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.

In rendering these states of mind, body, soul, no other composer can compare for impulsive immediacy. Schubert’s range is broader, his depth more profound. Schumann, within narrower confines, reaches the most secret places with the most intimate touch. Chopin (whose bicentenary also falls this year) seems by comparison salon-bound even at his most delicate: counting countesses, calculating subscriptions (that peremptory ‘Pay up! Get out!’ concluding the Barcarolle!); while Liszt (whose bicentennial comes in 2011) is all too obviously a figure of limelight even when ostentatiously avoiding it.

The question of Schumann’s subsequent output will be reopened but not resolved in his bicentenary. To those for whom he blooms early, the later work is a gradual victory for Meister Raro, wherein spontaneous invention is swamped by respectful/respectable submission to ‘bourgeois’ music-making in ‘official’ genres: symphony, chamber music, opera, oratorio. To the defence, the later work expands in mastery with these newly acquired genres, opening up altogether original glimpses into further territory.

All can agree to cherish wonderful moments, sometimes complete movements, in the four symphonies and the copious chamber works. Some of the later songs reflect the earlier with a paler, altered light, as the moon/sun. A few larger pieces escape ossification completely. But much gives hostages to fortune. And in the end one never senses that, as in Schubert, this composer is untimely cut off with indescribable potential riches still to yield. In Schumann the feeling of dilution, then guttering out, is palpable and unmistakable.

But let’s not close on a downer. Wherever its centre is located, this body of work has moved music-lovers in a unique manner, and always will. And the roster of composers touched by it speaks for itself: audible successors — Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak. Elgar, Mahler, Strauss, Wolf, Pfitzner; less immediately apparent (spirit over letter) — Fauré, Ravel, Berg, Britten. Not even Wagner has so wide a catchment; and his influence was more often a disadvantage, sometimes a downright disaster. Schumann’s is wholly benign, fertilising further beauties wherever it alights.

With this affectionate tribute to a favourite composer, I make my farewell to The Spectator’s hospitable pages. As the editor said, 22 years isn’t a bad run for a monthly column. I’ve enjoyed myself, on the whole; I hope I’ve given enjoyment to my readers — above all by sharing my joy in the vast, infinitely varied, inexhaustibly absorbing art we all so deeply love.

There’s plenty of Schumann for his bicentennial at this summer’s Proms. Two of Robin Holloway’s compositional tributes can be heard: at the Cadogan Hall on 27 August his Fantasy-Pieces (on the Heine Liederkreis, which the piece itself also includes); at the Albert Hall on 9 September the première of Reliquary, enclosing an orchestration of the Five Songs on texts by Mary Queen of Scots.