[In all and every time, our joy and sorrow meet:
Gird up thy loins and go, bravely thy fate to greet.]
In the later revised edition Schumann cut out this good old saying, as he omitted so much of the first and heartfelt edition. “Two readings may often be of equal value,” says Eusebius once in the aphorisms. “The original one is usually the best,” adds Raro. Why did not Schumann follow his own Raro? Raro was the most delicate of the “Davidsbündler.” He was in his irony, which had drunk deep of worldly wisdom, raised far above the storm and stress of Florestan and the gentle, simple complaisance of Eusebius. In Florestan there was much of Beethoven, in Eusebius an echo of Schubert. Raro was to surpass and combine them in a higher unity. But Raro is just—rare.
The “Davidsbündler” declare war on the Philistines, and of an evening bring their dances together, which are then published in a single volume. Florestan contributes the stormy ones, Eusebius the gentle ones; while Raro puts in his word as seldom as in actual life. Such bands of Romanticists we have heard of before; we think of Hoffmann’s Serapion Brothers, and their zeal against the Philistines. Herz and Hünten, and all the musical lions of the drawing-room were to be put aside. There was still music after Beethoven. David’s companions meant, like their prototype, to put the Philistines under a harrow. Even the explanatory notes of his “Bündler” were cut out by Schumann in his later revised edition. He smiled perhaps at the beautiful fancies of his youth, when he seemed to carry three temperaments warring in his soul. And yet this fictitious society was the truest expression of his romantic soul, in which living music and literary reflection met together. They were his fellow-workers in his life’s work, whom he could never renounce.
The moment had come when the world busied itself with Schumann in somewhat wider circles. It asked after his private circumstances, and gained the answer—surprising, and yet no longer utterly surprising—that here an academically educated man had become a musician—a phenomenon long unknown, and only possible in this new era of art, in which one could give oneself up to composition without having to wait for a commission for each single work.
Engraving by M. Lämmel
Schumann had attended the Zwickau Gymnasium in due course; and at eighteen, in 1828, he entered the legal profession at Leipzig. His piano-lessons under Frederick Wieck of course attracted him far more than jurisprudence; and when, after an interval spent at Heidelberg, he returned to Leipzig, the die was cast. The letter to his mother in which he announces his decision is to-day interesting for the light it throws on his intentions. Naturally, he thought of the career of a virtuoso; and, in order to make his fingers supple, he hung one of them in a sling while practising, with the result that first the finger and then the whole hand was maimed, and Schumann was saved for pure composition. Composition is soon intimately knit with love for Clara Wieck, the daughter of his teacher, whose great talent was to compensate him for his own lost power. We cannot forget his youthful letters to Clara, which form the conclusion of the edition of “Schumann’s Letters,” which she issued. Never were more lyrical letters written. He dedicates to Clara his whole power of creation; it is she that lives in all his pieces, and to create was to think of her. Before this he tells her legends and supernatural tales. “Look now at your old Robert; is he not still the frivolous ghost-tale teller and terrifier? But now I can be very serious too, often the whole day long—but don’t trouble about that—they are generally processes in my soul, thoughts on music and compositions. Everything touches me that goes on in the world—politics, literature, people. I think after my own fashion of everything that can express itself through music, or can escape by means of it. This is why many of my compositions are so hard to understand, because they are bound up with very remote associations, and often very much so because everything of importance in the time takes hold of me and I must express it in musical form. And this, too, is why so few compositions satisfy my mind, because, apart from all defect in craftsmanship, the ideas themselves are often on a low plane, and their expression is often commonplace. The highest that is here attained scarcely reaches to the beginning of what is aimed at in my music. The former may be a flower, the latter is the poem, so much the more spiritual; the one is an impulse of raw nature; the other the work of poetical consciousness.”
In these words Schumann penetrated into his own heart; and there is nothing to be added to this characterisation of his literary music. The new type existed in its purity; namely, the musician, standing on the height of the representative art of the time, of which type Wagner was the best expression. There is a strange likeness in these two opposed natures. What in Wagner passed over into the external, in Schumann passed into the intimate. Where the one carries us along with him in an intoxicating rush, the latter is a personal enjoyment for retiring souls. The one lives in the orchestra, and plays the piano badly; the other dreamed first for the piano, then for the chorus, and never was able to express himself tolerably through the orchestra. Wagner never burst into tears, like Schumann, when he before his wanderings played for the last time on the beloved instrument which had heard all the sorrows and joys of his youth. And Wagner never wrote to Madame Cosima as Schumann wrote to Clara: “You speak in your last of a cosy place where you would like to have me—do not aim too high—I ask no better surroundings than a piano and you close by. You will never be a kapellmeisterin in your life; but inwardly we are a match for any pair of kapellmeisters, are we not? You understand me.”