CHOPIN and Schumann, whose bicentenaries the classical music world celebrates this year, have long been linked as pioneers of Romanticism, in part because of the shared year of their births. Yet they were quite different creative artists who had little personal contact and moved mostly in separate circles.
Robert Owen Lehman Collection
A page from one of the Morgan Library & Museum’s manuscripts by Chopin.
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Frederick Francois Chopin.
Chopin was a natural musician with such precocious talents as a pianist and improviser that he considered himself essentially self-taught. Schumann was a bookish young man raised in a literary household where music was a rewarding amateur endeavor. Initially drawn to literature as much as music, he likened musical composition to a poetic activity.
But however much they differed, these masters will be celebrated together this year, notably in three recitals by the pianist Emanuel Ax at Carnegie Hall this winter. The first program, with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma on Friday evening, will feature a new work for cello and piano by Peter Lieberson, “Celebrating Schumann.” In addition, on Feb. 3 the pianist Garrick Ohlsson will present the first of two diverse programs of Chopin’s works at Alice Tully Hall. Much more is to come.
To understand the contrasting backgrounds from which Chopin and Schumann emerged, consider what each was up to around the time
of his 20th birthday. On graduating from music school, Chopin secured two important concerts in Vienna. At one he played his Variations for Piano and Orchestra on “Là ci darem” from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Writing home about his success, he said that “everyone clapped so loudly after each variation that I had difficulty hearing the orchestral tutti.”
Back in Warsaw a few months later he played his new F minor Piano Concerto before an enraptured audience. From all reports he was an astonishing pianist. Yet sickly, retiring and prone to mood swings, Chopin was a reluctant concert artist who considered publicity an invasion of his privacy.
Schumann at 20, though aching to be a musician, was studying law in Leipzig and miserable about it. His father, a writer who made a good living translating Byron and Walter Scott into German, had died in 1826. His will stipulated that Robert would have to complete three years of university training to receive his inheritance. Though indifferent about his law lectures, Schumann was passionate about the piano lessons he was taking with the renowned teacher Friedrich Wieck. Still, he was plagued with insecurity. In a diary entry he assessed his talents in poetry and in music as “at the same level.”
You have to feel sorry for the young Schumann, who underestimated his originality and skill as a composer even at this fledgling stage. His unbridled musical imagination would soon pour out in the piano works of the early 1830s, rhapsodic, wildly inventive suites of short and even fragmentary pieces. The whimsical “Papillons” (“Butterflies”) were elegantly described by the Schumann scholar John Daverio as “less a dense web than a gossamer tissue of premonitions and recollections.” The brilliant “Carnaval” is like a portrait gallery of Schumann’s friends (real and imagined), love interests, musical heroes (including Chopin) and adversaries.
Yet Schumann was in awe of Bach, studied “The Well-Tempered Clavier” almost daily and wrote fugues and canons all his life. Even in his most fantastical works, Schumann’s command of counterpoint and grasp of adventurous chromatic harmony lend texture, density and substance to the music.
Like Schumann, Chopin was a lifelong devotee of Bach who brought subtle polyphonic complexities to his works, even to waltzes and mazurkas that dance on the surface. All aspiring pianists at the time were compelled to write concertos as showcases for their own gifts. Chopin was never much interested in writing for the orchestra. Still, in his first effort, at 17, those Variations on “La ci darem,” he handled orchestration ably enough.
But what makes the music stand out is the way Chopin fills the virtuosic piano passagework with intricate inner voices and contrapuntal writing. After examining a published edition of the variations in 1831, Schumann, who would become a major critic and editor of a music journal, wrote an influential review hailing Chopin with the words “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius.”
I recently examined the manuscript of the early variations and other Chopin works at the Morgan Library & Museum. It was fascinating to see the mix of fastidious and freewheeling penmanship in the variations. On the last page of the bound volume, among random musical sketches, there is a doodle, a drawing of a bewigged man in a coat with epaulets next to a monument with a missing statue. Surely this is Chopin’s impish caricature of Mozart.
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Robert Schumann
For me it is revealing to view these two masters through the prism of Beethoven. By the time Chopin and Schumann came of age as young musicians, Beethoven, who died in 1827, loomed as an intimidating giant. Every subsequent composer had to come to terms with Beethoven, who took the symphony, the sonata and the string quartet into new realms. The architectural grandeur and sheer substance of Beethoven’s works held most of the new generation in thrall. Schumann embraced the challenge of Beethoven. Chopin could not be bothered.
