Schumann’s Tales

Robert Schumann moved to Leipzig in Octobre 1830, two months after this exchange of letters between his mother Christiane and Friedrich Wieck, the famous teacher. He rented two furnished rooms in Wieck‘s own house in order to take up the difficult path under Wieck‘s strict control that was supposed to make him a virtuoso pianist.

In reality, exactly this restless “fantasy“ turned out to be an insuperable obstacle between Robert and the achievement of his objective – ever since his childhood his cultural horizons had been too vast and manifold to be adapted to the narrow prospect of disciplined and methodical exercises. And it was his bizarre creativity to now give him the idea of tying two fingers of his right hand in a device that was supposed to strengthen them by immobilization. He hoped it would save him hours of excercise, shortening the approach to technical perfection. But the consequence was a nerve injury in his right hand that made it impossible for him to play the piano at all.

Robert would never become a great virtuoso. Friedrich Wieck‘s infallibile method probably had not been designed to be applied to a visionary genius, and the time spent as the his tenant didn‘t show the desired results.

t there was someone else growing up in Wieck‘s home, Clara, the severe teacher‘s daughter. Studying she was living every aspect of a secluded and regulated life under her father‘s inflexibile control, his “creature“ and “living proof“ of the efficiency of his method.

Robert met her and was exposed to the strange fascination of the girl: It had to be upsetting for him to listen to her playing the piano and discover her to be capable of a virtuosism and an imperturbable perfection in a completely unconscious way – something he would always remain precluded from. Clara incited his immagination similarly to what happens to Nathanael in ETA Hoffmann‘s story “Der Sandmann“. Nathanel falls in love with Olympia, a mechanic doll with the features of a girl, that is a virtuoso singer and pianist (like Clara) and the “creature“ of a teacher, too (Spalanzani, an Italian). Nathanael loses his senses following Olympia in dance and in life – Robert loses the use of two of his fingers trying to follow Clara‘s virtuosism…

Nevertheless, due to one of those entanglements of destinies and kaleidoscopic reversals of roles that are transferred from art to real life, also in Hoffmann‘s tale we find the character of Clara (nomen est omen), Nathanael‘s faithful friend and fiancé. With the limpid rationality, with the affection and the uprightness of her nature she tries to redeem him and to disperse the dark clouds building up in his soul.

One day this will also be the role of Clara Wieck as Robert‘s wife. Two decades later, in the 1850s, during his last battle against the madness that will uproot him from himself and from this world, she will try to hold back her husband‘s spirit on earth, a spirit inevitably destined for alienation. 

This transmigration from one role to another, the embodiment of two different and opposed characters (a situation that creates an atmosphere already extremely “schumannian“ by itself) will really happen: Clara will first be Hoffmann‘s Olympia and then his Clara (“Clara Wieck, Clara Wieck Doppelgänger“ she signs a letter to Robert in 1830) just as Robert will be both Florestan and Eusebius.

But coming back to the first meeting of the two of them, it will be just the tale to build a bridge between the distant and complementary worlds of Robert and Clara, a bridge that will finally unite them up to the point of her becoming sort of his alter ego. It was the long stories he told her, during afternoons spent together at home or walking around the town and the nearby countryside that to provide nourishment essential to the fantasy of a girl growing up without dolls, without books, but whom the father made practice with a Logier apparatus since the age of two, in order to strengthen her tiny hands…  

In Robert‘s inner universe Clara found the real, lively and consuming world she needed, the emotions and dreams she was thirsting for as an adolescent.

Schumann never stopped telling tales all his life: he told tales to Clara, later to their own daughters and to the world, with words and with music. Sometimes he told his tales in a implicit and hermetic way like in the hundreds of messages, symbols and enigmas encrypted in his piano compositions of the 1830s and 40s. Often he exchanged, confused or identified the roles of narrator and listener with the recurring yet constantly new role game of his characters.

Who can tell who is the subject of Von fremden Ländern und Menschen (Of foreign Lands and People) in Kinderszenen? The person who is telling and describing or the one listening and imagining, enchanted? And what about Der Dichter spricht (The Poet speaks)? Isn‘t it once again the reflection of storyteller and the listening child that makes it impossible to distinguish one from the other?

The topic of Tales reappears clearly in Schumann‘s late creative period: In Balladen (Melodramas) from 1851, music and text bend forward towards each other to meet at a spot that is always mobile, suspended above a border area: one becoming almost a punctuation of the other (some short parenthesis, accents and musical interventions serve as commas, exclamation marks, making the voice search for special intonations…). The performers are continously challenged to exercise their fantasy, attention and precision in adjusting this spot.

Schön Hedwig already anticipates the heraldic, chivalrous, slightly rigid and stereotyped atmosphere of the second piece from Märchenbilder and in particular of the last Märchenerzählung. The style has become almost Biedermeier: as Charles Rosen comments, during the last period of his life Schumann forced himself to normalize his creative language. For example he republished his early works trying to remove bizarre or peculiar details, as if now, on the edge of alienation, he were afraid of – and escaping from – those marvellous effects of illogicality, paradox and madness he had been playing with in his music of earlier times. 

This lines up with a more classical and unrelenting tendency (now that the fervour of early romanticism has gone out) that had its main pioneer in Brahms, but that was also ideal for composing Hausmusik (music to be played at home) of an attainable level of difficulty, in order to ennoble and raise the standard of amateur music played in a family context.

Märchenbilder (Fairy-tale Pictures) commence with the cosy atmosphere of a Biedermeier mood painting: the first notes of the viola (a – d – f – b flat – d…) seem to contain the words “once upon a time…“ and the curving of the arpeggio and its divergence in contrary motion in the bass line raise the curtain upon a scene, in the third bar – with that shadow of restraint always inherent in a deceptive cadence – unveiling who will be the main character of the story, and, in the forth bar, confessing with a modulation to g minor that he or she had secret sorrows…

The dialogue between the two instruments continues, revealing sunny or cloudy scenes until on the last page the pathos is intensified, but then released in the trills of the piano. The piece ends in the classical Schumann way: two conclusions are left unresolved before a third try brings the conclusion. Rosen notes how Schumann‘s style, already far away from the staggering experiments of the 1830s and signed by the process of retrogression, is deeply moving – a unique case in history of music.

That‘s why the knightly scene of the 2nd Märchenbild and the atmosphere of a fantastic and tempestuous ballad of the third piece resemble pictures of family life in comparison with the spectres of Kreisleriana. The melancholy cantilena of the end of the middle part is illuminated by a consoling vision – promise of a glorious utopia – and lets drop the curtain with seven notes in which Bruno Giuranna recognized his own experience as a father leaving the room on tiptoe once the children have fallen asleep at the end of the story…

Robert and Clara met in Leipzig on the 31st March 1828. She last saw him in the nursing home for the mentally ill in Endenich on the 29th July 1856, the day of his death. More than two years had passed since Robert‘s committal: ever since that moment the only communication between the two of them had been by means of letters and by accounts of Brahms, Joachim and others who had gone to see the musician. The spiritual communion of Clara and Robert thus dissolved as it had started: in narrations, tales written in their own letters, tales recounted by their friends…  

The story of her life is also imprinted in Clara‘s gaze: we can read it if we compare how her almond eyes look at us from the lithographies of 1832, when the father told her to pose “inclining her head slightly and as if she was looking at something far away, with a melancholy and dreamy expression“ and how differently she looks on the last portraits of the 1870s: here we see the haggard, infinite awareness of someone knowing to have been witness and protagonist – to have devoted one‘s own existence to a matter unique in the history of music.