The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

 

Arrival
 
Now at last we’ve overcome all the obstacles in our path, and left them behind us too, on rails as smooth as the ones you’ve been on for so long. And alongside yours, too. I’m unspeakably happy . . . and this valley is already a dear friend.
 
Caroline Schlegel to Luise Gotter, 11 July 1796
 
1
 
‘A happy event’
 
Summer 1794: Goethe and Schillers
 
On 20 July 1794 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe heaved himself into the saddle and rode from his house in the centre of Weimar to Jena, where he planned to attend a botanical meeting of the recently founded Natural History Society. It was a hot summer that would soon turn into a glorious autumn – long sunbaked months during which pears, apples, sweet melons and apricots ripened four weeks early and the vineyards produced one of the century’s greatest vintages.
 
On the fifteen-mile ride from Weimar to Jena, Goethe passed farmers scything wheat in golden fields and great haystacks awaiting storage as winter fodder in the barns. After a couple of hours of riding through flat farmland, the countryside began to change. Little villages and hamlets snuggled into gentle dips, and then the forest closed in and the fields disappeared. The land became more hilly. Shellbearing limestone cliffs rose to the left, exposing the geological memory of the region when this part of Germany had been a landlocked sea some 240 million years ago. Just before he reached Jena, Goethe crossed the so called Snail, the steep hill named after the serpentine road that wound up to its top.
 
Then, finally, he saw Jena beneath him, nestled in a wide valley and held in the elbow of the Saale River with the jagged outline of the forested mountains behind. These were more hills than mountains, perhaps, but the views were spectacular – and the reason why Swiss students in Jena lovingly called the surrounding area ‘little Switzerland’.
 
Goethe was the Zeus of Germany’s literary circles. Born in Frankfurt in 1749 to a wealthy family, he had grown up amidst comfort and privilege. His maternal grandfather had been the mayor of Frankfurt and his paternal grandfather had made his wealth as a merchant and tailor. Goethe’s father didn’t have to work and had instead managed his fortunes, collected books and art, and educated his children. Though a lively and bright child, Goethe had not shown any excep-tional talents. He loved to draw, was proud of his immaculate handwriting and enjoyed the theatre. When the French had occupied Frankfurt in 1759 during the Seven Years War and their commander had been billeted at the Goethes’ house, young Goethe had made the best of it by learning French from the occupying forces.
 
He had studied law in Leipzig and worked as a lawyer, but also began to write. In the mid-1770s he had been thrust into the public eye with the publication of his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther – the story of a forlorn lover who commits suicide. Goethe’s protagonist is irrational, emotional and free. ‘I withdraw into myself and find a world there,’ Werther declares. The novel captured the sentimentality of the time and became the book of a generation. A huge international bestseller, it was so popular that countless men, including Carl August, the ruler of the small Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, had dressed like Werther – wearing a yellow waistcoat and breeches, blue tailcoat with brass buttons, brown boots and a round grey felt hat. Chinese manufacturers even produced Werther porcelain for the European market.
 
It was said that Werther had caused a wave of suicides, and forty years after its publication the British poet Lord Byron joked with Goethe that his protagonist ‘has put more individuals out of this world than Napoleon himself ’. The Sorrows of Young Werther had been Goethe’s most vivid contribution to the so-called Sturm und Drang – the Storm and Stress movement – which had elevated feelings above the rationalism of the Enlightenment. In this period, which had celebrated emotion in all its extremes, from passionate love to dark melancholy, from suicidal longings to frenzied delight, Goethe had become a literary superstar.
 
The eighteen-year-old Duke Carl August had been so enraptured by the novel that he had invited Goethe to live and work in the duchy in 1775. Goethe was twenty-six when he moved to Weimar; and he knew how to make an entry, arriving dressed in his Werther uniform. During those early years the poet and the young duke had roistered through the streets and taverns of the town. They had played pranks on unsuspecting locals and flirted with peasant girls. The duke loved to gallop across the fields and to sleep in hay barns or camp in the forest. There had been drunken brawls, theatrical declarations of love, naked swimming and nightly tree climbing – but those wild years were long gone and Goethe had turned his back on his Sturm und Drang phase.
 
In time, both poet and ruler calmed down, and Goethe had become part of the duchy’s government. The small state had just over a hundred thousand inhabitants – tiny in comparison to the five million people of nearby Prussia, or other powerful states such as Saxony, Bavaria or Württemberg. With a mostly agrarian economy – grain, fruit, wine, vegetable gardens as well as sheep and cattle – the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar had little trade and manufacturing, yet it maintained a bloated court of two thousand courtiers, officials and soldiers, all of whom had to be paid. The town of Weimar itself had a provincial feel. Most of the seven hundred and fifty houses had only one storey and such small windows that they felt gloomy and cramped inside. The streets were dirty, and there were only two businesses in the market square that sold goods which could be classed as luxury items – a perfumery and a textile shop. There wasn’t even a stagecoach station.
 
Goethe became Carl August’s confidant and his privy councillor – so trusted that it was rumoured that the duke didn’t decide anything without the poet’s advice. In time, Goethe took charge of the royal theatre and of rebuilding the burned down castle in Weimar, in addition to several other well-paid administrative positions, including the control of the duchy’s mines. He also worked closely with his colleague in the Weimar administration, minister Christian Gottlob Voigt. A diligent worker, Goethe was never idle – ‘I never smoked tobacco, never played chess, in short, I never did anything that would have wasted my time.’

