Two Hundred Years Ago Today Robert Schumann was Born

To observe the one-hundredth anniversary of Schumann’s death on July 26, 1956, the Democratic Republic of Germany, i.e., East Germany, issued a pair of postage stamps showing Schumann’s picture against an open score. It happened to feature Schubert’s music. The stamps were soon replaced.

Nobody, east or west, communist or capitalist, is likely to suffer any comparable embarrassment this time. In the east, one assumes that in Mumbai the three-day Schumann Festival is proceeding smoothly. The organizers flew in the Canadian pianist Paul Stewart from Australia and the Mumbai-born musician Marialena Fernandes from Europe to judge the pan-India piano competition.

In Germany, of course, the day will be observed in many ways. In a conversation with Die Zeit (June 2), the well-known composer Heinz Holliger observed – in connection with Schumann’s attempted suicide by throwing himself in the Rhine, and his death a couple of years later in a mental institution to which he had been admitted at his own request – that “normal people do not compose – or they compose like Carl Czerny or Muzio Clementi. I am a doctor’s son, so maybe I see things a little differently. For me, being different is part of life. I do not look for a person’s illnesses. I look for the person who has no limits to his imagination, who is not afraid to cross over, whether it be into the world of madness or death, for these are intertwined. People like this have finer antennae than the others.”

Anton Kuerti would not agree with Holliger’s disdain for Czerny – he champions Czerny’s music with great enthusiasm. Clementi is still waiting for his champion. But he is fondly remembered by piano students and by others for his manufacture of pianos, of which the late pianist John Newmark had one in his apartment in Montreal.

Schumann’s life was turbulent, unlike Mendelssohn’s or Brahms’s, both of whom he admired and promoted with characteristic generosity, as he did Chopin. Schumann was a gifted critic and had founded a musical periodical. The unknown Brahms was twenty, beardless and angelic-looking when he first met Schumann in 1853, and soon after began a platonic love affair with Schumann’s wife Clara – and after Schumann’s death three years later his widow – until her own death in 1896. Brahms died a year later.

The Robert-and-Clara Schumann courtship and marriage is one of the great romantic love stories of the nineteenth century. She was a child prodigy of fifteen, and he a poor piano student of twenty-four when he was first attracted to her in 1834. Two years earlier she had played the piano for the old Goethe in Weimar, shortly before his death. She was thirteen. Her father, the eminent Friedrich Wieck, was Schumann’s piano teacher and landlord. In 1837, Robert and Clara were secretly engaged. When Schumann asked her father for her hand in marriage, the answer was “Out of the question!” One reason may have been that Schumann had injured his hand – too much practice and a botched attempt at medical self-help. He did not appear to Clara’s father to have much of a future as a pianist, which was all that mattered. There followed three years of warfare. The lovers took the father to court. Eventually they were legally married, without his consent. In that year, 1840, Schumann composed one hundred and sixty eight songs.

Clara survived him by forty years. During their marriage she was pregnant most of the time, while still going on concert tours. They had eight children, some of whose descendants are alive today. She was a considerable composer in her own right.

In his marvelous early piano piece Carnaval – and in his critical writing – two contrasting imaginary characters appear, Eusebius and Florestan. It has been suggested that they were early symptoms of schizophrenia. Whatever they were, today, on his 200th anniversary, they undoubtedly wish him, in unison:

Happy Birthday, Robert.