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Master Musicians Series
Schumann: 2nd Edition
Robert Schumann is one of the most intriguing-and enigmatic-composers of the nineteenth century. Extraordinarily gifted in both music and literature, many of his compositions were inspired by poetry and novels. For much of his life he was better known as a music critic than as a composer. But whether writing as critic or composer, what he produced was created by him as a reflection of his often turbulent life. Best known was the tempestuous courtship of his future wife, the pianist Clara Wieck. Though marriage and family life seemed to provide a sense of constancy, he increasingly experienced periods of depression and instability. Mounting criticism of his performance as music director at Dusseldorf led to his attempted suicide in 1854. Schumann was voluntarily committed to an insane asylum near Bonn where, despite indications of improvement and dissatisfaction with his treatment, he spent the final two years of his life. Drawing on original research and newly published letters and journals from the time, author Eric Frederick Jensen presents a balanced portrait of the composer with both scholarly authority and engaging clarity. Biographical chapters alternate with discussion of Schumann's piano, chamber, choral, symphonic, and operatic works, demonstrating how the circumstances of his life helped shape the music he wrote. Chronicling the romance of Robert and Clara, Jensen offers a nuanced look at the evolution of their relationship, one that changed dramatically after marriage. He also follows Schumann's creative musical criticism, which championed the burgeoning careers of Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms and challenged the musical tastes of Europe.
536 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 14, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 20, 2014
I very much enjoyed reading this biography. I actually got hold of it to use it for an assignment, but because I love Schumann so much I decided I'd read all of it.
The book is divided into chapters, which correspond to the main chapters of Schumann's life, organised into chronological order. It also contains chapters about Schumann's compositions, also divided into time periods. This made Schumann's life easy to follow and straight-forward to read. This organisation also showed the development of Schumann as a person (his personality and psychology), as well as his development as a composer (from piano music, to song, to larger-scale works such as symphonies).
This book was not stating just facts about Schumann's life, but most of the time attempted to give a detailed context of Schumann's life. Therefore we find quotes from Schumann's friends, wife, publishers - anyone who knew him and of him. Jensen also made the effort of describing Schumann's personality so it did feel like I was getting to know the real Schumann. The question is - how accurate was Jensen's description? That I will never find out I guess ...
I recommend listening to the compositions written about in the book as I often found it hard to read the composition chapters since I could not hear what the writer was going on about.
Overall I loved reading this book and getting to know Schumann since I'm a huge fan, and I hope after reading it you'll be one too!
The book is divided into chapters, which correspond to the main chapters of Schumann's life, organised into chronological order. It also contains chapters about Schumann's compositions, also divided into time periods. This made Schumann's life easy to follow and straight-forward to read. This organisation also showed the development of Schumann as a person (his personality and psychology), as well as his development as a composer (from piano music, to song, to larger-scale works such as symphonies).
This book was not stating just facts about Schumann's life, but most of the time attempted to give a detailed context of Schumann's life. Therefore we find quotes from Schumann's friends, wife, publishers - anyone who knew him and of him. Jensen also made the effort of describing Schumann's personality so it did feel like I was getting to know the real Schumann. The question is - how accurate was Jensen's description? That I will never find out I guess ...
I recommend listening to the compositions written about in the book as I often found it hard to read the composition chapters since I could not hear what the writer was going on about.
Overall I loved reading this book and getting to know Schumann since I'm a huge fan, and I hope after reading it you'll be one too!
December 6, 2021
I love Schumann songs and I sing them. But I really knew only the sketch of Schumann's life story -- how he and Clara had to sue her father so that they could marry, how Schumann threw himself in the river in Duesseldorf, how Brahms was attached to both Schumann and Clara, how Schumann died in an asylum.
Mr. Jensen's book fills in the sketch straightforwardly with attention to scholarship and recently available papers of Schumann himself. There is no judgmentalism in this book, but fair attention to situations that we will never know about directly.
There are also chapters on Schumann's music which, as Mr. Jensen writes in the introduction, can be skipped without losing the continuity of the biography. I confess that I skipped through those chapter because they are really over my head. And Mr. Jensen is right: The story's train continues.
I learned a great deal. There were Schumann's conflicts with his family and a young man's waywardness over what path to follow -- law (family preference), literature or music. I learned that Schumann began his formal musical education quite late and that he was always a tireless writer and a founding editor of what became one of Europe's leading musical journals. He was well known, but a very bad conductor (!). He was also musically controversial and regarded as either a writer of cacophony or a forerunner of a new music.
Of course, two areas of Schumann's life that hold great interest, almost a gossip's interest, are his relationship with Clara Weicke, his wife, and his madness. Clara was a lauded pianist as a young woman even before she fell in love with Schumann. The combination of her genius with 19th century "wife-hood" is at least part of what drove her father's nasty opposition to her and Schumann. But although she and Schumann had eight children together (!) and Clara had to give time to motherhood, she never lost her virtuosity. Far from being a woman genius locked away in the stifling world of domesticity, she, in Schumann's company, eventually made concert tours, including to Russia. After Schumann entered the asylum in 1854(?), Clara continued her tours. There is even a hint that the freedom to engage in her career was one of the reasons that she did not visit Schumann in the asylum until he was on his deathbed.
