Schumann: The Faces and the Masks - Hardcover

Chernaik, Judith

 
9780451494467: Schumann: The Faces and the Masks
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0451494466 ISBN 13: 9780451494467
Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Drawing on previously unpublished sources, this groundbreaking biography of Robert Schumann sheds new light on the great composer’s life and work. With the rigorous research of a scholar and the eloquent prose of a novelist, Judith Chernaik takes us into Schumann’s nineteenth-century Romantic milieu, where he wore many “masks” that gave voice to each corner of his soul. The son of a book publisher, he infused his pieces with literary ideas. He was passionately original but worshipped the past: Bach and Beethoven, Shake­speare and Byron. He believed in artistic freedom but struggled with constraints of form. His courtship and marriage to the brilliant pianist Clara Wieck—against her father’s wishes—is one of the great musical love stories of all time. Chernaik freshly explores his troubled relations with fellow composers Mendelssohn and Chopin, and the full medi­cal diary—long withheld—from the Endenich asylum where he spent his final years enables her to look anew at the mystery of his early death. By turns tragic and transcendent, Schumann shows how this extraordinary artist turned his tumultuous life into music that speaks directly—and timelessly—to the heart.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Judith Chernaik was born and grew up in Brooklyn. She graduated from Cornell University and received a Ph.D. from Yale University. She has taught at Columbia, Tufts, and Queen Mary College in London. Her books include The Lyrics of Shelley and four novels. She has also written a play, and most recently has published essays on Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin in the British academic journal The Musical Times.

She and her husband, Warren Chernaik, have been living in London for the last forty years, where she founded Poems on the Underground, which under various names, has since spread all over the world.

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1

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
1810-1830
 

EARLY YEARS
Zwickau, 1810-1827

Schumann’s background was middle-class, provincial, unremark­able. The seeds of his development into a great Romantic composer as well as his later crises, emotional and professional, can be traced in the history preserved in the Robert-Schumann-Haus, a beauti­fully maintained museum reconstructed on the site of the original family home in the town of Zwickau, in Saxony.

He was born on the 8th of June, 1810, the youngest of five chil­dren. There were three older brothers and a sister, Emilie, fourteen years older than Robert, who suffered from a severe nervous illness. Robert was petted and adored by his mother, Johanna Christiane, the daughter of Abraham Gottlob Schnabel, the chief surgeon of Zeitz. Johanna was prone to melancholia, and regularly took cures at the famous Bohemian spa of Karlsbad, now Karlovy Vary, fifty-five miles south of Zwickau. She was considered a good singer, with a large repertoire of songs popular at the time.

August Schumann, Robert’s father, was the son of a poor coun­try parson from the small town of Endschutz, near Gera. August burned with literary and intellectual ambition but was forced by the family’s poverty to leave school at fourteen. He longed to study at the University of Leipzig, and managed a few months there as an auditor. His early life was a series of frustrations and compro­mises. He was apprenticed to a local merchant, and later worked as a clerk for a bookseller. He set up his own business to convince Johanna’s father, with whom he lodged, that he would be able to support a wife. Somehow he preserved his literary ambitions. He wrote and published potboilers, romances of knights and monks in the style of gothic novels, and he founded a circulating library. A few years later he moved with his brother to Zwickau and estab­lished a publishing and bookselling firm, the Brothers Schumann. Along with lexicons and commercial handbooks, the firm published inexpensive German translations of the classics and a “Pocket Edi­tion of the most eminent English authors,” including novels by Sir Walter Scott and the poems of Lord Byron. August himself trans­lated Byron’s comic verse tale Beppo and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron’s semi-autobiographical verse romance.

