Robert’s taciturnity had been growing on him for years but it finally took utterly fantastic forms. We are told that in Düsseldorf he could not say: “Ladies and gentlemen, our next rehearsal will be tomorrow at seven”, without breaking down once or twice. In another case a certain Carl Witting was commissioned to visit Schumann in order to settle a debated point about the tempi in the “Manfred” Overture. After putting his question to the composer who was smoking a cigar (Robert had been an inveterate smoker from his youth) he received for all answer only the query: “Do you smoke?” Witting said he did and waited respectfully. Schumann neither offered a cigar nor gave a reply. Two more inquiries brought only another “Do you smoke?” The persistent silence finally impelled Witting to take his leave, thinking one knows not what. Still another idiosyncrasy of Robert’s later days was to frequent a restaurant, order a glass of wine or beer and leave without attempting to pay. The proprietor was not disturbed, but simply gave Schumann what amounted to a charge account and sent the bills to Clara.
One of the first excursions Robert and Clara took after their arrival in Düsseldorf was to Cologne. Schumann was charmed by the surrounding countryside and deeply impressed by an ecclesiastical ceremony he witnessed in the Cologne Cathedral. The visit provided the inspiration for the Symphony in E flat, the so-called “Rhenish”, published as the third, actually the fourth in date of composition (if we except the 1851 revision of the earlier D minor). The resplendent work has a freshness and a youthful ardor which seem to belie the composer’s encroaching mental impairment. The climax of the symphony is its monumentally conceived fourth movement in which Schumann strove to picture the solemnity he had witnessed in that stately fane. The other movements abound in those shifted accents and other rhythmic surprises which were always a hallmark of the composer’s style.
One marvels at the quantity if not always at the quality of Schumann’s Düsseldorf compositions. These include overtures to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, Goethe’s “Hermann und Dorothea” and Schiller’s “Braut von Messina”; the “Pilgrimage of the Rose”, the “Peri”; a fine Cello Concerto in A minor, and a violin concerto in D minor, written for Joseph Joachim, but secreted for years in the Berlin State Library and, though once tried out by Joachim, never played or published till recent years on the plea that it might by its weakness diminish Schumann’s reputation. As a matter of fact the concerto, which is typical late Schumann, seems to have been much too severely judged by Joachim and even Clara herself.
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The impossible situation in Düsseldorf could not continue. At first the Schumanns resolved to leave and settle down in Vienna. But that scheme proved impractical. The sorry conductorship came to its inevitable end. The Schumanns, much relieved, set out on a tour of Holland which had triumphal results for Clara. Back in Düsseldorf, though no longer in an official capacity, Robert on Sept. 30, 1853, was handed a card inscribed “Herr Brahms from Hamburg”. Next day he scribbled in a diary: “Visit from Brahms (a genius)”. And there began one of the most touching friendships in musical history, one that long survived the mortal Schumann and continued for the duration of Clara’s years on earth.
To Joseph Joachim, who had armed the twenty year old North German with the introduction he presented, Robert instantly wrote “in prophetic style” the words: “This is he who should come”. And only a few days later, another concerning “Johannes the true Apostle—the young eagle that has flown so suddenly and unexpectedly from the hills to Düsseldorf....” Then snatching his long unused editorial pen he began that famous essay, “New Paths”, published on Oct. 28, 1853, in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and which definitely started Brahms on the path of glory leading to deathlessness.
Brahms, Joachim, Albert Dietrich, J. O. Grimm—these perhaps more than any others were the men whose friendship was the chief solace of Schumann in his now rapid decline. He still took his walks with Clara and the children. With his lips pursed as if whistling and his hands clasped behind him he was a familiar figure as he wandered in a kind of abstraction through the parks of Düsseldorf. New and alarming symptoms steadily manifested themselves. In 1854 he had “marked and painful auditory sensations”, including a maddening affliction that took the shape of hearing melodies in two conflicting keys at once. His speech was heavier and his demeanor grew more and more apathetic. With increasing hallucinations he developed a morbid enthusiasm for spiritism and table rappings. He had dreams in which the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn dictated musical themes to him; or else he heard angelic voices which presently changed to the howling of demons threatening him with torments. On Feb. 26, 1854, he rose in a state of terrible melancholy, begged to be sent to an asylum and began to pack up the things he wished to take with him. Clara, wishing to speak to their friend and physician, Dr. Hasenclever, left the room for a moment. Suddenly Schumann opened his bedroom door and—vanished! A few minutes later he was brought back, dripping with water. Half clad, he had gone out, thrown himself into the Rhine but was saved from drowning by some fishermen who had seen the suicidal leap. On March 4 he was taken at his own wish to the private asylum of Dr. Richarz at Endenich, near Bonn. He left in a carriage accompanied by two doctors. Clara, from whom he took only a perfunctory leave, stayed behind, crushed. Someone had handed Schumann flowers as he drove away. He gave a few of them to Dr. Hasenclever, who afterwards took them to Clara. For a while his condition seemed to improve. He worked now and then at his music, composed a few variations on the theme he claimed to have received from the spirit of Schubert and wrote a piano accompaniment for some of the Paganini Capriccios. But by 1855 all hope was abandoned and in 1856 Clara, on a concert tour in England, was informed that Robert was “irretrievably lost”. Soon a telegram summoned her to Endenich “if she still wanted to see her husband alive”. With Brahms, who for nearly two years had watched over Robert and the sorely tried Clara with unexampled devotion, she went to the sanatorium, saw Robert and believed that, though he seemed to converse with spirits, he recognized and welcomed her after the long separation. On July 29, 1856, he was, in Clara’s words “to be freed from his troubles; at four in the afternoon he passed gently away. His last hours were peaceful and so he passed in sleep, unnoticed—nobody was with him at the moment. I saw him half an hour later. Joachim had come from Heidelberg on receiving our telegram....”
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Two days afterwards Schumann was laid to rest in the lovely Old Cemetery at Bonn. Members of the Düsseldorf “Concordia”, which had serenaded the Schumanns on their arrival from Dresden six years earlier, were the pallbearers. Hiller, Joachim and Brahms walked in front, Clara, alone and unobserved, far behind—“certainly as he would have wished”. Forty years later, on Whit-Sunday, 1896, she was reunited with him in the same tomb, in the presence of her surviving children and a few friends, chief of these the faithful Brahms, himself barely a year from his end.