Robert Schumann, Tone-Poet, Prophet and Critic

HERBERT F. PEYSER
Written for and dedicated to the RADIO MEMBERS of THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY of NEW YORK
Copyright 1948 THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY of NEW YORK 113 West 57th Street New York 19, N. Y.
A boyhood picture of Schumann.
It is obviously impossible in the brief space of the present booklet to offer more than the sketchiest outline of Robert Schumann’s short life but amazingly rich achievement. Together with Haydn and Schubert he was, perhaps, the most completely lovable of the great masters. It is hard, moreover, to think of a composer more strategically placed in his epoch or more perfectly timed in his coming. Tone poet, fantast, critic, visionary, prophet—he was all of these! And he passed through every phase, it seemed, of romantic experience. The great and even the semi-great of a fabulous period of music were his intimates—personages like Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Moscheles, Ferdinand David, Hiller, Joachim, Brahms. He won the woman he loved after a bitter struggle against a tyrannical father-in-law. He created much of the world’s greatest piano music, many of its loveliest songs, four great symphonies, superb chamber compositions and a good deal else which, even today, is insufficiently known or valued. A poetic critic, if ever there was one, he proclaimed to a world, still indifferent or uncertain, the greatness of a Chopin and a Brahms. His physical and mental decline was a tragedy even more poignant than Beethoven’s deafness or the madness of Hugo Wolf. His life story is, in point of fact, vastly more complex and many-sided than the following handful of unpretentious and unoriginal pages suggest. These will have served their purpose if they induce the reader to familiarize himself more fully with the colorful and endlessly romantic pattern of Schumann’s vivid life and grand accomplishment.
H. F. P.
By HERBERT F. PEYSER
At 9:30 on the evening of June 8, 1810, (the same being Saint Medard’s Day), the book publisher August Schumann and his wife Johanne Christiane, living in the Haus am Markt No. 5, Zwickau, Saxony, became the parents of a boy whom they determined to call Medardus, in honor of the saint of the occasion. Reasonably well to do if not precisely affluent they were pleased at the idea of another addition to their little brood of three boys and a girl—Eduard, Karl, Julius and Emilie, respectively. Over night they seem to have thought better of saddling the newcomer with such a name as Medardus and six days later the infant was carried to the local Church of Saint Mary’s there to be christened Robert Alexander. In proper season the “Alexander” seems for all practical purposes to have vanished.