 
In 1794, Goethe was forty-four and no longer the dashing Apollo of his youth. He had put on so much weight that his once beautiful eyes had disappeared into the flesh of his cheeks and one visitor compared him to ‘a woman in the last stages of pregnancy’. His nose was aquiline, and like so many contemporaries, his teeth were yellowed and crooked. He had a penchant for stripy and flowery long waist-coats, which he buttoned tightly over his round belly. Unlike the younger generation, who often wore fashionable loose fitting trousers, Goethe preferred breeches. He wore boots with turned-down tops and always his tricorne. He kept his hair coiffed and powdered, with two carefully pomaded curls over his ears and a long, stiff ponytail. Knowing that everybody was watching him, he always made sure to be properly dressed and groomed when he went out. Ennobled by the duke in 1782, he was now Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and lived in a large house in Weimar, where he often tried and failed to work amid a constant stream of strangers knocking on his door to gawp at the famous poet. He loathed these disruptions almost as much as he hated noise, in particular the rattling of his neighbour’s loom and the skittle alley in a nearby tavern.
 
Goethe might have turned his back on the Sturm und Drang era, but it seemed as if his creativity had done the same to him. For years he had failed to produce anything remarkable and his plays were no longer widely staged. He fussed over his writings for years. More than two decades earlier, he had begun to work on his drama Faust but only a few scenes had been published. He had rewritten and changed his tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris so many times – from prose to blank verse, back to prose, to its final version in classical iambic verse – that he called it his ‘problem child’. And though he was the director of the Weimar theatre, he preferred to stage popular plays by his contemporaries rather than his own.
 
Botany was now Goethe’s favourite subject, and the reason he often came to Jena. He was overseeing the construction of a new botanical garden and institute in Jena. Originally founded in 1548 as a medicinal garden, the university’s existing botanical garden had been used to train physicians, but Duke Carl August had asked Goethe to extend and move it to a new location, just north of the old town walls. Goethe enjoyed every aspect of the project because it united his deep love of nature and beauty with scientific rigour. He was looking forward to the meeting of the Natural History Society.
 
Excerpt from : Magnificent Rebels : The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

 

Penguin Random House

In the 1790s, an extraordinary group of friends led a revolution of the mind that still frames our way of being and living. This is their story.
 
Andrea Wulf’s unforgettable, Costa Prize winning The Invention of Nature transported us across the globe with one of the most extraordinary scientists who ever lived, Alexander Von Humboldt.
 
Now she is back with another story of German thinkers who changed the world – and whose ideas still matter profoundly to how we live today.
 
Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics. Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being.
 
We’re still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet.
 
The first Romantics changed the world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.

Video of lecture, The Conduit, London. 
 
 
The Conduit, September 2, 2022

An interview with acclaimed biographer Andrea Wulf on her thrilling, and timely, story of a group of friends who changed the world. Andrea is in conversation with broadcaster Kirsty Lang.
 
In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends from the small German town of Jena changed the world. They were the first Romantics, and their ideas transformed society and shaped the way we lead our lives today.
 
In Magnificent Rebels, Andrea Wulf, the Costa Prize-winning author of The Invention of Nature, tells the riveting story of this revolutionary band of poets, novelists and philosophers. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. And through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories, heart-breaking grief and radical ideas, they launched Romanticism onto the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest thinkers of the time.
 
The lives of these Magnificent Rebels are as relevant today as ever as we, like they, walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community, and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet.
 
Andrea Wulf was born in India, moved to Germany as a child, and now lives in London. She is the award-winning author of five books. Her previous book, The Invention of Nature, was an international bestseller and won more than 10 awards, including the Royal Society Science Book Award 2016, Costa Biography Award 2015, the Inaugural James Wright Award for Nature Writing 2016 and the LA Times Book Prize 2016. Andrea has written for many newspapers including the Guardian, LA Times and New York Times. She was the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013 and a three-time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. She appears regularly on TV and radio.
 
Kirsty Lang is a writer, broadcaster and former foreign correspondent. A familiar voice on BBC Radio 4 Kirsty has been a presenter on Front Row, The World Tonight and Last Word. This year she took over as the first female host of the fiendishly difficult Round Britain Quiz, the longest running game show in Europe. She is also Chair of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Newcastle and a regular contributor to the Sunday Times Culture magazine.
 
5 x 15 Stories, September 6, 2022. 

Website Andrea Wulf

A philosophy student attending a concert in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1797 could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes. Seated in one row were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest writer of the age; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher of the moment, whose packed lectures attracted students from across Europe; Alexander von Humboldt, just setting out on a career that would transform our understanding of the natural world; and August Wilhelm Schlegel, then making a name for himself as a writer, critic and translator. It seemed extraordinary to see so many famous men lined up together.
 
Except that it wasn’t, not then in Jena, a quiet university town at the heart of Germany of only 800 houses and fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. For a brief period, as the 18th century gave way to the 19th, Jena had a claim to be the intellectual capital of Europe. The nation’s finest minds were gathered there.
 
