ROBERT SCHUMANN
Tone-Poet
Prophet and Critic
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.
August Schumann had not always dwelt on easy street. Born in 1773 in the village of Entschütz, near Gera, he was the son of an impecunious country pastor who, despite his poverty, became a cleric of some eminence. Unwilling to see the youngster grow up as an object of charity the preacher gave him four years of high school education, then apprenticed him to a merchant. But the lad was not cut out for business; books were his world and in them he sought refuge from the misery of shopkeeping. Moreover, he soon developed literary aspirations of his own and, even though a well-meaning book-seller tried to discourage him, wrote a novel entitled “Scenes of Knighthood and Monkish Legends”. The unremitting labor of study, writing and business chores told on his health and for the rest of his life he was never wholly a well man. Yet nothing could diminish his energies or dampen his ambitions to achieve the glories of authorship. When he eventually fell in love with a daughter of one Schnabel, official surgeon of the town of Zeitz, and met with a downright refusal from that hard-shelled individual to give his daughter to anyone but a merchant of independent means, August Schumann was equal to the challenge. For a year and a half he wrote day and night, saved up about $750 (a respectable sum at the time) opened a shop in partnership with a friend in the town of Ronneberg, married Schnabel’s daughter and was happy. A circulating library formed an adjunct to the store and the new Mrs. Schumann divided her time between handling books and selling goods. Her husband for his part combined the satisfactions of an extremely prolific authorship with the management of a bookshop, not to mention the direction of a prosperous business. In 1808 he moved to Zwickau where he founded the publishing house of Schumann Brothers, which lasted till 1840. The firm brought out among other things translations of the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. One of its showpieces was a so-called “Picture Gallery of the Most Famous Men of all Nations and Ages”. At 14 Robert busily puttered around the place, reading proofs and performing many of the other odd jobs common to printing establishments.
Schumann’s birthplace in Zwickau, Saxony.
For all his zeal and strength of character August Schumann paid the price of his unsparing toil in the shape of a nervous malady complicated by other ailments and attended by accesses of profound melancholy. He died on Aug. 10, 1826. His children without exception inherited the diseased strain. Curiously enough, about the only quality Robert could not regard as an outright heritage was his musical talent. His father had none of it and his mother only the most superficial trace. She was an excellent housewife and a tender soul but of wholly provincial mentality (which explains, perhaps, why her restlessly active husband chose her as his mate). Robert looked like his mother and loved her devotedly. But his features were about the sole birthright he owed her. From his father, on the other hand, he acquired virtually all of those qualities which were to fertilize his greatest inspirations—ambition, high principle, productive activity, imagination, poetic fantasy, whimsicality, the gift of literary expression and even to a certain degree that shrewd practical sense which marked some of his business dealings. Yet to none of his immediate forbears does he seem to have been indebted for his musical instincts as such.
Robert’s early upbringing was chiefly the business of his mother. His father, swamped by literary and mercantile pursuits, had no time for nursery duties. Possibly the child would have been less spoiled if a paternal hand had more actively guided him. As it was, Robert became not only his mother’s darling but the pet of every woman of her large acquaintance. He had his way in everything and in later years this error of his early training was reflected in the irritation he sometimes showed when crossed in his wishes. All the same, this female adulation did not soften the lad who, at the age of six, was sent to the private school run by an Archdeacon Döhner. In the games and sports of his comrades he was as wild and turbulent as the roughest of them. Nevertheless, he did not neglect his school work and exhibited a lively intelligence. Music fascinated him early. A pupil from a Latin school, one August Vollert, who obtained free board at the Schumann home in exchange for a bit of teaching, gave Robert a little elementary instruction in the art, though hardly systematic guidance. The spark was kindled, however. At seven the boy composed a few little dances. We need not say “wrote”, for these trifles were chiefly improvised on the piano. One aspect of his gift manifested itself early—a knack for “characterizing” people in tone with a kind of delineative justness that both moved and amused listeners. The child was obviously father to the man who composed the “Carnival”!
In Zwickau at the time there was no better musician than Johann Gottfried Kuntzsch, who long before Robert was born, had gained a certain distinction by conducting a performance of Haydn’s “Creation”. August Schumann, who secretly hoped that his youngest boy might become such a poet as he himself had always aspired to be, resolved to cultivate that musical talent which was beginning to flower. It was to the care of Kuntzsch, therefore, that he confided him. We know little of the kind of teaching Robert enjoyed at this stage. Frederick Niecks surmises that it may have consisted “in little more than telling the pupil what to practise and the first elementary rules of fingering ... in short, prescription without exemplification, happy-go-lucky chance without purposeful system”. Niecks adds that Kuntzsch’s pupils could never be sure of escaping a box on the ear and that “on one occasion Robert’s bad timekeeping was even corrected by a stout blackthorn”. Yet Robert preserved a good opinion of Kuntzsch all his life and as late as 1832 wrote asking permission to dedicate a composition to “the only one who recognized the predominating musical talent in me and indicated betimes the path along which, sooner or later, my good genius was to guide me”.
In 1820 Robert entered the Zwickau Lyceum (“Gymnasium”) to emerge, eight years later, with a certificate inscribed with a flattering eximie dignus. He was a personable youngster, blond, bright-eyed, sensitive, temperamental, prankish. The two subjects particularly dear to his heart were music and literature. His teachers thought kindly of his talent for languages. An uncommonly developed instinct for rhythm and meter expressed itself in effusions of poetry. At home he spent much time concocting “robber comedies” and producing them with the assistance of his schoolmates. Meanwhile, he was carrying on his musical studies with the son of a local bandmaster. The two became fast friends, played overtures and symphonies in four hand arrangements and even tackled compositions by Hummel and Czerny. Kuntzsch was anything but pleased by his pupil’s displays of independence. Not having been consulted about the latter’s music-making he suddenly declared that Robert could now shift for himself. Yet when Kuntzsch produced an oratorio by F. Schneider at Saint Mary’s Church, young Schumann played the piano accompaniments while his father, though unmusical, beamed approvingly. Indeed, August Schumann did everything to further his son’s musical inclinations. The paternal publishing firm obtained gratis quantities of music from which Robert was free to take his pick and choice. Father Schumann provided plenty of music stands for household concerts and bought a Streicher piano. With some of his musical comrades Robert produced at home a setting of the 150th Psalm he had composed. A little earlier he had heard a concert by the celebrated Ignaz Moscheles on a trip to Karlsbad in his father’s company. For a long time he was fired with the ambition to study with this virtuoso. Nothing came of it but the youth preserved the program of that recital like a sacred relic.