We have been turning over the leaves of a book from which Schumann and Chopin might have found matter to fill years of their lives. In form and colour, melody and movement, the model was before them. This modest man, who in his Vienna solitude wrote such things as these for himself, loved a few good friends, but publicity he hated. A composer who never appeared in public—was the like ever seen before? In the aged Beethoven the world understood it; but in this young man it could only reward it with indifference. He remained willingly unknown, like so many of his companions in sorrow who wished to be artists in themselves without relation to others, and without the encumbrance of patronage. The times were altering in music as in painting. The patronage of the State or of the Prince is disappearing; the commissions the artist receives become fewer and more distasteful; he becomes more intimate and is constrained to offer his works to the public, and to supply what it will purchase. Supply and demand rule art as well as anything else: but nowhere is the severance so painful. Pensions are irksome, and official posts are not to be had otherwise than indirectly. The struggle after the ideal which is the life of the artist is purer than it ever was. The type which Feuerbach and Böcklin represent in painting, that new type of artist who can be happy without commissions and without honorarium, is first clearly exhibited by Schubert in the musical world. Publicity, to which Beethoven at first had recourse, and which he would have carried further had fate not opposed, was impossible to Schubert. He had to live on a pension, his applications for posts were rejected, publishers were timid, and very slowly indeed did his songs win their way to favour. Goethe never answered him on receiving his songs; and Beethoven, to whom he shyly dedicated his Variations (Op. 10) as “admirer and worshipper,” only learnt to know him in the last days. As he began, so he died. The publishers had still to work through the whole century in order to bring out his works, which they dedicated in very stylish manner to Liszt, Mendelssohn, or Schumann: as Schubert closed his eyes he knew as little as the world that his simple integrity had won a new realm for art.
Some years after Schubert’s death, in November 1831, a certain Robert Schumann published as his first work some Variations, whose theme was formed on the name Abegg (A B E G G). It was easy to see that the Countess Abegg, to whom they were dedicated, was a pseudonym for a good lady, whom the author had once admired as a beauty without otherwise troubling himself much about her. The theme was worked out a little too painfully, and the Variations moved in eclectic style among influences derived from Beethoven, Weber, and the contemporary virtuosos; but their originality was nevertheless unmistakable. It was not the worn-out contemporary style of variations; and many sound traces of that naive dilettantism, which always stands at the cradle of the new, were easily to be detected. Sudden pianissimo effects, single selected technical motives, an original melodic gift for singing with contrapuntal voice-parts and new forms of accompaniment, rapid harmonic changes by the chord of the seventh, legendary romance in the finale alla fantasia, the successive release of the notes of a chord, from the lowest to the highest—all this led men to wait eagerly for Schumann’s next work.
This next work bore the title of “Papillons”—a title not unknown in contemporary drawing-room music. But here there was nothing of the drawing-room style. These butterflies seemed to come from the regions where Schubert had found his flowers. Thence they brought a breath of short lyrical songs—a concentrated breath of severe and restrained beauty. A wonderfully penetrating heart-felt tone breathed through them. The world had now to do with a reflective, deeply musical nature, far removed from all the merely brilliant virtuosity of the time: it was a romantic spirit. After the short slow introduction came the waltz, whose outlines inevitably recalled Schubert; but its emotions were personally felt. There were melodic passages in octaves for alternate hands, dying away in the aria with the “nachschlagbegleitung”[127] down to pianissimo, a splendid fugato-march in spirited style, episodes of popular songs, sportive whisperings, sparkling polonaise rhythms, melodious effects working out of very gentle full chords, canonic melodies in lively motion, repetitions of earlier bars in later sections to represent the external unity of these little stories, and as a conclusion the “Grossvater” song. The whole is united contrapuntally with the first waltz. The carnival is silenced—this appears suddenly in words—the tower-clock strikes six (and high enough on the upper A); a full chord of the seventh piles itself up gradually and closes the piece.
