Touched by Schumann

Schumann is probably the most lovable of the great German masters, simply because his music is inextricably involved in first impressions: many children learning the piano will encounter early the pretty little pieces from his Album for the Young, moving on with enhanced delight to the easier numbers in Scenes from Childhood. Then, after headier teenage intoxications, the taste recoils to discover his two greatest contributions to the world hoard — the body of solo piano works with which he began, and the body of songs that overlapped then wholly took over.

The 24 piano works present a cavalcade of dancing, dreaming fantasy, peopled by lovers real or imagined, heroes of music and literature living and dead, brother warriors in art against the Philistines. Creatures of the night from gothic folklore and daemonic emanations from the subconscious co-exist with glittering ballrooms and fairy palaces. All is born of his own divided personality, its zigzag oscillation between euphoria and melancholy, never so vividly contrasted as in the eight movements of the Fantasy Pieces op. 12 — ‘Evening’, ‘Soaring’, ‘Why?’, ‘Whims’, ‘In the Night’, ‘Fable’, ‘Dream-Perplexities’, ‘End of the Tale’. Such contradictions are scarcely integrated by constructing a hopeful middle way — ‘Meister Raro’ (formed of his own and his Clara’s first names) — to bridge the sometimes frightening discrepancies.

Clara it is, of course, who inspires Robert’s next phase: their tortuous courtship ended in 1840 with marriage, releasing the glorious effusion of song, words explicit at last after lurking encoded so long. The highlights are Myrthen (a garland of 26, many mooded for many poets); Frauenliebe und -Leben (infinitely chalorous account of the course of a marriage); the two cycles to Heine texts, the op. 24 Liederkreis and Dichterliebe, charting every nuance of youthful passion, from shy rapture to heartbreak and renunciation, defiant, stoical, nostalgic; and, greatest of all, the other Liederkreis (poems by Eichendorff), encapsulating in 12 brief songs a whole dictionary of romantic themes — nature welcoming and solacing, or menacing and uncanny; love and hope; exile and loss; medieval balladry and folktale set in deep Germanic forests; ecstatic renewal by the surging sap of spring.