As to Schumann's madness, one cannot diagnose from such a distance in time. The notes of Schumann's physician at the asylum are unhelpful. They show the physician to have been remarkably cold and seemingly incapable of compassion or warmth. Perhaps he was so devoted to his intellect that he could be cruel. One of the products of his intellect was a theory that all madness had its origin in the physical body. Thus, he did autopsies on deceased patients. The autopsy of Schumann is important in that it shows no physical manifestations of tertiary syphilis, a disease that some see, speculatively, as a possible cause of Schumann's mental state.
Schumann seems never to have been a happy man, though he was an enthusiastic young man. He had bouts of melancholia and he suffered at least two "nervous breakdowns." But he was also an extraordinarily loving father and husband. Mr. Jensen says, quite guardedly, that perhaps Schumann suffered from deep depression and a bi-polar condition. But I personally do not see in the biography any description of a "manic" behavior unless one wants to say that Schumann's musical productivity was manic -- something I would shy away from, considering the productivity of Bach, Haydn and Mozart!
We can hardly read the minds of persons subject in the present day to what are called mood or affective disorders. So, how can we know about Schumann. It is enough, I think, that Mr. Jensen has pretty much ruled out syphilis.
In sum, this was a nice read and very interesting about a man for whom I have feelings of sympathy.
Mr. Jensen's book fills in the sketch straightforwardly with attention to scholarship and recently available papers of Schumann himself. There is no judgmentalism in this book, but fair attention to situations that we will never know about directly.
There are also chapters on Schumann's music which, as Mr. Jensen writes in the introduction, can be skipped without losing the continuity of the biography. I confess that I skipped through those chapter because they are really over my head. And Mr. Jensen is right: The story's train continues.
I learned a great deal. There were Schumann's conflicts with his family and a young man's waywardness over what path to follow -- law (family preference), literature or music. I learned that Schumann began his formal musical education quite late and that he was always a tireless writer and a founding editor of what became one of Europe's leading musical journals. He was well known, but a very bad conductor (!). He was also musically controversial and regarded as either a writer of cacophony or a forerunner of a new music.
Of course, two areas of Schumann's life that hold great interest, almost a gossip's interest, are his relationship with Clara Weicke, his wife, and his madness. Clara was a lauded pianist as a young woman even before she fell in love with Schumann. The combination of her genius with 19th century "wife-hood" is at least part of what drove her father's nasty opposition to her and Schumann. But although she and Schumann had eight children together (!) and Clara had to give time to motherhood, she never lost her virtuosity. Far from being a woman genius locked away in the stifling world of domesticity, she, in Schumann's company, eventually made concert tours, including to Russia. After Schumann entered the asylum in 1854(?), Clara continued her tours. There is even a hint that the freedom to engage in her career was one of the reasons that she did not visit Schumann in the asylum until he was on his deathbed.
As to Schumann's madness, one cannot diagnose from such a distance in time. The notes of Schumann's physician at the asylum are unhelpful. They show the physician to have been remarkably cold and seemingly incapable of compassion or warmth. Perhaps he was so devoted to his intellect that he could be cruel. One of the products of his intellect was a theory that all madness had its origin in the physical body. Thus, he did autopsies on deceased patients. The autopsy of Schumann is important in that it shows no physical manifestations of tertiary syphilis, a disease that some see, speculatively, as a possible cause of Schumann's mental state.
Schumann seems never to have been a happy man, though he was an enthusiastic young man. He had bouts of melancholia and he suffered at least two "nervous breakdowns." But he was also an extraordinarily loving father and husband. Mr. Jensen says, quite guardedly, that perhaps Schumann suffered from deep depression and a bi-polar condition. But I personally do not see in the biography any description of a "manic" behavior unless one wants to say that Schumann's musical productivity was manic -- something I would shy away from, considering the productivity of Bach, Haydn and Mozart!
We can hardly read the minds of persons subject in the present day to what are called mood or affective disorders. So, how can we know about Schumann. It is enough, I think, that Mr. Jensen has pretty much ruled out syphilis.
In sum, this was a nice read and very interesting about a man for whom I have feelings of sympathy.
March 16, 2018
This biography of the composer was nicely balanced between covering the events of Schumann's life and discussing his music. I found the life story sensitively and perceptively told and especially appreciated Jensen's insights into Schumann's history of mental illness and his final decline and death. He really shows what is interesting about Schumann and his music. I just wish he had done better by Clara; most of the time Jensen pretty much ignores her, and when he does include her, he is more often than not critical of her character or actions. His discussion of Schumann's music sits at the sweet spot between descriptive and technical and did what all good writing about music should do: made me want to listen to the works covered. Jensen's prose is also incredibly readable and engaging, making this a very enjoyable book.
May 2, 2018
Both informative and easy to read, this biography condenses a good part of the abundant and diverse modern Schumann scholarship. Jensen takes the reader in a voyage alongside the master trough the most important events of his life and, at the same time, uses them as the context in which his more beloved masterpieces were produced, keeping the balance between Schumann the pianist, the composer, writer and passionate lover; as well as the tyrannical husband. Is a must read for any music student or Schumann fan.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews