2. Jean Paul and Schubert: Leipzig, 18289.

According to the terms of his fathers will, Schumanns receipt of his inheritance was contingent upon his
undertaking a three-year course of university study in an unspecified field. In deference to the wishes of his
mother and his guardian (J.G. Rudel), Schumann agreed to matriculate as a law student at the University of
Leipzig in late March 1828. Before taking up residence in Leipzig, however, he set off with his friend Gisbert
Rosen on a tour of southern Germany that took him to Munich (where he met Heine) and then in April and
early May to Bayreuth, Jean Pauls home for his last 21 years. In the preceding months he had read most of
the writers major works; the novelsTitan and Flegeljahre were his favourites.
Once settled in Leipzig in late May, Schumann proved indifferent to the ice-cold definitions of law.
According to his room-mate Emil Flechsig, who perhaps exaggerated, he never set foot in a lecture hall.
Instead, he continued his close study of Jean Paul, to whose inimitable style replete with extravagant
metaphors, fantastic digressions, flashes of wit and antithetically paired characters he was irresistibly
drawn. Confiding in his diary, he claimed: Jean Paul seems to be interwoven with my inner being; it is as if I
had a premonition of him.
Before long Schumann embarked on a number of literary projects, all bearing the unmistakable stamp of his
Jean Paul manner. In Hottentottiana, the diary he began on 2 May 1828 and maintained until 1830, he
brought

together

autobiographical

analyses,

sketches

for

poetic

projects,

and

aesthetic

speculations. Juniusabende und Julytage, an idyll conceived during the summer of 1828, contains
experiments with Polymeter or Streckvers, Jean Pauls terms for prose poetry. In the aesthetic fragments
from Hottentottiana (most of them dating from July and August, and thus contemporary with his second
burst of song composition), Schumann toyed with the notion of musical composition as a kind of poetic
activity, an idea he elaborated in Die Tonwelt, an essay written jointly with Willibald von der Lhe late that
summer. The fancifully titled ber Genial- Knill- Original- und andre itten (On Genial- Insobr- Originaland other i(e)ties) presents an analysis of creative genius. Finally, the fragmentary tale Selene, on which he
worked in November, treats the Jean Paulian theme of the hoher Mensch, the individual capable of
tempering Promethean energy with Olympian restraint. The synthesis of opposing character types best
represented by Vult and Walt Harnisch, the twin-brother protagonists in Flegeljahre remained a major
concern for Schumann as composer and critic throughout the ensuing decade.
Music likewise figured prominently during Schumanns first year in Leipzig. By August he was studying the
piano with Friedrich Wieck, who was to play an important role in his professional and personal life. At
Wiecks home, Schumann made contact not only with the musical lite of Leipzig but also with his teachers
daughter Clara, at nine years of age already well on the way to becoming a concert pianist. In the months
ahead Schumann himself attempted to master Hummels Etudes and Piano Concerto in A minor.

By late summer 1828 he had developed a passionate attachment to the music of Schubert, which he found
comparable to Jean Pauls prose in its psychologically unusual connection of ideas. Schuberts polonaises
and variations for piano (four hands) served as models for Schumanns works in the same medium, among
them the VIII polonaises conceived in August and September. Another four-hand composition for piano
followed in early October, a set of variations (of which only a fragment survives) on a theme by Prince Louis
Ferdinand. A more ambitious project undertaken soon after attests both the importance of convivial musicmaking for the young composers development and the continued influence of Schubert. In November
Schumann organized a piano quartet whose reading sessions were attended by Wieck and the Caruses
(resident in Leipzig since November 1827), and which continued to meet regularly until late March 1829.
The group provided a laboratory for the C minor piano quartet Schumann had just begun, a work perhaps
intended to pay homage to the recently deceased Schubert. (Sketches for two other piano quartets, in A
and B, may both date from this period.) Indeed, the glittering keyboard passage-work in the first movement,
the rapid modulations by 3rds in the minuet and the propulsive rhythms of the finale all reflect Schumanns
fascination with Schuberts E Piano Triod929. Nearly 20 years later, he would associate the trio of the
minuet with the revelation of a new poetic life in his music. The recurrence of the trios main theme in the
peroration of the finale is only one element in a web of inter-movement connections that bespeak
Schumanns concern with large-scale unity. Having provisionally completed the piano quartet by March
1829, Schumann planned to cobble it into a symphony, a project he did not realize.
33.
Schumann left Heidelberg for Leipzig in September 1830 and by 20 October he had settled into Wiecks
home. His claim that he devoted up to seven hours daily to piano practice is supported by the near
cessation of composition in late 1830 and early 1831, and also by the suspension of his diary. But by
December 1830, when he wrote to his mother of his desire to study with Hummel in Weimar, Schumann had
already become disenchanted with Wieck, whose chief interest lay in the promotion of his daughter Claras
career.
Although relatively little is known of Schumanns activities in the first part of 1831, the period surrounding his
21st birthday in June of that year emerges as a critical phase, musically, intellectually and personally. Soon
after arriving in Leipzig in autumn 1830 he was introduced to the composer Heinrich Dorn, conductor at the
city theatre, by his friend Willibald von der Lhe. In mid-July of the following year he began theoretical
studies with Dorn, proceeding from the noble figured bass to chorale harmonization, canon and double
counterpoint. According to a communication from Dorn to Wasielewski, Schumanns first biographer, the
young musician proved to be an indefatigible worker, though on at least one occasion teacher and pupil
moistened the dry work at hand with a bottle of champagne.
Shortly before submitting to the rigours of contrapuntal study, Schumann became enthralled by the new
worlds revealed to him in E.T.A. Hoffmanns writings, their weird blend of reality and fantasy motivating a

