Figure VII.
The same waywardness finds further expression in certain harmonic eccentricities. Schumann loves to surprise, waylay, disappoint, and otherwise cajole his hearer. Strong unprepared dissonances, entrances of chords before we expect them, delays of the expected ones, entire evasions of the seemingly inevitable, and felicitous transitions into the seemingly impossible are a constant feature of his program. He loves to hit upon a note as if by accident, and then to justify and even emphasize it, as in the eighth and succeeding measures of the theme of the "Papillons"; to wound our ears with the harshest intervals, and then compel our acquiescence by a resulting felicity, as in the introduction to the F-sharp minor Sonata; to toss us restlessly upon a chromatic sea and bring us out at last into diatonic tranquillity, as in the first two pages of the "Toccata." At the beginning of the "Kreisleriana" he keeps the right hand half a pace ahead of the left, thus producing a great richness of tone as well as emphasizing the vigorous progression of the bass. In the first variation in opus 5 just the reverse of this occurs; the bass takes the lead, while the chords in the right hand lag behind, making temporary discords, but always coming out right in the end.
Many of these peculiarities of harmony are doubtless due simply to Schumann's sensuous susceptibility to good ear-filling sound, long intensified and developed by his habit of improvisation. Sir Hubert Parry remarks that "he loved to use all the pedal that was possible, and had but little objection to nearing all the notes of the scale sounding at once. He is said to have liked dreaming to himself, by rambling through all sorts of harmonies with the pedal down; and the glamour of crossing rhythms and the sound of clashing and antagonistic notes was most thoroughly adapted to his nature." There is, indeed, evidence of this taste for rich tonal effects on almost every page of his piano music. Like Chopin he finds a Mozartian clarity of sound a little tame, and prefers to obscure the outlines of his consonant chords by means of plentifully sprinkled dissonances; but while Chopin, more fastidiously delicate, makes his dissonances float like a diaphanous veil over the pure chords, Schumann, with true Teutonic luxuriousness, fills up all the chinks and crannies with suspensions and passing notes, and holds down the pedal to boot. His piano style is much more massive than Chopin's. He has the true Johnsonian taste for sonorousness and resonance. His ear is insatiably curious, too; witness the final chord in the "Papillons," with its tones released successively until but one remains sounding, the extraordinary clangor of low thirds and final emergence of ghostly pianissimo chord at the end of "Paganini" in the "Carnaval," and the many bizarre sonorities he obtains by making the left hand play above the right, as in the second of the "Abegg Variations" and in the section marked "Langsamer" in number two of the "Kreisleriana."
Taken all together, these piano compositions of the decade 1830-1840, which may be called the first period of Schumann's artistic life, reveal an extraordinarily mobile and fanciful temperament, working with the greatest freedom and spontaneity, though without the guidance of regular discipline. Their crudities are undeniable: the flights are short, the forms are fragmentary and often badly proportioned, the style is highly subjective, eccentric, arbitrary. Yet there is in these things such unflagging vitality, such rare and various beauty, such abounding youthful enthusiasm and freshness, that one would hardly sacrifice them for anything else that music has to offer, and it has even been questioned whether in the final analysis there is not more of the true Schumann in them than in the later, larger, and more technically perfect works. In a sense Hans von Bülow was right in saying that the ipsissimus Schumann was to be found only in the early works up to opus 50.
However this may be, it is certain that at about his thirtieth year Schumann's artistic ideal began to undergo a gradual but radical transformation. We see him in the compositions of this time paying less and less attention to those purely personal whims and fancies that had at first dominated his imagination, and beginning to work very earnestly toward objective beauty and impersonal expression. The fictitious characters, the mottoes, the stage directions, the whole elaborate machinery of allusion to extra-musical interests, are forgotten, and the interest of the music itself becomes all in all. There had been already, among the works of his "storm and stress period," single compositions in which the dramatic interest was wholly subordinated to the musical, as, for example, the great "Toccata," opus 7, the "Allegro," opus 8, and the "Novelettes," opus 21; but now what had been only occasional in the days when fancy and a self-involved emotional life absorbed him grew to be normal and constant, and he became for the first time a liberal and devoted artist. Of the causes underlying this important change, the most fundamental was doubtless simply increasing maturity. Youth is naturally and innocently egotistical; the young man of sensibility loses himself in day dreams and whimsical fancies, which have no basis in experience, and no reference to anything beyond themselves; age brings a sense of the values of real life, sobers and domesticates the passions, and enlarges the interests until they spread from the self to all humanity. In an artistic nature this general change of attitude involves a change of artistic ideal; poignancy, intensity of expression, become less valued than justice and proportion; the merely self-expressive comes to seem trivial, and whimsicalities are discarded as interfering with the serenity of a universal beauty. Schumann's change of attitude was simply an unusually striking case of what happens to every perceptive mind when experience has been sufficiently assimilated.
