Schumann and Clara Wieck, or The Life of an Artist

Around the year 1820, Ferdinand Wieck was the greatest piano teacher in Leipzig and one of Germany's great musicians.

Clara was the second of his daughters, and from her earliest years she showed a passion for music. When she reached the age of five, Wieck began teaching his daughter to play the piano.

In the year 1828 a new pupil, eighteen years of age, arrived at Wieck's. He was a student at the school of law, the son of a father who worked as a book publisher. His name was Robert Schumann.

This youth had passed through the transition from childhood to adolescence in distress and turmoil. With adolescence, his childhood gaiety and his lovely candor turned into gloom. He became withdrawn into himself, absent-minded, indolent... taking refuge at the piano every evening, improvising and sobbing.

His father discovered the musical instinct in him and wanted to send him to Weber to study under him. But this father died suddenly while Robert was still sixteen.

Schumann, then, is eighteen when he begins serious piano lessons with Wieck. As for music itself, he learned it not through abstract theory alone but through a deep study of the lives of the great musicians. Bach was his greatest idol.

But this restless adolescent soon leaves Leipzig and Wieck and departs for Heidelberg to continue his law studies there. Yet his life remains, even so, in a turmoil that knows no rest, for he is forever wavering, and he writes to his mother on this subject:

"My whole life, for twenty years, has been nothing but a continual struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you will, between music and the law. And now here I am between two paths, and this question terrifies me: which life shall I choose?"

In this turmoil and this distress he begs his mother to write to Wieck: "Ask him what he thinks of my future." And Wieck answers: "I take it upon myself to make of Mr. Robert, your son, within three years, one of the greatest living pianists, because of his intelligence and his genius. He must come to play with a precision and a warmth greater than the warmth and precision of Moscheles, and with a grandeur mightier than the grandeur of Hummel. And I give you the proof in the person of my daughter, who is eleven years old, and whom I have begun presenting to the public."

Madame Schumann sent the letter to her son, and Robert answered her:

"I compelled my soul to decide for itself; it placed the future in the two pans of the scale and chose the weightier pan. I did not find the act of choosing difficult..."

★

Schumann is now living once more at Wieck's. Yet he was not happy. He is one of those who are never happy! He wrote letters throbbing with pain. No doubt he was not at ease where his livelihood was concerned, his poverty denying him many things. But the chief cause of his despair was deeper than that, and more wretched. Here is the letter that recounts his sorrows and reveals his hidden ailment:

"My life is dreary and without joy, and it is a blessing that I do not live alone, for in solitude I easily turn into a man who loathes people. And it vexes me to see none but stupid mortals. Yet in the depths of my being I am not so very miserable, for music grants me all that people refuse me. The piano tells me the deep feelings I am unable to express; and when I am weary, my strength worn down, I think of the dear ones at home, whom I love

and who love me with tenderness... And when I think of these things, the spirit of melancholy smiles upon me softly, with grave, glad eyes, so that I can do nothing but weep... Ah! Mother, my nature is very quiet, and every creature who feels as deeply as I do is without doubt unhappy."

Clara had reached her eleventh year, and several days after Schumann's arrival she gave her first concert.

The next day the magazines and newspapers wrote of her, praising her art, admiring her to the utmost, and acquainting the public with her precocious genius.

In the course of that year she published her first composition, the Four Polonaises, with Hofmeister. A special copy was reserved for Mr. Schumann, "who has been living with us since the feast of St. Michael of the year 1830, and who is studying music."

Soon there sprang up between this marvelous girl and this adolescent genius an acquaintance, then an accord. At this very time there appeared in Vienna a new composition by another genius, Frédéric Chopin, Schumann's contemporary. The two became acquainted, and Clara wrote in her diary: "Chopin's piece Les Variations, which I studied in eight days, is the most difficult piece I have seen and played up to now..."

On the eighth of November of the year 1832, Schumann and Clara gave a concert in Zwickau, in the course of which the first movement of an unfinished symphony was performed. During this concert Madame Schumann made Clara's acquaintance. The girl was thirteen. And one day, as the two of them were looking out the window and Robert was greeting her from the street, the mother said to the girl in a low voice: "One day you must marry my son Robert."

The years pass, and the bonds of friendship between them grow firm; they join forces in playing, then

in composing and writing music — all this, while no hint of love had yet appeared in their conversations. In September of the year 1833 Schumann was seized by a terrifying attack of neurasthenia. He recovers at the beginning of 1834 and becomes engaged to a beautiful, kind girl who loved Schumann with her whole being. But he broke off this engagement suddenly; Clara's womanhood had come into full flower, and the artist discovered in her what bound him once and for all in love of her, and he confessed his love to her at last. And how great was his joy when she answered him with acceptance!

But Father Wieck had ambitions other than these. He hastened to remove his daughter from his pupil. Then the artist's despair and his faith burst forth in his melodies: "the Third Sonata," "Passion," "the Dances of the Companions of David," "la Phantasiastücke" —

all of them pages surging with overflowing love, with deep pain, with heartbreak and bitter resentment!

At that time he was writing to Clara:

"All this week I have been sitting at the piano, composing and writing, laughing and weeping at one and the same time. You will notice this in my great piece (Humoreske)."

In these days, painful and happy at once, Schumann sang like a goldfinch — sang and nearly died; and he composed the first Lieder, and "The Myrtles," which holds his sweetest and most delicate melodies, and "The Walnut Tree" and "The Wall," and finally "A Woman's Love and Her Life."

The great, beautiful dream of the German poets opened out in its fullness in this wondrous flower.

At last, on September 21 of the year 1840, after five years of bitter struggle, Robert and Clara were married in the church of Schönefeld near Leipzig. They had many children, and a happiness unclouded by any care settled over their home.

Yet the nervous attacks returned upon the artist in the year 1845.

And on the twenty-ninth of July, 1855, Schumann closed his eyes forever, after a torment that had lasted two years...

... And then, in the paradise of musicians, where Mendelssohn and Chopin were awaiting him, he heard, no doubt, the awesome melody — the melody of the artist angels, playing a piece profound, human, harmonious, throbbing with beauty.