response analogous to that occasioned by his earlier fascination with Jean Paul. As indicated in an entry for
5 June 1831 in his new diary (Leipziger Lebensbuch), Schumann considered writing a poetic biography of
Hoffmann and reworking his Bergwerke zu Falun as an opera libretto. Then on 8 June (his 21st birthday) he
wrote in his diary: It sometimes seems as if my objective self wanted to separate itself completely from
my subjective self, or as if I stood between my appearance and my actual being, between form and
shadow. In response to the dilemma of the split self or Doppelgnger, a major theme in the works of both
Hoffmann and Jean Paul, Schumann decided (in the same entry) to give his friends more beautiful and
more fitting names. Hence Wieck appears as Meister Raro (exceptional master), Clara as Cilia (later he
would also dub her Chiara), and Christel (perhaps a servant in Wiecks house, she had been Schumanns
lover for at least a month) as Charitas. Several of the same characters recur in the preliminary material
for Die Wunderkinder (child prodigies), a novel dealing with the problematic situation of the artist that
Schumann started to outline a week later. There his renamed friends were joined by virtuosos such as
Paganini and Hummel, and by Florestan the Improviser. That the last was intended as a self-projection is
confirmed by an entry in the Leipziger Lebensbuch of 1 July: Completely new persons enter the diary from
this day forward two of my best friends Florestan and Eusebius. If Schumanns Florestan persona
was the embodiment of his aspirations as a virtuoso, then Eusebius conforms to the image of a pensive
cleric; within the next few years, Schumann made a specific association between his Eusebius and St
Eusebius the Confessor (pope 30910), whose feast day (14 August), as he pointed out to the real and
fictive Clara (Eusebius an Chiara, 1835), is preceded by the namedays of Aurora (13 August) and Clara
(12 August). Schumann noted these namedays in his Haushaltbcher (household account books) as late as
1853.
The birth of the child prodigies was likewise implicated in Schumanns discovery of a new musical idol,
Fryderyk Chopin, whose recently published variations for piano and orchestra on Mozarts L ci darem la
mano (op.2) he acquired sometime in May 1831. Frustrated by his inability to master the technical
difficulties of the work, and speaking through his Eusebius persona, Schumann sketched a poetic critique of
Chopins op.2 that links each variation with the characters and events of Don Giovanni. Entered into his
diary on 17 July, the critique supplied the nucleus of the pathbreaking review (published in the Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung, 7 December 1831) in which he hailed Chopin as a brilliant newcomer on the musical
scene with the words: Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!
A gradual shift in Schumanns view of himself, from composer-pianist to composer-critic, was precipitated by
a physical complaint that was variously described in letters and diaries as an ever-worsening weakness or
laming of the middle finger of his right hand, which became a source of inner struggles beginning in
October 1831. After a period of slight improvement, the finger was completely stiff by June of the following
year. While its precise cause still remains uncertain, the ailment can only have been exacerbated by
Schumanns use of a chiroplast, a practice to which Wieck vociferously objected. And although he tried a
number of curative measures animal baths (a grotesque remedy that required the patient to insert his
hand into the entrails of a carcass), electrical therapy and homeopathic treatment (involving strict attention

