Under the circumstances he would require a fuller training than he had yet enjoyed in the technic of composition. Wieck had recommended for a master in theory none other than Cantor Weinlig, the teacher of his own daughter, Clara, and of a certain irresponsible young firebrand named Richard Wagner. Robert did not accept the suggestion. Instead he became a pupil of Heinrich Dorn, recently come to Leipzig, who promised to be a more progressive person. Schumann esteemed Dorn personally and long remained his friend. But soon he was writing to Wieck and his daughter, then off on a concert tour: “I shall never be able to amalgamate with Dorn; he wishes to get me to believe that music is fugue—heavens! how different men are....” Nevertheless he slaved away at his exercises in double counterpoint and when the study became too intolerably dry he moistened it with draughts of champagne! His best lessons in counterpoint he obtained from Bach, who was to remain his supreme divinity all his life. The fugues of the Well Tempered Clavier he analyzed “down to the smallest detail.” When in his melancholy late days he received a visit from the young Czech, Bedrich Smetana, with a plea to advise him about musical studies, the taciturn master said no more than: “Study Bach”. “But I have studied Bach”, protested Smetana. “Study him again”, replied the declining composer and relapsed into moody silence.
It was at Dorn’s home, incidentally, that Schumann made his first acquaintance with Wagner, to whom he played the “Abegg” Variations. Wagner did not care for them on account of their “excess of figuration”. Nevertheless, they soon found a publisher. When the firm of Probst brought out the work the composer was in the highest measure elated, promised each of his Heidelberg acquaintances a free copy and wrote that “his first marriage with the wide world” made him feel as proud as the Doge of Venice at his ceremonial wedding with the Adriatic! The critics were, on the whole, encouraging, though the notorious Rellstab in his review “Iris” deplored the lack in it of any canon or fugue and made fun of “a name one can compose”.
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With the children in the Wieck home Robert was a great favorite. What the youngsters especially enjoyed were the charades he was in the habit of devising for their pleasure, the frightening ghost stories he improvised for them day after day and his shivery enactment of the various spooks. Riddles, fairy tales—there was seemingly no end of the parlor tricks he knew how to provide on the spur of the moment for the tots. This deep understanding of children and their psychology was bound, sooner or later, to find artistic expression and lovely embodiment in music like the “Kinderscenen” and the “Album for the Young”, the one with its “Träumerei”, the other with its “Happy Farmer”.
The first sketch for The Happy Farmer, from the “Album for the Young,” Op. 68.
His grown-up friends he endeavored to choose only among people who genuinely interested him and who shared his tastes. Persons who could not partake his high-flown enthusiasm for Jean Paul or for Bach amounted almost to mortal enemies! As for Clara, his early feelings toward the talented daughter of Wieck were scarcely more than a brother-and-sister affection, even though some of his more extravagant biographers have written nonsense about him worshipping her “like a pilgrim from afar some holy altar-piece”. In his diaries one can find such entries as: “Clara was silly and scared”, “With Clara arm in arm”, “Clara was stubborn and wild”, “Clara plays gloriously”, “She plays like a cavalry rider”, “The ‘Papillons’ she plays uncertainly and without understanding”! And so it goes in continual contradiction. We must bear in mind, however, that Clara was then only about 12 and, however artistically precocious, hardly more than a child. Her father had seen to it that she studied violin and singing and had stiff courses in theory and composition. But it was only after she had been in Paris in Wieck’s company and known Chopin, Mendelssohn, Kalkbrenner, Herz and other great personages of the day that she matured into a young woman who, as Robert said, “could give orders like a Leonore”.
For his part Schumann was composing industriously. It is necessary to bear in mind that his early work, which comprises some of his greatest, is almost exclusively for the piano. Songs form his second creative stage, then chamber, then orchestral music. To be sure, choral works, an opera and miscellaneous creations sometimes cut athwart the other categories. But his works can be easily arranged in their respective classifications. The “Papillons” is probably the first masterpiece which achieved what might be called universality. Doubtless Schumann would have been grieved that anyone should think of the fantastic little dance movements and mood pictures which constitute the set without appreciating their relationship to Jean Paul and his “Flegeljahre”. But the whirligig of time has quite reversed the position of Schumann’s enamoring miniatures and the faded romantic work which inspired them. Today we remember the “Flegeljahre” chiefly because the “Papillons”, after a fashion, recalls it to our attention. But it would be erroneous to imagine that Jean Paul exclusively, accounts for those captivating musical fancies that we meet in this Op. 2—the clock which strikes six at the close, indicating that the imaginary throng of revelers is dispersing; the chord which dissolves, bit by bit, till only a single note remains; the “Grandfathers’ March”, typifying the old fogies and Philistines generally (an ancient tune of folk character, which Bach had introduced into his “Peasant Cantata” many years earlier). Not without reason could Schumann claim “that Bach and Jean Paul exercised the greatest influence on me in my early days”.
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Let us at this point enumerate a few of the men and women who were gradually coming into Schumann’s orbit, who became, more or less, fixtures in his circle, or else grazed its circumference and went their different ways. Among one of the first names we encounter are those of Henriette Voigt, a lady whom Robert was presently to call “his A flat soul”, and Ernestine von Fricken, from the town of Asch, just across the Czech border. Ernestine was a lively and coquettish young person, an adopted illegitimate child, who fascinated Robert, to whom she briefly became engaged, and who passed out of his life as breezily as she had come into it. But if Ernestine was hardly more than a butterfly Robert nevertheless immortalized her. She is the Estrella of the “Carnival” for one thing; and, for another, it was on her account that he utilized in a diversity of ways the musical motto embodied in the letters of her home town, Asch. These “Sphinxes” as the composer called the series of long-held notes (A flat, C, B natural, E flat, C, B, and A, E flat, C and B) are combinations which constitute the basis of numerous pieces in the “Carnival”. They are not only letters which form the name of “Asch” but are also common to that of “Schumann”. Robert was plainly indulging in some more of his little romantic whimsies, mystifications or epigrams!