It happens very occasionally that exceptionally talented people congregate in one place for a while, to encourage and stimulate one another. Jena in the late 1790s and early 1800s was such a town. In this exhilarating book Andrea Wulf tells the story of what she calls “the Jena set”, a group of mainly young writers and poets who came together in “this lovely crazy little corner of the world”, as Goethe described it.
 
At the core of the Jena set were the Schlegels, August Wilhelm and his wife, Caroline, who worked together on translating Shakespeare’s plays into German verse; Friedrich, August Wilhelm’s younger and more quarrelsome brother, also a writer and critic, who for a while was in love with Caroline; the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (“Novalis”), almost the personification of Goethe’s Young Werther in his melodramatic posturing and adoration of a sickly, pubescent girl; and the serious young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, whose naturphilosophie envisaged the self as at one with everything living, and who conceived of art as the expression of this union.
 
This group saw themselves with some justification as cleverer, wittier and more poetic than anyone else. In their own eyes they were “the chosen ones”. Like other young people of their generation across Europe, they were inspired by the upheaval of the French Revolution, a challenge to established authority and ideas everywhere. Their irreverence inevitably led to feuds, first between the upstart Schlegels and the venerable poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, and later between Schelling and Fichte. Caroline’s refusal to conform to convention earned her widespread disapproval, especially from other women. Eventually she would divorce August Wilhelm and marry Schelling, 12 years her junior. Despite this, the three remained on good terms.
 
One reason why Jena became such a magnet for independent thinkers was the unusual constitution of the university, which allowed its professors comparative freedom. The most prominent of these was Fichte, who declared that “the source of all reality is the Ich” – a word with no exact equivalent in English. Fichte’s concept of the Ich placed the self at the centre of everything, always an attractive idea to self-regarding young people.
 
Goethe had been attracted to Jena from his home in nearby Weimar by the presence of Schiller. While Goethe was staying in Jena he and Schiller would meet daily, since they lived only a few minutes’ walk from each other. They made an odd couple as they strolled around town together, the cadaverous playwright towering above the older and now corpulent poet. Like the young English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller collaborated closely, editing each other’s work and suggesting improvements and changes. After Schiller’s death, Goethe would strive unsuccessfully to complete his unfinished work.
 
Goethe and Schiller were father figures to the group of younger writers and thinkers who gravitated to Jena. Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man would become a founding document for this new generation of thinkers, who called themselves romantics.
 
Goethe was a true renaissance man, as interested in science as he was in literature. For him, another attraction of Jena was the company of the young scientist Alexander von Humboldt. The two formed “our little academy”, carrying out dissections and experiments together, including electrical experiments on animals – “galvanism”. To the romantics, electricity seemed the fuel of life. It was no coincidence that Frankenstein’s monster would be brought to life by a massive electrical charge. Electricity also provided a fresh, almost irresistible metaphor. In its incessant and impassioned debate the Jena set was “electrified by our intellectual friction”; while apart, one of their number lamented the absence of “the electricity I feel with them”.
 
This is indeed an electrifying book, in its illuminated portraits, its dynamic narrative and its sparking ideas. Wulf writes clear, flowing prose, which is a pleasure to read. It’s informed by scholarship without being bogged down by jargon. Her book begins with an autobiographical prologue, explaining how, as the impulsive child of progressive parents, she chose to leave school early, rather than going to university, and became a single mother at a young age, learning in the process to balance free-spiritedness and responsibility. This introduction is appropriate, because her experience mirrors that of the woman at the heart of the story, Caroline Schlegel.
 
The Jena set broke up in 1803, dispersing across Germany and beyond in a general exodus. Magnificent Rebels ends with a dramatic set-piece chapter as French troops arrive in Jena in 1806, plundering the town and setting fire to buildings, before the battle that ends in devastating defeat for the Prussian army. The victorious emperor slept that night in Goethe’s bed. For the Jena set, Napoleon was not an enemy but a hero. They admired him as a force of nature. Ominously, Fichte began to talk about the “Ich” of a nation.
 
In her epilogue Wulf traces the influence of the Jena thinkers on subsequent generations: through the English romantic poets, especially Coleridge, and via him the American transcendentalists (Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman), on to the thoughts of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce, and into the present. We have so far “internalised the Ich”, the author argues, that we no longer recognise it. What was revolutionary is now standard: we are all romantics now. And all this began in a small town in Germany more than 200 years ago.
 
 
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf review – big ideas from a small town. By Adam Sisman. The Guardian, September 11, 2022. 

For a few years at the turn of the 19th century, Jena, a small university town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was an intellectual Shangri-La. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Though its population was barely 4,500, Jena was for a while home to many of the leading German thinkers of the time—Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Novalis, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schiller, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who lived 14 miles away in Weimar, was a frequent visitor and collaborator.
 
Andrea Wulf, born in India and raised in Germany, impulsively moved to England in her late teens and adopted the English language as her professional medium. She finds kindred spirits in the proudly independent, unconventional prodigies of Jena. They inspire in her the extravagant boast that “the last decade of the eighteenth century saw more famous poets, writers, philosophers and thinkers living in Jena in proportion to its population than in any other town before or since.” The Athens of Aristophanes, Democritus, Plato, Protagoras, Sophocles, and Thucydides, like the Princeton of Freeman J. Dyson, Albert Einstein, Clifford Geertz, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, and Erwin Panofsky, might, per capita, have outshone even Jena. However, Wulf’s central assertion is indisputable: “The Jena Set changed our world. They did so irrevocably. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and way of understanding the world without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.”
 
