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Robert and Clara found out before long, no doubt, that married people sometimes get in one another’s way. For instance, Robert needed hours and sometimes days and weeks of quiet for his creative work. On such occasions Clara had to put a stop to her practising. The two realized that they were rather more hampered than was agreeable and Robert felt keenly how needful it is for an artist appearing in public to keep up his technical practice. Nevertheless she did manage somehow to get in her necessary hours of practice. Her husband found that “as she lives in nothing but good music her playing is now certainly the wholesomer and also more delicate and intelligent than it was before. But sometimes she has not the necessary time to bring mechanical sureness to the point of infallibility and that is my fault and cannot be helped.... Well, that is the way of artist marriages—one cannot have everything at once.”
The Schumanns would have been glad to see Robert occupied with some regular work outside his compositions and his writings for the Neue Zeitschrift. Clara felt that her husband ought to be occupying an important conductor position. She would like to have seen him in such a post at the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts, which his friend Mendelssohn had raised to such a level of distinction. “Don’t be too ambitious for me”, gently chided Robert, who realized that he was not cut out for a conductor. Yet this ambition was one of Clara’s tragic failings. We have to thank it for Schumann’s later misfortunes when he let himself be stampeded into accepting a batonist’s post at Düsseldorf which probably accelerated his final breakdown. “I wish no better place for myself than a pianoforte and you near me”, he had said not long after they were married. But Clara was to be incorrigible. She was one of those typical ambitious wives who drive their husbands into careers for which they know themselves to be totally unfitted. Yet the greater the inroads made by Robert’s deep-seated malady on his nervous system the more incapable he seemed of resisting Clara’s urging.
What promised to be a solid and permanent position for Schumann materialized in the spring of 1843 when Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory. Robert was given charge of the classes in piano playing; and he taught private composition. His colleagues were men like the theorist Hauptmann, the violinist, Ferdinand David, Moscheles, Plaidy, Richter, Klengel and others of distinguished standing. But it does not appear that Schumann’s actual teaching can have amounted to much. For he was growing more and more uncommunicative and the fitness as a pedagogue of such a silent teacher may be doubted. In 1844 his duties at the Conservatory were interrupted for four months when he accompanied Clara on a concert tour to Russia and finally ceased in the autumn when he suffered a severe nervous breakdown which led to his removal to Dresden. Some months earlier he had renounced the editorship of the Zeitschrift. To his friend, Verhulst, he wrote in June, 1844: “I have given up the paper for this year and hardly think I shall ever resume it. I should like to live entirely for composition”. Shortly afterwards the Zeitschrift passed into the hands of Liszt’s friend, Franz Brendel.
Schumann was now definitely a sick man. Clara wrote in her diary that she feared he would not survive the journey to the Harz mountains and to Dresden which they had planned in the hope of restoring him; “Robert did not sleep a single night, his imagination painted the most terrible pictures, in the early morning I generally found him bathed in tears, he gave himself up completely”. The change of scene and society helped him, however, and they resolved to settle permanently in Dresden, whither they moved in the last days of 1844.
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A period of fertile productivity lay behind him. If 1840 was Robert’s “song year”, 1841 was his “symphony year” and 1842 his “chamber music year”, though this should not be taken as meaning that his creations at this time were limited to a few works in these genres exclusively. First of all came the B flat Symphony—the “Spring” Symphony—which Schumann wrote down with a steel pen he had found in Vienna in the Währinger Cemetery, on Beethoven’s grave. The “Spring Symphony”, though it had its detractors, put Schumann on the map, so to speak, more almost than anything else he had written heretofore. Immediately after the symphony came two other large-scale works—the so-called “Overture, Scherzo and Finale” (which modern conductors have singularly neglected) and a Phantasie in A minor, for orchestra and piano, which was to become the first movement of the glorious Piano Concerto—for not a few musicians the greatest of its kind in existence!
On the heels of this soaring masterpiece Schumann embarked on another symphony. “As yet I have heard nothing about it”, wrote Clara in her diary, “but from Robert’s way of going on and the D minor sounding wildly in the distance, I know that another work is being created in the depth of his soul”. Less than four months later Robert handed his wife as a birthday gift the score of the D minor Symphony. It was not to see the light of publicity for some time, however. Before Schumann had put the finishing touches on it his thoughts began to be occupied with the subject of “Paradise and the Peri”, from Thomas Moore’s “Lalla Rookh”, and he opined that “perhaps something fine can be made out of it for music”. He was right, though the beautiful oratorio—one of the finest yet (in America) least familiar of Schumann’s major works—was not completed for nearly two years more. When it finally appeared the composer described it as “an oratorio for cheerful people, not for the place of prayer”.
In the spring of 1842 Robert and Clara had been occupied with the study of the string quartets of Haydn and Mozart. The following October he wrote to the publisher, Haertel: “During the summer months I worked with great zeal at three quartets.... We played them several times at David’s and they seemed to please players and listeners alike, in particular Mendelssohn....” They are the Quartets in A minor, F major and A major, Op. 41. For one thing, they contain some of the most unusual effects of syncopated rhythm to be found in the entire range of Schumann’s compositions. On the heels of the quartets came the most popular sample of Schumann’s chamber music, the E flat Piano Quintet, Op. 44, the first movement of which is perhaps as fine a thing as its creator ever achieved. Other chamber works followed—the E flat Piano Quartet, Op. 47, the so-called Phantasiestücke, for piano, violin and cello, Op. 88, none of them, however, rising above the level of the Quintet.
