The unromantic approach

John Worthen, a D.H. Lawrence specialist, approaches Robert Schumann’s tormented life without any apparent musical or medical expertise. His aim is ambitious: to prove that Schumann was not the quintessential Romantic figure of folklore and that he died of tertiary syphilis. He attempts to argue that Schumann was not manic-depressive, schizophrenic, unbalanced or even unstable. His publishers, meanwhile, claim that this book ‘frees Schumann from 150 years of myth-making and unjustified psychological speculation’. Worthen hardly covers the music, so nor do I.

In 1985, Peter Ostwald, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, published Schumann: Music and Madness. In this brilliant book, Ostwald concludes that Schumann exhibited the classic symptoms of a deeply divided self and suffered from manic depression (bipolar disorder). Worthen criticises Ostwald for exaggerating Schumann’s unhappiness, depression and disturbances. Yet he himself goes to the opposite extreme of denying the numerous examples of depression and hypomania.

His thesis is that Schumann’s life went swimmingly until he was ‘struck down, at the age of 44, by a vile and incurable disease’. But Uwe Henrik Peters, professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of Cologne, has argued convincingly that the doctors’ notes, Dr Richarz’s autopsy and Richarz’s subsequent statements do not support the diagnosis of syphilis.

The most accessible part of Schumann’s life is his relationship with Clara, daughter of his piano teacher Friedrich Wieck. This part of the narrative is excellently handled by Worthen, and he is right to stress that there was nothing inevitable about the liaison. Between 1833 and 1837, thanks to the stern tactics of Clara’s father, either of them might have married someone else. Wieck’s distaste for the relationship reached obsessive-compulsive proportions, and he was not far from winning the argument. Saxon law finally found in Robert and Clara’s favour after her father failed to find witnesses to attest to Schumann’s drunkenness.