Bach and Mozart were Chopin’s gods, though he also loved the bel canto opera composers of his day, especially Bellini. The symphonic imperative, the whole Beethoven thing, meant nothing to him. Composing nocturnes, mazurkas, waltzes, ballades and other novel works for the piano was what he did. He was not even that interested in the music of his contemporaries, though he was friendly with Berlioz, Liszt, Mendelssohn and others.
The most intriguing description of Chopin’s creative process came from the French novelist George Sand, who had a nine-year love affair with him. Sand was six years Chopin’s senior, and there was an oddly maternal element to her love. “My third child,” she sometimes called him. But no one knew Chopin better.
When he composed, according to Sand, ideas poured from him, almost as if he were improvising. Then came an agonizing process of working out the ideas amid torment, anger and weeping. There would be countless changes until, by the end, Chopin arrived back at something close to the initial inspiration.
Chopin wrote a handful of chamber works and some beguiling songs. But mostly he wrote his idiomatic piano pieces. Even his Second and Third Piano Sonatas, though staples of the repertory, are unconventional. The Second Sonata is known for its severely beautiful funeral march. But the most astounding movement is the breathless finale, which unfolds as a softly rustling, dissonance-saturated, weirdly twisting single line in parallel octaves.
Schumann could never quite shake off Beethoven. In 1832, at 22, he struggled to write a Symphony in G minor inspired by Beethoven’s “Eroica,” and finished only the first movement. It drew a tepid response at an otherwise sensational concert in Zwickau that featured the 13-year-old pianist and composer Clara Wieck, Friedrich’s daughter, who would eight years later become Schumann’s wife. In 1838, inspired by Beethoven’s Opus 131 String Quartet, Schumann tried to write a quartet of his own, which came to naught. Instead he completed his “Kinderscenen” (“Scenes From Childhood”) for piano, a tender, playful yet emotionally piercing suite still beloved by pianists.
Schumann did write many enduring chamber works and four symphonies that have found places in the repertory. But when I think of him feeling compelled to advance the Germanic cause by writing symphonies and oratorios, I wish he had been liberated enough to have given us more works like “Kreisleriana,” a set of eight impetuous piano pieces inspired by a character from the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann and dedicated to Chopin. Rich with intricate contrapuntal writing and exploratory harmonic passages, “Kreisleriana,” in its own episodic way, can seem as monumental as any symphony.
It is amazing that Chopin’s enormous reputation as a pianist was based only on some 30 formal concerts that he gave during his lifetime. He was just too physically weak for concert life. From all reports his sound at the piano, with minute gradations of softness, was exquisite but small. He was most comfortable playing at salons and private homes.
He made his living from his published works and from teaching piano, for which he commanded exorbitant fees. He pushed the boundaries of what was possible technically by composing 24 formidable études, published in two books, which he began when he was 20. Though the études explore specific areas of technique, they are musically riveting works. And if you can play the Chopin études, you can play anything written for the piano.
By 1847 Chopin’s relationship with Sand was over. He lived another two years, dying from tuberculosis in Paris at 39.
Schumann’s desire to combine the arts of poetry and music achieved a blissful synthesis when he turned to song in 1840, a burst of creativity that surrounded his marriage to Clara. Having come of age, Clara could defy her father, who went to court to try to prevent the marriage of his brilliant daughter to the dreamy Schumann, who — he charged, with good reason — was prone to drunkenness. Clara, who gave birth to eight children, also became one of the most celebrated pianists in Europe.
The marriage was tragically affected by Schumann’s lifelong bouts of depression and mental instability. Whether his troubles, which in later years included delusions, hearing voices and fits of sobbing, were a psychotic disorder or resulted from syphilis has long been debated. In 1854, in a state of panic and worried that he might hurt Clara, Schumann left their home in Düsseldorf early one morning and leapt off a bridge into the Rhine. Rescued by fisherman, he was sent to an institution outside Bonn, where he died two years later. Clara was not allowed to see him until two days before his death.
I find it touching that on good days during this period in the asylum, Schumann was allowed to walk into Bonn, where he made a point of visiting the monument to Beethoven.
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