Ill health pursued Schumann more and more implacably during the six odd years of his Dresden sojourn. He had moments when things seemed to brighten. At other times the slightest mental effort produced sleepless nights, auricular delusions, new and terrifying symptoms which came to haunt him as others disappeared. He was morbid, irritable, had visions of “dark demons” and was assailed by “melancholy bats”.

Music sometimes helped and sometimes hindered. Nevertheless the Dresden period saw the creation of some of his greatest works—the completion in 1845, of the A minor Piano Concerto, by the addition of the Intermezzo and the Finale to the Phantasie written in 1841; the magnificent C major Symphony, with its melting Adagio, its breathless scherzo, its resplendent finale; the “Scenes from Faust”, the Overture and incidental music to Byron’s “Manfred” and the opera, “Genoveva”.

Limitations of space forbid us to consider in any detail works like the Piano Concerto, the C major Symphony and the rugged “Manfred” Overture—so different in its sombre, moody character from the romantic effusions of Schumann’s earlier day. But the opera, “Genoveva” though branded a failure contains superb music, beginning with the overture which, in its different fashion, ranks with the one to “Manfred”. The prayer of the fated Genoveva in the last act is a long scena comparing in its far-flung lyric line with the noblest vocal pieces Schumann ever wrote.

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Clara cared tenderly for her ailing husband and left nothing undone to comfort him. She would use all her culinary skill to make it certain that his meals would be bright spots in his often troubled days. A friend who met her returning from market in one instance inquired what she was carrying in a strange-looking packing. “Something to tempt my poor husband’s appetite—mixed pickles”, she answered. They had friends in a certain Major Serre and his wife who had a country estate at a place called Maxen, near Dresden, and she took Robert there from time to time to benefit by the pleasant country surroundings. But his stay in Maxen was spoiled by the view from one of the windows of a lunatic asylum nearby. And as the years passed and his condition deteriorated the sight of an asylum brought his melancholy to an almost intolerable stage.

It was to Maxen that Clara brought him and her children when, during the revolutionary uprising in May, 1849, they found it necessary to flee from Dresden till order was restored. Pretending to take her husband for a walk she picked her way at sundown through the fields and hills surrounding the city and reached the Serre estate in the small hours of the morning, terrified by the armed mobs they continually met and the sounds of shooting in the distance. Then, without waiting to rest or refresh herself, Clara had to set out for Dresden once more to bring the children to a place of safety. Back in Maxen she restrained her feelings with difficulty when she was met by contemptuous allusions from her aristocratic hosts to “canaille” and “rabble”. “How men have to fight for a little freedom!” she confided in her diary. “When will the time come when all men will have equal justice? How is it possible that the belief can so long have been rooted among the nobles that they are of a different species from the bourgeois?”

In the fall of 1849 Schumann received a letter from Ferdinand Hiller, on the point of leaving Düsseldorf, inquiring whether he would be disposed to succeed him as Musical Director in that Rhenish town. The salary was good, the duties heavy but stimulating. Schumann reflected that Dresden had never shown itself in the least inclined to give the illustrious artist couple within its gates the faintest official recognition. Hiller’s offer seemed promising. Robert started to look up information about Düsseldorf. In an old geography book he found that the town’s attractions included “three convents and a lunatic asylum”. Nevertheless, they decided in its favor.

They took a cool farewell from Dresden and arrived in Düsseldorf on Sept. 2, 1850. They were greeted with extreme cordiality, wined and dined, serenaded and threatened with the exhausting honors of dances, picnics and excursions. Until they could find a suitable house and garden they were lodged in the best (and most expensive!) hotel. The Music Committee turned itself inside out to make life pleasant for its new conductor and his illustrious artist-wife. Robert was forty, seemingly in the prime of life but actually past his best creative period, and glad that an apparently desirable opportunity was opening up to him at last.

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Tragic deception! Whether or not Schumann realized it from the first, the Düsseldorf period was the beginning of the end. It quickly became obvious that Robert had no ability whatever as a conductor, none of the dominating qualities to impose his wishes on orchestras or choral masses. He could think of no better methods of correcting a defect of execution than to ask his players or singers to repeat a passage over and over, without ever making plain to them what he wanted. The performers became listless, inattentive or downright rebellious. Things grew progressively worse and the decline of musical standards in Düsseldorf became town talk. The worry and physical strain involved told sorely in Schumann’s afflicted nervous constitution. He developed an embarrassing habit of dropping his baton at rehearsals, till he hit on the scheme of fastening it to his wrist with a piece of string! “There, now it can’t fall again!”, he sheepishly told a friend who gazed at his arm in questioning wonder. His mental ailment bit by bit robbed him of the alertness, concentration, presence of mind, “even the ability to speak audibly”. Clara, unable apparently to recognize the truth, suspected intrigues on every hand. Her blood “boiled” over the “disrespectful behaviour of some of the choir” at a rehearsal of the “St. Matthew Passion” and she developed a particular enmity against the well-meaning if uninspired conductor, Julius Tausch, who gradually took over some of Schumann’s most taxing labors.