Wulf titled her 2015 study of the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt (who often visited his older brother, the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, in Jena) The Invention of Nature. Like recent popular books that make broad historical claims—for example, that the Scots invented the modern world or that the Irish saved civilization—Magnificent Rebels credits the Jena Set for “the invention of the self.” Its members initiated the Romantic movement and redefined romanticism to mean an emphasis on subjectivity, a preference for emotion over reason, an exaltation of the imagination, a reverence for the natural world, and a yearning to poeticize science. Fichte was not the first philosopher to take the Ich as his starting point (René Descartes’s cogito ergo sum did that 150 years earlier), but a preoccupation with the self would be inherited from Jena by thinkers as disparate as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ayn Rand, and Martin Buber, and it would manifest itself in the institutionalized cravings of consumer society. The German Romantics predated and inspired poets and philosophers in Britain, France, and the United States. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was so enthralled by the Jena thinkers that much of his Biographia Literaria is plagiarized from Schelling.
 
Members of the Jena Set are not strangers to anyone conversant with German cultural history. Much has been written in German about the subject, including Peter Neumann’s Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits, published in 2018 and translated into English earlier this year. And though English-language readers surely have heard of Goethe, they might be unfamiliar with his contemporaries and confused by the profusion of Friedrichs—Schelling, Schiller, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher. Wulf begins with a list of dramatis personae and, relying on letters, journals, and published texts, proceeds to recount the stories of distinct personalities during troubled times. Her book is a collective biography of talented and productive men and women who worked brilliantly together, apart, and in opposition.
 
The story begins with Schiller, the first of the major figures to reside in Jena. Already famous for his 1781 play The Robbers, he founded the journal Die Horen, which drew many of its contributors to the town. The polymath Goethe came to Jena to supervise its botanical garden. His was an inductive mind, working from the specific to the general, but he developed a close friendship with Schiller, who worked from the general to the specific. Yet it was the house at Leutragasse 5, shared by poet August Wilhelm Schlegel, his free-spirited wife, Caroline, plus August’s younger brother, Friedrich, and Friedrich’s lover, Dorothea, daughter of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, that became the cradle of German Romanticism. There, August and Caroline translated Shakespeare’s plays into versions that turned the Bard into the quintessential Romantic. Many German speakers consider the couple’s translations superior to the original. The philosopher Fichte and the poet Novalis spent many hours in the Schlegel household in conversations that fertilized their own work. During one dazzling four-day session, writes Wulf, “they composed poems, drafted philosophical treatises, edited essays, set up scientific experiments and translated passages from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Shakespeare.”
 
But these were high-strung, competitive, and libidinous people, and their idyllic creative community was doomed to dissolve. Dependent on income from teaching, some members of the Jena Set resented it when the charismatic speakers Fichte and Schelling drew students away from their own lectures. After Friedrich Schlegel attacked Schiller in print, neither spoke to the other. Soon, other enmities developed. For a while, August Schlegel seemed complaisant about the openly adulterous relationship between Schelling and his own wife, Caroline, but numerous sexual transgressions and rivalries also fractured the group. The translator Tieck dismissed the Leutragasse coterie as being “like a big farm full of pigs.” Dysentery ended the promising life of Caroline Schlegel’s 15-year-old daughter, Auguste, in 1800, months before tuberculosis killed 28-year-old Novalis. Increasingly, disease and death took a toll on the Jena Set.
 
Germany would not become a state until 1871, and in its 1,500 jurisdictions, no central authority could enforce censorship. The Jena Set, then, was relatively unshackled by convention. Inspired by the spirit of the French Revolution, its members saw their own revolution founder in spasms of freedom. By 1806, when Napoleon Bonaparte arrived to “liberate” Jena, most of its authors had already left. The invading French army, which many had welcomed as a force for liberté, égalité, et fraternité, left the town in ruins
 
Jena-Gadda-Da-Vida : The brief flowering of an intellectual mecca in 1790s Germany. By  Steven G. Kellman. The American Scholar, September 1, 2022

Today, the German city of Jena, 150 miles south-west of Berlin, is the world centre of the optical and precision industry; but in the 1790s it spawned an even more marketable commodity. It was then a small medieval town on the banks of the river Saale with crumbling walls, 800 half-timbered houses, a market square and an unruly university. Here, in the philosophy department, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a young professor inspired by Immanuel Kant and the French Revolution, proclaimed from the pulpit his theory of the ‘Ich’. ‘A person,’ he roared, ‘should be self-determined.’ In an age of absolute power and the divine right of kings, the idea of free will was an incendiary device and Fichte freewheeled his way through each lecture. ‘Attend to yourself,’ he instructed his mesmerised followers; ‘turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self.’ Fichte’s lectures, says Andrea Wulf in her engrossing new book, re-centred the way we understand the world. It’s little wonder that intellectuals flocked to Jena.
 
