Page 199 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Today the name Robert Schumann denotes a famous composer, the creator of oft-played piano pieces, art songs, and other chamber music. When he met the love of his life, Clara, however, Schumann was a nobody, a failed law student who only hoped that someday he might make a living through music. In 1830, Robert Schumann dropped out of law school and began a serious study
of the piano with the renowned teacher Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873) in
Leipzig, Germany. There he met Wieck’s beautiful daughter Clara,
a child piano prodigy, who at the age of eleven had already turned
heads in Paris. In 1834, when he was twenty-four and she fifteen, the
two fell in love. But father Friedrich adamantly opposed their union:
Robert seemed to have no prospects, especially since an injury to his
right hand had dashed any hopes of a career as a concert pianist. Only
after a protracted legal battle and a court decree did Robert and Clara
wed, on September 12, 1840. The day Robert Schumann won his court
victory for the hand of Clara, he wrote in his diary, “Happiest day and
end of the struggle.”
Robert Schumann was something of a manic, “streak” composer. Dur- ing the 1830s, he wrote music for solo piano almost exclusively. In 1840, per- haps inspired by his marriage to Clara, he composed almost nothing but art songs, most about love. But from his earliest years, Robert had been afflicted with what psychiatrists now call bipolar disorder (likely exacerbated by doses of arsenic that he had taken as a young man to cure a case of syphilis). His moods swung from nervous euphoria to suicidal depression: In some years, he produced a torrent of music; in others, virtually nothing. As time progressed, Schumann’s condition worsened. He began to hear voices, both heavenly and hellish, and one morning, pursued by demons within, he jumped off a bridge into the Rhine River. Nearby fishermen pulled him to safety, but from then on, by his own request, he was confined to an asylum, where he died of dementia in 1856.
Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–1896)
Unlike her husband, Robert—a gifted composer but failed performer—Clara Wieck Schumann was one of the great piano virtuosos of the nineteenth century. When she married, however, she took up the dual roles of wife to Robert and mother to the eight children she soon bore him. She, too, had tried her hand at musical composition, writing mostly art songs and character pieces for piano. But despite her unmistakable talent as a composer, Clara was ambivalent about the capacity of women, herself included, to excel as creative artists. As she wrote in her diary in 1839: “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose. There has never yet been one able to do it, should I expect to be that one?”
Clara’s most productive period as a composer coincided with the early years of her marriage. As more and more children arrived, however, her pace slowed, and following Robert’s death, she ceased composing entirely. Eventually Clara re- sumed her career as a touring piano virtuoso, but never remarried. Concertizing across Europe into the 1890s, she always appeared dressed in black—the “widow’s weeds” of perpetual mourning. Proving that life sometimes imitates art, Clara re- mained true to the pledge heard in her song “Liebst du um Schönheit”: “I will
Figure 11.5
Robert and Clara Schumann in 1850, from an engraving constructed from an early photograph
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