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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 and everything there was to know about their business, their income, their personal trials and scandals. Though he attended the Zwickau grammar school, where he learned French, Greek and Latin, and later had some lessons in English and Italian, Schumann was never at ease in other languages. He reveled in his student holiday travel in northern Italy and Switzerland, but he did not travel extensively in later life, apart from six months in Vienna and a disastrous tour of Russia. His real traveling took place in his mind and his music.
At regular intervals throughout his life, Schumann took stock of his achievements and setbacks. These records, meticulously preserved by the family, are a gift to biographers. They are also revealing in ways the writer could not have anticipated.
One of the earliest of these documents, composed in Robert’s fifteenth year, describes a cheerful, talented child, eagerly absorbing his school lessons, at eight writing poems to his nine-year-old first love, happiest when wandering alone in the countryside and dreaming. He was already placing himself in the tradition of Goethe’s popular novels, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. He was also a gifted mimic, with a keen comic sense. Several themes of his later life are already apparent in this first of several autobiographies, entitled “My Biography, or the Chief Events of my Life.”
I was born in Zwickau on the 8th of June, 1810. Until my third year I was a child like any other; but then, because my mother fell ill with a nervous fever and it was feared she might be contagious, I was sent at first for six weeks to the home of the then Burgomaster Ruppius. The weeks flew by; I loved Frau Ruppius, she was my second mother, in short I remained two and a half years under her truly motherly oversight . . . I still remember well that the night before I was to leave this house, I could not sleep and wept all night long . . . I was a good, handsome child. I learned easily and was at six and a half enrolled in a private school in Freiburg . . . In my seventh year I learned Latin, in my eighth French and Greek, and at nine and a half I entered the fourth class of our lyceum. Already in my eighth year—if one can believe it—I learned to know the art of love: I loved in a truly innocent way the daughter of Superintendent Lorenz, by name Emilie . . . My life then began to be less calm; I was no longer so busy with my school work, although I did not lack talent. What I loved best was to go for walks alone and relieve my heart in nature.
After falling in love with young Emilie, who later married his brother Julius, Robert fell in love with Ida Stölzel, for whom he wrote poems, one of which he set to music. His usual pattern thereafter was to fall in love with at least two girls at the same time. His adolescent passions were for Nanni Petsch and Liddy Hempel, one glimpsed at a window, the other sharing a dance—both inspiring an outpouring of longing in his diary.
New Year’s Day was always an occasion for Schumann to look back over the past year and to look ahead to the next. His diaries include lists of acquaintances, extracts from his extensive reading, his expenses, and philosophical commentary. Even in his earliest diary he expresses doubt about keeping a record of his life. In true Romantic fashion, he wonders if it might be more authentic to live life intensely than to record it in the cold form of a diary. In the end he embraced the highs and lows of his daily experience and also recorded each day’s events, his love life, real and imagined, and his literary and musical projects, some realized, many abandoned. Addicted to the emotional extremes of Romantic fiction, he took note of his own dreams and nightmares and what we would now call panic attacks.
His father would have supported further studies in the arts. But at sixteen, Schumann was subject to the worries of his mother and the guardian appointed to oversee his future. They insisted that he pursue a respectable profession. He agreed to enter the University of Leipzig to study law, hoping to include philosophy and history. It is hard to imagine a less congenial profession for the youth often described as a shy dreamer, lost in his poetic fancies. His brothers were absorbed in running their father’s publishing house in Zwickau and a press in nearby Schneeberg, and they left decisions about Robert’s future to his mother and his guardian. August Schumann’s generous patrimony paid for Robert’s music lessons, his law studies, and his holiday travel. But law it must be, first in Leipzig, and a year later in the romantic city of Heidelberg.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Schumann"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Judith Chernaik.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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