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| Birth Name(s) : Robert Schumann |
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Full Robert Schumann Biography
Robert Alexander Schumann (June 8, 1810 – July 29, 1856) was a German composer and pianist and the husband of Clara Schumann. He was one of the most famous Romantic composers of the nineteenth century, as well as a famous music critic. An intellectual as well as an aesthete, his music reflects the deeply personal nature of Romanticism. Introspective and often whimsical, his early music was an attempt to break with the tradition of classical forms and structure which he thought too restrictive. Little understood in his lifetime, much of his music is now regarded as daringly original in harmony, rhythm and form. He stands in the front rank of German Romantics.
By the spring of 1834, however, he had sufficiently recovered to be able to start Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal in Music,) the paper in which appeared the greater part of his critical writings. The first number was published on 3 April 1834. It effected a revolution in the taste of the time, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber were being neglected for composers who are, today, considered minor figures. The popular taste at the time ran toward flashy displays of technique, without much in the areas of content or ideas; Schumann campaigned to revive interest in the great composers of the past, while also intervening on behalf of new composers who were attempting to create something more substantial. To bestow praise on Chopin and Hector Berlioz in those days was to court the charge of eccentricity in taste, yet the genius of both these masters was appreciated and openly proclaimed in the new journal. On the other hand, the "Music of the Future," as was called the compositional school of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, was condemned by Schumann. Amongst his associates involved with the publication, were the composers Ludwig Schunke, dedicatee of Schumann's Toccata in C, and Norbert Burgmueller.
On October 3, 1835 Schumann met Mendelssohn at Wieck's house in Leipzig, and his appreciation of his great contemporary was shown with the same generous freedom that distinguished him in all his relations to other musicians, and which later enabled him to recognize the genius of Johannes Brahms, whom he first met in 1853 before he had established a reputation.
Probably no composer ever rivaled Schumann in concentrating his energies on one form of music at a time. At first all his creative impulses were translated into pianoforte music, then followed the miraculous year of the songs. In 1841 he wrote two of his four symphonies. The year 1842 was devoted to the composition of chamber music, and includes the pianoforte quintet (op. 44), now one of his best known and most admired works. In 1843 he wrote Paradise and the Peri, his first essay at concerted vocal music.
He had now mastered the separate forms, and from this time forward his compositions are not confined during any particular period to any one of them. In Schumann, above all musicians, the acquisition of technical knowledge was closely bound up with the growth of his own experience and the impulse to express it.
The stage in his life when he was deeply engaged in his music to Goethe's Faust (1844–53) was a critical one for his health. The first half of the year 1844 had been spent with his wife in Russia. On returning to Germany he had abandoned his editorial work, and left Leipzig for Dresden, where he suffered from persistent “nervous prostration” which is today known as bipolar disorder. As soon as he began to work he was seized with fits of shivering, and an apprehension of death which was exhibited in an abhorrence for high places, for all metal instruments (even keys) and for drugs. He suffered perpetually also from imagining that he had the note A sounding in his ears. In 1846 he had recovered and in the winter revisited Vienna, traveling to Prague and Berlin in the spring of 1847 and in the summer to Zwickau, where he was received with enthusiasm, gratifying because Dresden and Leipzig were the only large cities in which his fame was at this time appreciated.
To 1848 belongs his only opera, Genoveva (op. 81), a work containing much beautiful music, but lacking dramatic force. It is interesting for its attempt to abolish the recitative, which Schumann regarded as an interruption to the musical flow. The subject of Genoveva, based on Johann Ludwig Tieck and Hebbel, was in itself not a particularly happy choice; but it is worth remembering that as early as 1842 the possibilities of German opera had been keenly realized by Schumann, who wrote, "Do you know my prayer as an artist, night and morning? It is called 'German Opera.' Here is a real field for enterprise something simple, profound, German". And in his notebook of suggestions for the text of operas are found amongst others: Nibelungen, Lohengrin and Til Eulenspiegel. Schumann's consistently flowing melody in this work, can be seen as a forerunner to Wagner's Melos.
On February 27, 1854, he attempted suicide by throwing himself from a bridge into the Rhine. Rescued by boatmen and taken home, he asked to be taken to an asylum for the insane. He entered Dr. Franz Richarz's sanitarium in Endenich, a quarter of Bonn. |
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