Magnificent Rebels is a group biography about the decade between 1794 and 1804 when a cohort of writers, philosophers and translators, ignited by the cries of liberty, equality and fraternity coming from Paris, turned Jena into a hub of revolutionary thinking. The book is also a beginner’s guide to German idealism. It’s no mean feat to explain such hefty theories in layman’s terms, and Wulf does so without, as Byron said of Coleridge, needing to explain her explanation.
 
The grandfather of what she calls ‘the Jena set’ was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther turned suicide into an art, or group-think. Goethe, who lived with his mistress and son in nearby Weimar, was first invited to Jena by the playwright Friedrich Schiller, who began lecturing at the university in 1789. Their friendship initiated what Goethe described as a ‘new era’ in his writing. The effect of Jena turned Goethe into a ‘demi-god’ for a new generation of readers.
 
The town muse was Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, a ‘politico-erotic’ fire-ball who, together with her young daughter Auguste, had spent six months in prison in Königstein in 1793. Caroline and her second husband, the poet, critic and translator August Wilhelm Schlegel, came to Jena in 1796, where the couple translated, for the first time, Shakespeare into German verse. Their translations are still the standard edition in Germany. It was August Wilhelm who coined the term ‘Romantic’ to describe the new sensibility whose impact was also being felt in the English Lake District. ‘Speak nothing but German,’ Coleridge (unsuccessfully) counselled Wordsworth: ‘Live with Germans. Read in German. Think in German.’
 
August Wilhelm was joined by his younger brother, the writer Friedrich Schlegel, who was himself in love with Caroline. (‘One look is all it takes’, Friedrich said of her.) Friedrich brought along his best friend, the poet and mining inspector Friedrich von Hardenberg, who used the pen name Novalis. ‘My whole self,’ said Novalis, ‘is a system of fragments’, and together with Schlegel, he invented the Romantic fragment. Schiller and the Schlegels were then joined by the young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who taught at the university between 1798 and 1803. The similarity of names makes this a difficult book to follow after a glass or two of wine, but keeping up with the Jena set is challenging in other ways too.
 
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ said Wordsworth of the French Revolution, ‘but to be young was very heaven.’ Jena, now the centre of this heaven, was actually very hell. Caroline Schlegel described it as a ‘den of murderers’, and she wasn’t far wrong. Jena reduced the whole world to a town which could be crossed in ten minutes flat; no one read the newspapers and nothing was discussed beyond gossip and the new philosophy. Everyone hated everyone else and did all they could to stymie each other’s careers with bad reviews. One of Schiller’s poems, wrote Friedrich Schlegel, was so bad it was best read backwards.
 
Schiller and the Schlegels were thereafter mortal enemies, as were Schiller and Alexander von Humboldt, Schiller and Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling. While Schiller, who never left his house, hated everyone except Goethe, Fichte was not only hated by all his colleagues but those students who didn’t buy into his philosophy threw bricks through his windows. These attacks – which took place night after night for five months and once nearly killed his father-in-law – must have been, said Goethe, ‘a most disagreeable way’ for Fichte ‘to have the existence of a non-Ich proven to him’.
 
Everyone equally hated Friedrich Schlegel. One look, apparently, was all it took: ‘People prefer to observe me from a distance,’ he said, ‘like a rare and dangerous beast.’ They similarly hated his wife Dorothea, who in turn hated Caroline Schlegel, who hated Schiller’s wife Charlotte. ‘The minute she’s out of the house,’ Caroline said of Charlotte, ‘you should fire up two pounds of incense to purify the air.’ When Friedrich Schlegel’s friend, the poet and translator Ludwig Tieck, moved to Jena in 1799, everyone hated Frau Tieck too: ‘Oh, that wife! That wife!’, Friedrich complained to Caroline Schlegel.
 
Caroline is the heroine of the story, not least because she internalised the Ich-philosophy which, Fichte stressed, applied only to men. A woman, Fichte insisted, had to submit her own Ich to that of her husband. Caroline, accordingly, changed husbands three times, divorcing August Wilhelm in 1803 in order to marry Friedrich Schelling, who was, she said, ‘the kind of man who bursts through barriers’.
 
One reason the Jena set idealised the mind is because their bodies were so imperfect. The illnesses they suffered – gout, tapeworm, ‘nervous fevers’, infections, coughs and tumours – were treated by the local quack Dr Stark with the usual leeches, poultices, enemas and blood-lettings. When Caroline was given a mustard plaster made of horseradish to cure her sleeplessness, it inflamed her leg and led to cramps. Her daughter Auguste died after being prescribed laxatives, of all things, to stop her dysentery. Schiller, who experienced such ill health in Jena that his major organs were destroyed, was discovered after his death to have had a ‘hard, petrified sponge’ instead of a heart, which made Friedrich Schlegel laugh. One of the book’s finest chapters is an account of Novalis’s 14-year-old fiancée undergoing an operation on her liver without anaesthetic. The doctor who killed her was, of course, the wretched Stark.
 
Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession. Wulf does not draw the analogy, but Jena was a prototype of Silicon Valley, a factory in which a handful of geeks open up our skulls and rewire our brains. The Jena set invented the self, and in doing so invented us all; we now think with their thoughts and feel with their emotions. They paved the way for Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself’, Freudian psychoanalysis and Hitler’s fascism, the ‘Ich’ of a nation. Jena was the birthplace of self-consciousness, self-obsession, selfishness and selfies – the whole business of me, me, me and me too.
 
How the quarrelsome ‘Jena set’ paved the way for Hitler : A group of warring 18th-century intellectuals, devoted to the theory of the ‘Ich’, left a dangerous legacy. By Frances Wilson. The Spectator, August 27, 2022.

Friedrich Schlegel on philosophy and poetry

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) – whose full name was Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel – was a leading philosopher of German Romanticism, as well as a poet and a scholar. Together with his brother August Schlegel he was at the center of early German Romanticism. Romanticism was an 18th-19th century movement that appeared in Germany, Britain, France, and other countries. Its ideal was to unify the different aspects of the human world – philosophy, poetry, the sciences, art, nature – around aesthetics, or beauty. As Friedrich Schlegel wrote: “The Romantic imperative demands that all nature and science should become art, and art should become nature and science.” This ideal took various shapes, sometimes that beauty is the basis of truth, sometimes that poetry should be the model of all fields of knowledge, or that life and philosophy should be made poetic, etc. The result was much emphasis on feelings, creative imagination, and non-rational elements of existence (although without rejecting reason and systematic thinking). 

 Friedrich Schlegel was born in Hanover, Germany. In his mid-twenties he moved to Jena and collaborated with Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Fichte, and Caroline Schelling (who married his brother). Together with his brother, he founded the journal Athenaeum, and published in it fragments and essays about the principles of Romanticism. He later moved to Berlin, where he lived with the thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher and met his future wife, Dorothea Veit, daughter of the Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn. She was a married woman, nine years older than him, but they started an affair. Even after she divorced, they remained unmarried, because he despised social norms. Eventually they married and joined the Catholic Church. After some writing and publishing activity he went to Paris, where he gave philosophy lectures and studied Indian languages and wisdom. He published an influential book on the topic, in which he argued that European languages and Sanskrit have a common origin, a view that is accepted today. Throughout the years his social and political views changed: he turned away from his earlier radicalism and became conservative and opposed to civil liberties. In 1809 he went to Vienna and took up political positions and also wrote texts on philosophy, literature and history. He died at the age of 56.

On philosophizing  - Fragments and Symphilosophy

The following are some of “the Atheneum fragments” which Schlegel published in 1797-1798 in Atheneum, the journal which he and his brother founded. For the Romantics, particularly for Schlegel, the philosophical fragment was an important format of writing philosophy. Each fragment is an incomplete idea, written spontaneously, and is therefore open-ended. It inspires or suggests, but without having a finished meaning. In this sense, a collection of philosophical fragments is creatively open to the universe. It points to the unity of everything, but without trying to capture it with a theory. 

 The idea of writing in fragments is related to another Romanic notion used by Schlegel, that of symphilosophy (Symphilosophie in German) – which means philosophizing together. In this process, each philosopher contributes a few fragments, so that the collection of fragments creates a whole composed by several authors. Both of these methods, fragment-writing and symphilosophy, were used to point to an ideal harmonic whole which cannot be captured in a theory. But this does not mean that the Romantics rejected systematic philosophy. Rather, they aimed at a balance between systematic and fragmentary thinking. Indeed, Schlegel also wrote and lectured systematic texts and lectures. 

53. It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. The mind will simply have to decide to combine the two.

 54. You can only be in the process of becoming a philosopher, you cannot be one. As soon as you think that you are a philosopher, you stop becoming one.

 77. A dialogue is a chain or garland of fragments. An exchange of letters is a dialogue on a larger scale. And memoirs constitute a system of fragments. But so far, no existing genre is fragmentary both in its form and in its content: completely subjective and individual – and at the same time completely objective, and like a necessary part in a system of all the sciences.

 112. Philosophers who are not opposed to each other are usually joined only by sympathy, not by symphilosophy.

 116. Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim is not just to reunite all the separate types of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to, and has to, mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature, and make poetry lively and sociable, and make life and society poetical. It should poeticize wit, and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good solid educational matter, and animate them with the pulses of humor. It embraces everything that is purely poetic, from the greatest systems of art […] to the sigh, to the kiss that the poetizing child breathes in a natural song. […] Only Romantic poetry can become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole surrounding world, an image of the period. […] 

The romantic kind of poetry is still in the process of becoming. This, in fact, is its real essence: that it is always in the process of becoming and is never perfected. It cannot be exhausted by any theory, and only a guessing interpretation would dare try to characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free, and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet cannot tolerate any law above itself. The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind – it is, as it were, poetry itself. Because in a certain sense, all poetry is, or should be, romantic.

 125. Perhaps there would be a birth of a whole new historical period of the sciences and arts if symphilosophy and sympoetry became so universal and heartfelt that it would no longer be unusual for several complementary minds to create communal works of art. One is often struck by the idea that two minds really belong together, like divided halves that can realize their full potential only when joined. […]

206. A fragment, like miniature work of art, must be entirely isolated from the surrounding world, and be completely in itself like a porcupine.

