Robert Schumann : The Faces and The Masks

Robert Schumann’s life story evokes pity and terror in equal measure. And gratitude, for the extraordinary range and quantity of miraculous work he produced in his short composing career — just over 20 years, during which he created some of the most inspired and lovable music ever written, in an immense range of genres, including some unique to him: as well as piano music, songs, symphonies, concertos, chamber music, choral music and opera, he created hybrid semi-dramatic works such as Paradise and the Peri (a woefully neglected masterpiece) and a version of Byron’s Manfred for actors, soloists, choirs and orchestra.

Review: Schumann: The Faces and the Masks by Judith Chernaik — the composer’s life evokes pity, terror and gratitude. By Simon Callow. The Sunday Times, September 30 2018.

Listen to  2 interviews with author Judth Chernaik, who  wrote this life of Robert Schumann.

in-depth 

The Great Composers Podcast, classical music. By Kevin Nordstrom. October 1, 2018

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WWFM.  By Rachel Katz. September 20 , 2018

The great composer Robert Schumann receives a sharp, knowing, and complicatedly sympathetic treatment in his latest biography, Schumann: The Faces and the Masks by Judith Chernaik, who fills her book (a heavy, handsomely-designed thing from Knopf) with Schumann’s music but keeps her focus always on the man. Schumann hasn’t lacked for biographers since his death in 1856, although in the 21st century outside of classical music circles there’s certainly an argument to be made that his music lacks for devoted fans. Chernaik does everything she can to change this; not only does her book feature some of the most passionate appreciations of Schumann’s music ever written in English, but she leaves her readers very specific and very encouraging instructions on how to find every last note of that music for free online (YouTube alone provides countless hours of such listening, in recordings new and old, legendary and reprehensible).

It may be for naught; it’s entirely possible that the price Schumann’s music pays for speaking so electrically to his original Romantic era audience is that it will speak in increasingly muffled tones to all subsequent times. But in Schumann: The Faces and the Masks, the story of the music, whether it be the criminally underrated symphonies or the interminable Leider, is expertly intertwined with the well-known details of the weird broken-field obstacle-course that was the man’s life, the dramatic highlight of course was Schumann’s marriage to Clara Wieck, the daughter of his revered music teacher. Chernaik pays generous attention to Schumann the writer, and she makes extensive use of Robert and Clara’s notes and correspondence to illustrate their relationships with the other great artists of their day, even when, as in the case of Felix Mendelssohn, the illustration is anything but flattering to her hero :

   “Schumann admired Mendelssohn above all other musicians, but there were recurrent tensions. An entry in the marriage diary reveals his ambivalence, tinged with the anti-Semitism that was endemic at the time, an insidious mixture of envy and resentment. “Clara told me that I seemed to have changed toward Mendelssohn: surely not toward him as an artist, as you know - for years I have contributed so much to promoting him, more than almost anyone else. In the meantime - let us not neglect ourselves too much. Jews remain Jews; first they take a seat ten times for themselves, then come the Christians. The stones we have helped gather for their Temple of Glory they occasionally throw at us ... We must also work for ourselves.” Clara responded in kind. Perhaps they should not be as friendly to Mendelssohn as before.”

And of course the shadow surrounding any life of Schumann is the tragic end of that life, a protracted process of deterioration and thwarted hope that Chernaik follows every step of the way in brutal detail. For most of his adulthood, Schumann was plagued by dark moods and strange obsessions, eventually reaching a point of such despair that he feared for the safety of the people around him and wanted himself committed to an asylum. In these crises, Clara’s own accounts are heartbreaking:

    “He often had moments at night when he begged me to go from him, because he might do me harm! To calm him I went out of his sight, then returned to him ... Often he lamented that his mind wasn’t right, and he feared it would soon be over with him - then he bade me farewell, and put all his money and compositions in order, etc. ... Then suddenly at 9:30 pm he rose from the sofa and wanted to have his clothes, for he said he must go to an asylum, for his senses were no longer working, and he had no idea what he might do during the night ... Robert put everything in order that he wanted to take with him, watch, money, note paper, pens, cigars, in short everything with the clearest care, and when I asked him, “Robert, will you leave your wife and children?” he answered, “It will not be for long, I shall soon be cured ...”

He wasn’t cured, and Chernaik joins the ranks of biographers and experts who diagnose the problem as tertiary syphilis. It makes for a melancholy end to every Schumann biography, but even so, Schumann: The Faces and the Masks leaves a mostly joyful lasting impression, an emphasis on the boggling variety and genius of the composer’s music. That emphasis is wise, and it yields a tremendously persuasive portrait.

Schumann: The Faces and the Masks by Judith Chernaik. By Steve Donoghue.

Open Letters Review  , September 24, 2018

Picture a man swooning and raging with all the passions of youth. Every problem is a crisis, each feeling an ocean. His commitment to political and artistic freedom yields only to the irrepressible truths of love and beauty. Put that exhausting spirit to music and you have the tragic Romantic composer Robert Schumann. His diaries repeatedly refer to the worst day or night or week of his life. He spent his free time wandering the countryside and yearning. In the first of several autobiographies, he wrote: “Already in my eighth year—if one can believe it—I learned to know the art of love.” The superintendent’s daughter Emilie was his paramour.

Today’s reader might confront such a person and ask him to calm down. Yet Schumann (1810-56) not only embodied the spirit of his age, he converted his existential anguish and romantic ardor to music. He composed some of his best work while longing for his future wife, Clara Wieck, whose father forbade their union. Likewise, Schumann wrote his finest songs in the Lieder tradition by quitting his desk and taking to the hills. As Judith Chernaik relates in “Schumann: The Faces and the Masks,” he stopped composing at the piano and began crafting songs “while taking walks in which the poems assumed melodic shape.” The accompaniments came later, upon returning home.