No one knew what was the chief impulse which led Schumann to write these “Papillons.” Those who corresponded with him alone knew that he was thinking of the “Flegeljahre”[128] of Jean Paul. From Jean Paul he received his spiritual nourishment, and those to whom his letters came could tell that he hardly sent off one without including in them a rhapsody for the Bayreuth poet. In this intermediate world between the highest earnestness and endless laughter he preferred to live in ironic love and loving irony. To reflect deeply on immortality, and at the same time to drink in comfortably the sweet odour of the girdle cake which the goodwife is cooking in the kitchen—it is in this mixed light that the poet stands, who has so characterised himself. The fantastic boundaries of the real and the imaginary world, of the most insipid flatness of the animal nature and of the most ethereal heavenly flights, alike attract him. His delicate soul flies to Nature, and Nature is to him—so he writes to his mother—the great outspread handkerchief of God, embroidered with His eternal name, on which man can wipe away all his tears of sorrow. But the tears of joy too—and when every tear falls into a rapture of weeping—whence came these tones in the soul of a musician? The world had never yet understood them. It knew them in literary circles, which busied themselves with romantic new creations, where unknown regions seemed suddenly to open themselves between the everyday and the legendary, and which demanded new, painfully twisted words for the wild tumult of their representations. Where pure music had long wandered alone, the poets and the æsthetics had now penetrated; and was now a musician to give them a hand to speak in their tongue? This was a surprising turn. Upon the musical poet came the literary musician. The one could only gain; had the other anything to lose? No; Schumann seemed musician enough to prove that nothing was lost. None of his friends, to whom he recommended the perusal of the conclusion of the “Flegeljahre”—whose masked dance, he said, the Papillons were intended to transform into tones—would have expected this pure and genuine music from him. I imagine they all puzzled their heads to know what the wild Jean Paul had to do with these dainty musical butterflies. And it is to-day even harder for us.
A delicate musician read Jean Paul, and the grotesque figures of this “Walt und Vult” combined in him with a world of tone, which slumbered within him, in those deep regions of associated ideas which stand at the basis of artistic creation. They there formed a special union with their musical counterpart, the simplest, most natural, and least academical creations which the art of tone ever saw—those of Schubert. So early as 1829 Schumann, who was then a student, wrote to Frederick Wieck from Heidelberg: “When I play Schubert, it is as if I were reading a Romance of Jean Paul set to music.” Jean Paul and Schubert are the gods in Schumann’s first letters and other writings. He cannot shake off the ethereal melancholy, the “suppressed” lyrical tone, in Schubert’s four-handed A major Rondo: he sees Schubert, as it were, in bodily shape, experiencing his own piece. No music, he said, is so psychologically remarkable in the progress of its ideas and in its apparently logical leaps. There is a rare fire in him when he speaks of Schubert. How eager is he for new publications from Schubert’s remains! Yet, while he is devouring a volume of his national dances, he is weeping for Jean Paul. In the Papillons, we hear, there was Jean Paul; and what we find in them, is Schubert. What was to come of this conjunction?
This question was very satisfactorily answered in the next work (Op. 3). This was a collection of Études with a textual introduction on motives after Paganini, but adapted to the piano. Considered as a whole it was technical to a degree, yet without disguising the real Schumann. And what was the meaning of the Introduction? Every great pianist had already written his “School” or wanted to write it. Did these barren finger-directions speak for the virtuoso Schumann?
The Intermezzi (Op. 4) answered in the negative. These were genuine pure music without any external pretensions. It was possible already to recognise the true style of Schumann: the characteristic features were repeated. Dotted motives, built up in fugato style; delicate melodies with the “nachschlag” accompaniment and with other melodies superimposed; reflective repose in chords; syncopated rhythm; parallelisms of the air in octaves; all these were as before. In the slurred thirds and the sequences, and especially the diatonic runs, which seem to gather their strength as they go, the model was not Schubert but Sebastian Bach. There was something in this not merely of his absolute, self-contained music, but even of his means of expression. At this time of course this could do no harm. In the fifth and sixth intermezzos Schumann’s personality would seem to have entirely ripened. This marked propensity to “anticipations,” those pianissimo unisons, those sharp detonations of C and C sharp, D and D sharp; the singing legato middle voices developing in the canonic manner, the absolute transference of whole passages by means of a single note foreign to the scale, generally effected by an anticipation; all this had grown into a definite musical picture, extraordinarily sympathetic, in which soul and technique were united. With stern sadness the hands grip one within another, to bring out the “suppressed lyric” of the piano; and a delicate noble spirit guides them, which delights to express strange things in strange forms. With stern sadness, as in the style of Jean Paul, and right in the midst of the music, where an answering voice intrudes itself, Schumann writes over the notes the words, “Meine Ruh ist hin”—my peace has departed. This is not as text, but merely as a comment by the way.
Then came Op. 5, free variations in romantic style, on a theme by Clara Wieck; and Op. 6, called “Davidsbündlertänze.” They were dedicated to Walther von Goethe, and bore as motto the old proverb:—
“In all’ und jeder Zeit verknüpft sich Lust und Leid;
Bleibt fromm in Lust, und seyd dem Leid mit Mut bereit.”