 264. You shouldn’t try to symphilosophize with everyone, only with those who are à la hauteur. 

 297. A work is cultivated when it is everywhere sharply limited by boundaries, but within those limits it is limitless and inexhaustible; when it is completely faithful to itself, entirely homogenous, and nevertheless exalted above itself. Like the education of young Englishmen, the most important thing about it is le grand tour. It should have traveled through all the three or four continents of humanity […] in order to broaden its vision and give its spirit more freedom and inner versatility, and thus greater independence and self-sufficiency.

 344. Philosophy is a mutual search for omniscience.

 451. Universality is the gradual realization of all forms and substances. Universality can reach harmony only through the unification of poetry and philosophy; and even the greatest and most universal works of isolated poetry and philosophy seem to lack this final synthesis. They come to a stop, still imperfect but close to the goal of harmony. The life of the Universal Spirit is an unbroken chain of inner revolutions. All individuals – that is, all original and eternal individuals – live in it. It is a genuine polytheist, and it bears within itself all Olympus.

Philosophy and the unity of life.

Throughout his philosophical career, Schlegel believed that philosophy, like poetry, should aim at the unity of life. Although the life we see around us seems to be divided, although it consists of conflict and contradictions, life in its highest form is a unity. Romantic philosophy, as he envisioned it, aims at restoring this unity. 

 The following text is adapted from Lecture 1 from his series of lectures, titled “Philosophy of Language,” which he gave in Germany during the last years of life, in 1828-29. By this time he had turned away from his radical years, and had become conservative in his political and ethical views. Yet, the theme of philosophy as unifying life remained central in his late philosophy. Schlegel argues here that if we want to truly understand life, we should explore it not in everyday moments in which it is fragmented and in conflict, but in its pure or higher state, in which it is a harmonious unity.

“If the object of philosophy is the sublime understanding of our inner life, which struggles to expose the mystery of its own being, how could it possibly want to exclude one half of humanity, or society, or of civilized life? The proper sphere of philosophy, no less than of art, is the whole of human life. […] Therefore, the field in which philosophy has to act and work is not a narrow field, limited and confined by some unjustified exclusivity. On the contrary, it must be complete and perfect, as much as humanly possible. And for this reason, too, philosophy must not, and cannot start from a consciousness that is artificially divided, and which is only half of its true self, and which, biased in its views, is divorced from real life. It can originate only from the mind’s greatest perfection and its full and most undivided totality, so that it makes this consciousness clear to itself and to others. 

 […] 

A true and living philosophy cannot choose and follow the method of higher and higher abstraction, much less can it regard it as the only right method. It starts, rather, from life itself and the feeling of life, and indeed from a feeling and consciousness of life which strives to be as complete as possible. It does not seek its success and hope of true knowledge in any artificial and elaborate division of the human mind. […] This kind of philosophy is based on an assumption which is entirely arbitrary, and which is discovered to be baseless once we examine it more carefully: It assumes that the human mind as it exists now is in a perfect state, and has always remained entire and complete, and has not changed from its original constitution. It believes that nothing is missing for the task of finding the truth, except for a careful and skillful analysis of man’s self-consciousness, and a correct and appropriate classification of its different elements. But we, in contrast, whenever we examine the experience of our inner consciousness, and try carefully to understand it simply as it is, the first thing that strikes us most strongly is conflict and opposition – not only between ourselves and the external world, but also within our own self in the inmost center of the mind. Thus, our mind seems to fall apart and to split into absolute unconsciousness and irreconcilable contrarieties. 

 […] 

The immediate and specific aim of philosophy is simply to analyze and clearly understand the psychological fact of the conflict and opposition which exists between the several faculties of the soul and spirit, and to present it just as it is. After accomplishing this, philosophy will continue to show the point from which the work of restoration must begin, or at least the way which leads to it – the path of returning to the original harmony of the soul. In other words, the ultimate object of philosophy will be to discover the way to restore a living and perfect consciousness, and to create a more harmonious cooperation of its divided powers and faculties, whether of soul or spirit. 

 Now, even in ordinary experience, under certain circumstances this inner conflict and disagreement between the understanding and the will, reason and imagination, is happily overcome. When this happens, the faculties which previously were separated and divided, or which fought against each other, are brought into profitable agreement and harmony, at least partly. These rare moments are characterized by extraordinary energy of character, unique artistic genius, or other high and rare mental gifts. These, therefore, do not only prove the possibility of restoring the conflicting and isolated elements of the inner man to completeness of unity and entirety of life, but also provide stable starting points from which we can begin with the work of restoration. Such moments, however, are only exceptions from the usual situation. They are, no doubt, fortunate and rare exceptions, but even so they prove the universal fact of the internal conflict among the faculties of the human mind. 

 […] 

To sum up, the ordinary state of the human mind, as it shows itself in its present condition to our inner perception, is in a state of four-fold conflict and disturbance. We may say that it is a consciousness divided to four, that it is the victim of the double opposition between the understanding and the will, and between reason and imagination. […] Now, the return from the divided mind into a harmonious consciousness is the very beginning of a true philosophy of life, and, indeed, of a renewed and enhanced vitality. “

Poetic energy.