Ms. Chernaik, an American who has lived and taught in London for more than 30 years, is well-positioned to undertake a biography of Schumann, even though the path is well-trod. (Several other biographies in English as well as the composer’s collected letters have appeared in the past decade.) A novelist and academic specialist on the poetry of Shelley, she is an enthusiastic student of Schumann’s music and a fine chronicler of his turbulent life. “The Faces and the Masks” is a well-proportioned, highly readable biography for general readers that establishes Schumann as a man thoroughly of his time.

The book’s greatest contribution is to situate Schumann in a remarkable fraternity of 19th-century composers. He knew and admired contemporaries from Chopin to Liszt, but his most important colleague was Felix Mendelssohn, who earned fame before his younger friend and did all he could to promote Schumann’s works. They were “two sensitive, prickly composers of genius,” Ms. Chernaik writes. “Schumann admired Mendelssohn above all other musicians, but there were recurrent tensions,” including “an insidious mixture of envy and resentment.” Mendelssohn served as godfather to one of Schumann’s children and was namesake to another. The two composers fell out for ambiguous reasons that may have had to do with anti-Semitism. Yet Schumann was devastated by Mendelssohn’s death and served as a pallbearer to the man he called “a true God.”

Still, no relationship in Schumann’s life can compare with the remarkable partnership he shared with his wife, Clara, a composer and virtuoso concert pianist. The two were childhood playmates; Schumann took piano lessons from Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck. Schumann’s own performing career was cut short when he injured three of his fingers with a contraption meant to strengthen the hand. Yet, unlike Clara, he lacked natural brilliance at the piano and so decided to devote himself to composition. Wieck steadfastly opposed the courtship, which took place before Schumann had earned a name for himself. The obstacles Wieck placed in the way of the two lovers can make him seem almost a cartoon villain. Schumann even successfully sued him for defamation, landing his future father-in-law a short prison sentence.

Ms. Chernaik casts new light on Wieck’s motivations. She quotes from a previously unpublished letter confirming the reason for the paterfamilias’s divorce from Clara’s mother, Mariane. The cause was infidelity. The letter to Wieck from Mariane’s father reads: “Never would I have believed that Mariane could sink so low . . . and I cannot understand even now how she can have become what she now is. My God! Must I and my dear wife in our old age live through such disgrace from a child whom I raised with so much care?”

Ms. Chernaik writes that this betrayal may have motivated Wieck’s implacable hostility to a match between Clara and Schumann. “Was it possible that Clara, his darling, his creature, had inherited her mother’s low character? He could not bear the thought that having lost her mother, he would now lose his daughter.” Some will write this off as speculation or armchair psychology—but it is certainly plausible. In any event, the letter is a remarkable discovery.

Once the couple had united, Clara served as breadwinner by concertizing across Europe, leaving her beloved husband the freedom to compose. She was his greatest champion, and the two artists’ devotion to each other is extraordinary. Their arrangement left Clara less time for her own composing, but Ms. Chernaik insists that her choices were hers alone: “Although it has been fashionable to consider her a victim of contemporary attitudes toward women composers, it was her own decision to put Schumann’s needs as both a man and an artist ahead of her own. She was always the stronger of the two, and her fame as the greatest woman pianist in Europe far outshone Schumann’s uncertain reputation.”

Schumann worked with all the fury of a Romantic: quickly, in passionate, frenetic bursts. Many of his works have entered the standard concert repertoire, including the song cycle “Dichterliebe” (“A Poet’s Love”), the exquisite piano trios, the four symphonies (especially the “Rhenish”), and the concertos for cello and piano. Yet in later years, as mental illness began to appear, his compositions became uneven. And throughout his composing life, he could seem overwhelmed by admiration for his forebears. He labored in the shadow of Schubert’s songs, Beethoven’s symphonies, and Bach’s and Chopin’s works for keyboard. Ms. Chernaik is an ardent admirer of Schumann’s music and asserts that each of his compositions bears his own stamp. It is possible for that to be true and also to say that Schumann’s corpus lacks the shine of utter originality that characterizes the very greatest musical artists.

Yet no one can disagree that his voice was silenced prematurely. In 1854 a syphilitic infection from 25 years earlier led to a mental breakdown, attempted suicide and eventual commitment in an asylum, where Schumann slowly succumbed to general paralysis. He died in agony two years later, at age 46. And yet in his final months, the two great themes of his life brought comfort: Clara’s undying love and affection, and the fellowship of other musicians, in this case, the young Johannes Brahms. (Brahms visited the ailing composer and comforted Clara, even falling in love with her, and later the two edited and presented Schumann’s complete works.) Still, it was a terrible end to Schumann’s story—and also terribly Romantic.

‘Schumann: The Faces and the Masks’ Review: A Dreamer at the Piano. By Michael O’Donnell

Wall Street Journal  , September 14, 2018

Also of interest :

Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, and Johannes Brahms are surely the most famous love triangle in the history of Western music. Details of the courtship, ensuing legal troubles and the eventual marriage between Robert and Clara are well known.

At the Center of the Musical Universe  Robert and Clara Schumann. By Georg Predota. Interlude ,  March 26, 2018

At the Center of the Musical Universe  Robert and Clara Schumann. By Georg Predota. Interlude ,  April 2 , 2018

The complicated musical genius of Robert Schumann, by Steven Isserlis.  Schumann remains one of the most misunderstood of all composers. Cellist and Schumann devotee Steven Isserlis peers behind the myths. The Gramophone, January 12, 2016. 

Schumann's symphonies – building a fantasy world. Philip Clark explores why Simon Rattle, Heinz Holliger, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Robin Ticciati are immersing themselves in Schumann's highly individual sound world. The Gramophone , January 8,  2016