(This review was first published in Times Higher Education, 11 October 2012 (2071), p.50.)
Martin Geck has written a
good few composer biographies: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. In his most
recent, first published in German in 2010, Geck turns his attention to Robert
Schumann.
The author draws out some
important biographical themes, not least the extent to which, from an early
age, Schumann’s twin literary and musical careers informed one another. In the
most impressive section, Schumann’s role as editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, in its heyday one of the most
influential music periodicals of all time, is brought to vividly Romantic life.
Schumann’s ‘friends’, fiery Florestan and introverted Eusebius, and the Zeitschrift’s ‘League of David’,
dedicated to the defeat of the ‘Philistines’, played games of identity with
readers not unlike those of German Romantic poets such as Schumann’s beloved
Jean Paul.
The composer’s marriage is
treated more sensibly than often, though Clara Schumann is treated with kid
gloves. No mention is made of the Schumanns’ rank ingratitude towards Liszt;
nor does Geck deal critically with Clara’s music – perhaps because, sadly, it
is not intrinsically very interesting. The final years of Schumann’s life and
career receive surprisingly short shrift. It is almost as if Geck stands
reluctant to tell the harrowing tale of psychosis and the Endenich asylum.
Moreover, the sheer strangeness of Schumann’s highly disturbing late works goes
unexplored.
In general, a deeper
understanding of Schumann remains elusive. One particular problem lies in the
lack of any sense of place. We learn some facts about, for instance, Schumann’s
time as a student in Leipzig; yet without a keener sense of what Leipzig, or
indeed Saxony, c.1830, was like, they
amount to little more than the sum of their parts. An historian of
nineteenth-century Germany, alert to the differences between, say, Saxony and
Prussia, might have had something revealing to say here. Alan Walker’s
compelling Liszt biography presents a model too little followed in writing on
composers’ lives.
Discussion of Schumann’s
music – which is surely why we are most interested in him – is mixed in
quality. Following a striking, if brief, discussion of the piano piece, Papillons, and citation of Schumann’s
contention that he had learned more about counterpoint from Jean Paul than
anyone else, comes the bizarre claim that the Marseillaise quotation in Faschingsschwank
aus Wien is ‘almost unrecognisable’. I recall it leaping out from the page
at me in a childhood piano lesson – and certainly not on account of any
particular acuity. Analysis and even description tend to be approached and
veered away from, an odd state of affairs for a treatment of ‘life and work’.
Attempts at theoretical engagement, for instance, citation of Roland Barthes,
seem somewhat forced and sit oddly with a generally belletrist approach. There
is nothing wrong with the latter; sadly, however, Geck’s lettres prove more often grises
than belles.
Historical situation of
Schumann amongst his peers is dubious, largely consisting in his relative
elevation through swiping at others. Quite why an irrelevant and, in the worst
sense, merely subjective contrast with Schoenberg, whose music ‘is less popular
than Schumann’s ... [because] it is more difficult to understand,’ is thought
necessary but four pages in, I cannot imagine. Inevitably, though no less
wearisomely, there comes a host of digs at Wagner. Even Beethoven has his
middle-period works portrayed as one-dimensional when compared with Schumann’s
music. As for Geck’s wildly unhistorical claims that ‘until Beethoven’s day
composition was primarily a craft that required an adherence to traditional
rules,’ and that ‘Mendelssohn and Schumann were the first musicians,’ not even
the first composers, ‘to receive a proper formal education,’ hands must be
thrown up in the air.