The anxieties, doubts, fears, and disappointments connected with his courtship of Clara Wieck probably did more than anything else to chasten and to steady his character at this time.[6] The two artists, so diverse in talents, so remarkably at one in musical ideals, had first met in Leipsic in 1828, when one was a law student and amateur musician of eighteen, and the other an accomplished pianist, though only nine years old. Their relation was for a while purely musical; but as Clara's mind gradually developed, and especially after she began to play Schumann's compositions, they discerned more and more how deep-seated an artistic and personal congeniality was destined to bind them together. It is most interesting to trace in his letters and published music the successive steps of their comradeship. In 1832 he composes his "Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck"; in 1833 he writes: "I have had a sympathetic idea, namely that to-morrow, exactly at eleven o'clock, I shall play the Adagio from Chopin's 'Variations,' and shall think intensely, exclusively, of you. My petition is that you will do the same, so that we may meet and communicate in spirit;" in 1834 he says: "When I am thinking of you very intently I invariably find myself at the piano, and seem to prefer writing to you in chords of the ninth, and especially with the familiar chord of the thirteenth." "Chiarina," in the "Carnaval," written in 1835 and 1837, is a musical portrait of the already beloved Clara, and the F-sharp minor Sonata, dating from the same period, one of his most romantic and impassioned works, is dedicated to her. The "Davidsbündlertänze" (1837) opens with a motive by her, and in 1839, while he is busy with the "Phantasie," he tells her, "I suppose you are the Ton in the motto." As time goes on, musical sympathy merges more and more into love. "The 'Davidsbündlertänze,' and 'Phantasiestücke,'" he writes in January, 1838, "will be finished in another week. There are many bridal thoughts in the dances, which were suggested by the most delicious excitement that I ever remember. My Clara will understand all that is contained in the dances, for they are dedicated to her more emphatically than any of my other things. The whole story is a Polterabend."[7] In April he observes ingenuously, "I have just noticed that Ehe[8] [the German for "marriage">[ is a very musical word, and a fifth, too." A year later he exclaims: "From your Romance I see plainly that we are to be man and wife. Every one of your thoughts comes out of my soul, just as I owe all my music to you.... Once I can call you mine you shall hear plenty of new things.... And we will publish some things under our two names, so that posterity may regard us as one heart and one soul, and may not know which is yours and which mine. How happy I am!"
Meanwhile, however, the narrow selfishness of the father, Friedrich Wieck, was raising all sorts of obstacles to this union. His daughter being, by her playing in public, a source of financial gain to him, he steadily opposed a marriage, as unfavorable to his interests. He forbade the lovers to meet, circulated false and damaging stories of Schumann, and when the couple, goaded to despair by his insensate obstinacy, had resolved to take matters into their own hands, thwarted even so radical a step by pretending to yield, but imposing conditions that could not possibly be carried out. On the whole, considering his impulsive temperament, Schumann bore this persecution with admirable patience, though not without an occasional plaint. "Your father calls me phlegmatic? 'Carnaval' and phlegmatic! F-sharp minor Sonata and phlegmatic! Being in love with such a girl and phlegmatic! And you can listen calmly to all this? He says that I have written nothing in the Journal for six weeks. In the first place, it is not true; secondly, even if it were, how does he know what other work I have been doing? Up to the present the Journal has had about eighty sheets of my own ideas, not counting the rest of my editorial work, besides which, I have finished ten great compositions in two years, and they have cost me some heart's blood. To add to all this, I have given several hours' hard study every day to Bach and Beethoven, and to my own work, and conscientiously managed a large correspondence. I am a young man of twenty-eight, with a very active mind, and an artist to boot; yet for eight years I have not been out of Saxony, and have been sitting still, saving my money, without a thought of spending it on amusement or horses, and quietly going my own way, as usual. And do you mean to say that all my industry and simplicity, and all that I have done, is quite lost upon your father?"
But all these difficulties and disappointments, all these occasions for patience, tact, industry, loyalty, and self-control, painful as they were to experience, were slowly transforming the capricious and dreamy youth into a man of mature will and seasoned resourcefulness. "No man is any use," says Stevenson, "until he has dared everything." Some such conviction must have been in Schumann's mind when at last, early in 1840, he resolved to avail himself of the law of Saxony that when parents withhold their consent to a marriage without good reason, the consent of the courts may be substituted. For such a man, so public a step in so sacredly private a matter must have been doubly difficult; to decide upon it must have involved a long mental turmoil. But he did finally take his case to the courts, and eventually married Clara Wieck, with the sanction of the law, in September, 1840. With this manly and courageous action his youth may be said to have ended, and the responsibilities, anxieties, labors, and sober joys of his manhood to have commenced.