to diet and the ingestion of a tiny powder) none produced lasting results. As he put it emphatically to his
mother in a letter of November 1832: for my part, Im completely resigned [to my lame finger], and deem it
incurable.
9. The aesthetics of the Liederjahr, 184041.
Schumanns nearly exclusive concentration on vocal composition in 1840 can be traced to a confluence of
pragmatic, personal and artistic factors. His turn to what was probably the most marketable of musical
genres and the concomitant search for a more easily understandable style no doubt reflected his desire to
attain the financial stability Wieck accused him of lacking. In addition, the lieder of 1840, like many of the
earlier piano pieces, were closely interwoven with his feelings for Clara. Much of you is embedded in my
Eichendorff Liederkreis, he wrote to her in May, and the same could justly be said of Myrthen, Frauenliebe
und -leben, and the Kerner cycle op.35. Finally, in the lied Schumann would have found an ideal means of
fulfilling his longstanding quest for a synthesis of music and poetry. While he claimed (in a letter of June
1839 to Hirschbach) never to have considered song composition as great art, his own achievements in the
genre may be seen as responses to an imperative articulated repeatedly in his critical writings: the
perfecting of imperfect tendencies in contemporary art.
It is possible to reconstruct from these writings the composers aesthetic of song, which commanded his
critical attention from 1836. In Schumanns view, the ideal lied must mediate between artlessness and art,
simplicity and pretension. Construed as more than a singable melody supported by a decorative
accompaniment, the lied unites voice and piano as equal partners in a shared discourse. Schumanns
further conviction that a great poem is a necessary condition for a great song may help to account for the
relatively limited role he ascribed to Schubert, who was not always a discriminating judge of verse, in the
development of the genre. Although Schumann located the song composers central mission in the
preservation of the poems delicate life, this aim was to be fulfilled less through an act of translation than
through a subtle recreation of the poems essence. The composer endeavours to produce a resonant echo
of the poem and its smallest features by means of a refined musical content, he wrote, and hence becomes
a poet.
The songs of the Liederjahr more than meet these standards. Schumann struck a balance between
apparent naivety and refinement at all levels, perhaps most obviously as regards melody, but no less
notably in the realm of form. While modified strophic or tripartite designs prevail in his settings, his concern
for continuity often led him to leave the earlier strophes harmonically open so that closure is reserved for
the final moments, as in Morgens steh ich auf (Liederkreis op.24 no.1). In Der Nussbaum (Myrthen op.25
no.3), the interplay between a graceful but melodically attenuated vocal line and a diaphanous texture in the
accompaniment produces a finely wrought dialogue. The piano postlude of Stille Thrnen from the Kerner
songs op.35, like the corresponding passages in many other songs, completes a thought only partly
articulated by the voice.

Throughout his career as a lieder composer, Schumann drew on the verses of the finest poets of the late
18th and early 19th centuries, including Goethe, Eichendorff, Heine, Rckert, Andersen, Burns and Byron.
While about half his chosen texts can be classified as lyric in the strict sense of the term, the remainder
divide almost evenly into narrative and dramatic types. The topical range is equally broad, encompassing
love in all its nuances, patriotism, wandering, death, isolation and even madness. In some of the collections,
folk- and drinking-songs appear side by side with lullabies, visions and depictions of festive scenes. While
he was particularly fascinated with the contrast between innocence and sensuality in many of Heines lyrics,
Schumann has been charged with insensitivity to the poets characteristic irony. But although he
undoubtedly smoothed over Heines mordant wit on occasion, he demonstrated a keen sense for parody
and for the destruction of illusion in his settings of Lieb Liebchen (Liederkreis op.24), Ich grolle
nicht(Dichterliebe op.48), and Die beiden Grenadiere (op.49 no.1), to cite just a few examples.

Nowhere is Schumanns tendency to cast himself in the role of poet more apparent than in his fondness for
the song cycle, a genre he cultivated more assiduously than any other major composer of the 19th century.
In a review of Carl Loewes Esther op.52 (a cycle in Balladenform), he observed that narrative continuity,
large-scale tonal planning and motivic recurrence might contribute to a cycles coherence, though the
presence of all three elements was not prescribed as a condition of cyclic integrity. Several of Schumanns
own works draw on poetic cycles that either provide a chronological narrative (Frauenliebe und -leben) or
describe a series of affective states (the Heine Liederkreis). In other cases Schumann acts as co-creator of
the text, either by making careful selections from a widely ranging poetic collection (such as
Heines Lyrisches Intermezzo, the textual basis for Dichterliebe), or by arranging poems from disparate
sources into a meaningful pattern (the Eichendorff Liederkreis op.39). Tonal and motivic relationships are
also coordinated with textual factors. The motion from D to F over the course of the Reinick Sechs
Gedichte, for instance, reinforces a thematic shift in the poems from reality to dream world. Motivic recall
and transformation are deftly aligned with poetic content in the Eichendorff Liederkreis (second version),
where a compact but expressive figure first introduced in the accompaniment of the opening song (In der
Fremde) becomes an emblem for yearning, removal in time and space, and finally for an ecstatic union with
nature. The restatement of entire melodies over broad expanses, often a function of the piano part, may call
up reveries of bygone days (Frauenliebe und -leben) or add a consoling touch to texts that would have
otherwise ended on a bitter note (Dichterliebe, Kerner cycle). In all of these cases, the technique of melodic
recurrence underlines the power of memory itself, the theme through which Schumann confirms his role as
musical poet.