Poetry was a central topic for German Romantic thinkers. It was viewed as a metaphysical force representing unity, harmony, and beauty, which were humanity’s highest goals and aspirations. Poetry was often associated with philosophy – poetry and philosophy enriching each other, uniting, and acting towards unity and harmony. 

 Friedrich Schlegel, who was the main critical thinker of the German Romantic school, spoke about poetry in many of his texts. But his most important text about the topic was Dialogue on poetry, published in 1800. It is structured, like Plato’s Symposium, as a collection of speeches and conversations between several people. The selections below are from the first two main sections, “Epochs of literature” and “Talk on mythology” (slightly adapted for ease of reading). They express Schlegel’s idea that poetry is a metaphysical energy that flows through human history.

“Epochs of literature’ 

This first main section is about the history of poetry. It describes Homer as the “fountain” of Greek poetry and Western poetry in general. From there, poetry continued to flow like a river that inspired future poets and that split into several smaller rivers. The details of this historical exposition should not interest us here, but note that Schlegel uses the metaphor of a flowing river of poetic inspiration:

“It is an essential quality of all art to follow closely what has already been formed. Therefore, history goes back from generation to generation, from phase to phase, always farther back into antiquity, to its original source. 

 For the modern generation, for Europe, this source resides in Greece, and for the Greeks and their poetry is was Homer and his followers. This was the inexhaustible source of poetry, a powerful stream of representation in which waves of life rush against each other, a peaceful ocean where the fullness of the earth and the splendor of the heavens are nicely reflected. Just as the ancient thinkers saw water as the beginning of nature, so does the oldest poetry manifest itself in fluid form.”

From ancient Greece, the flow of poetic energies continued to flow in many rivers throughout the history of Europe: “…The Romans had only a short outburst of poetry… the stream of fervent love flowed powerfully from Horace’s sincere heart… With the appearance of the Teutons, a new fountain of a new heroic poetry flowed across Europe. And then the wild energy of Gothic poetry merged… After it sprang from such sources, the stream of poetry in the fortunate Italian nation could not run dry again…”

Talk on mythology

In the next section, which is also built as a speech, Schlegel presents his vision about the essence and future of poetry. He tells us that the spirit of poetry must be given a new life. But in order to do this, it needs a new cultural source of life. Without such a common fountain, each poet would be a separate creator, an isolated little fountain that is forced to start poetry from the beginning. This common fountain of poetic inspiration, Schlegel proposes, is mythology – a non-rational, complex, “chaotic” framework about human life, nature, and reality. 

 Poetry needs individual creators, but it also needs a cultural fountain of poetic energies. To be a poet you must have certain personal gifts, but you also need to be connected to the river of poetic energies that is bigger than you. In the ancient world, this river was fed by mythology. Now, in modern times, we need a new poetic source that would unify all poetic creativity.

“You yourselves have written poetry, and you must have often felt the absence of a firm foundation for your activity, a matrix, a sky, a living atmosphere. The modern poet is forced to create all these things from within himself, and many have done it wonderfully. But until now, each poet had to do it separately, and to work on it from its very beginning, like a new creation out of nothing. 

 I will go right to the point. Our poetry, I maintain, lacks a focus, something like mythology was for the ancients. We can summarize the inferiority of modern poetry to ancient poetry in these words: We have no mythology. But, I add, we are close to getting one! Or, rather, it is time that we work seriously together to create one. 

 […]

The new mythology must be created from the deepest depths of the spirit. It must be the most creative work of art, because it must include all the other arts. It must be a new vessel for the ancient eternal fountain of poetry, an infinite poem which contains the seeds of all other poems. 

 You may smile at this mystical poem, and at the disorder that might result from so many poetic creations. But the highest beauty – indeed the highest order – is that of chaos. It is a chaos which waits only for the touch of love to reveal itself as a harmonious world, a chaos like ancient mythology and poetry were. Because mythology and poetry are one and inseparable. All poems of antiquity join one another, until a whole is created from the many members. Everything inter-penetrates everything else, and everywhere there is one and the same spirit, only expressed differently. And thus, it is not an empty image to say: Ancient poetry is a single, indivisible, and perfect poem. Why shouldn’t that which once was, come to life again? – in a different way, of course. And why not in a more beautiful, in a greater way? 

 […] 

Because this is the beginning of all poetry: To cancel the laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transplant us once again into the beautiful confusion of the imagination, into the original chaos of human nature. I don’t know a better symbol for this than the many different gods of the ancient world. 

 […] 

We must be able to press towards the goal in more than one way. Let each one of us pursue his own way in joyful confidence in the most individual manner. Because individuality has the greatest validity here, where the sublime is at issue – as long as we understand what individuality means: indivisible unity and an inner and vital coherence. From this standpoint, I would not hesitate to say that the true value – indeed the virtue of man, is his originality. 

 […] 

And so, let us, by light and life, no longer hesitate, but accelerate the great development to which we are called, each one according to his own mind. […] What an immense expansion will this power experience, and especially now! It seems to me that anybody who could understand the historical period – that is, those great principles of general renewal and of eternal revolution – would be able to grasp the poles of mankind, to recognize the activity of the first man, as well as the nature of the Golden Age which is about to come. Then the empty chatting would stop, and man would become conscious of what he is: He would understand the earth and the sun."

Philopractice  , July 18 , 2018.

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

short

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