August Schumann had a special relationship with his gifted son. He encouraged Robert’s literary and musical talents, and was determined to ensure that his son would not have to repeat his own history of frustrated ambition. The boy was always a scribbler, writ­ing poetry, stories, and plays; improvising at the piano, composing ambitious musical scores from an early age. As a fourteen-year-old, Robert helped provide material for his father’s publications, includ­ing a Picture Gallery of Famous Men of All Times and Places—perhaps suggesting to Robert that he, too, could one day achieve great things. August had political as well as literary enthusiasms. He sympathized with the ideals of the French Revolution and regarded Napoleon as a liberator until he assumed the imperial crown and embarked on the conquest of Europe. His father’s liberal tastes influenced Rob­ert’s lifelong passion for Byron and his sympathy with the revolu­tions that swept Europe in 1830 and 1848–1849.

August was also a loving and indulgent father. In a letter to his fourteen-year-old son, he writes that he is pleased to learn from Robert’s older brother Eduard that the boy is doing well in his stud­ies; he hopes that he will continue to practice on the fine Streicher piano which his father has recently purchased for him. He appreci­ates Robert’s concern about his sister, Emilie, whose condition is not improving under the latest treatment. He proposes that Robert might consider visiting his father in Karlsbad, rather than travel­ing to Dresden with his teacher, the Zwickau organist Gottfried Kuntsch. He ends with fatherly advice: “Now, Robert dear, live prop­erly, remain cheerful, take care of your health, and either travel with Kuntsch to Dresden or come here. In the second case, I shall await you with heartfelt longing.” On an earlier visit to Karlsbad with his mother, Robert heard the great pianist Ignaz Moscheles perform, an inspiration to the youngster, who treasured the program long into his later life.

Emilie died in 1825, aged twenty-eight, officially from “a ner­vous attack,” according to later accounts by drowning herself or throwing herself from a window, in an access of “quiet madness.” A year after Emilie’s death, August Schumann died suddenly, prob­ably suffering a heart attack, though his death was also attributed to “a long-standing severe nervous illness.” He left his wife, three grown sons, who inherited the publishing business, and young Rob­ert, who at sixteen was put under the care of a guardian, Johann Gottlob Rudel. His father’s will provided a yearly annuity on condi­tion that Robert pursue a three-year course of university study—his father’s unfulfilled ambition. A biography of August, published soon after his death, praised his services as an author and publisher, his selfless devotion to family and friends, and his hope that his tal­ented youngest son might pursue his studies unencumbered by the poverty he himself had experienced as a young man.

These were the first severe shocks in Robert’s life. In an early diary, he laments having lost two dear human beings, citing one, his father, as “the dearest of all, forever.” One would expect the other loss to be his sister, but the phrase he uses, “one who in a certain view might also be lost to me forever,” could plausibly re­fer to his romantic attachment to a Zwickau sweetheart, Nanni Petsch, who had rejected him. On the anniversary of his father’s death, he expressed surprise that he did not feel more distressed. On New Year’s Day of 1829, he records reading the “loving letter” of “my wonderful father”—possibly the letter written from Karls­bad to the fourteen-year-old, quoted above. The early losses Robert experienced affected his reactions to the premature deaths of close family and friends during the next decade. His intimate compan­ion the young composer Ludwig Schunke, “a bright star,” died of consumption at twenty-four; his beloved sister-in-law Rosalie died at twenty-nine; his close friend and patron Henriette Voigt died at thirty. He also lost all three of his brothers: Julius at twenty-eight, Eduard at forty, and Carl at forty-seven. Death was always close, in real life as in literature.

For his father, and later for Robert, Shakespeare was the first Romantic, and Hamlet’s melancholy was its symbol. Madness real and assumed, suicidal urges, the passionate rejection of the hypoc­risy of kings and courtiers—all had great appeal for father and son. Their literary interests were European rather than narrowly German, including the Greek and Roman classics, the works of Dante and Petrarch, as well as the writings of Scott and Byron. Edward Young’s melancholy Night Thoughts was a favorite, as was James Thomson’s The Seasons, in the German translation set to music so memorably by Haydn. While he was still at school, Robert organized a literary circle which met each week to read the plays of Schiller and other works by German writers.
Wide-ranging as his literary interests were, Robert also retained from his protected childhood its small-town provincial character. In Zwickau, people knew their neighbors...

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Verlag
Knopf Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0451494466
ISBN 13 
9780451494467
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
349
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

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