The Love Affairs of Great Musicians Volume II Part 13

The lawsuit dragged on and on. Wieck exhausted all the devices of postponement in which the law is so fertile. Schumann found himself the victim of a pamphlet of direct a.s.sault and downright libel, but all these things were only obstacles to exercise fidelity. The lovers felt that no power on earth could cut them apart. They began to dream of their marriage as more certain than the dawn. Schumann writes to Clara--"_Mein Herzensbrautmadchen_"--that he wishes her to study and prepare for his exclusive hearing a whole concert of music, the bride's concert. She responds that he too must prepare for her music of his own, for a bridegroom's concert. He writes and begs her to compose some music and dedicate it to him; he implores her not to ignore her genius.

She writes that she cannot find inspiration; that he is the family's genius for original work. Always they mingled music with love.

The composer Hiller gave a notable dinner to Liszt, who, after toasting Mendelssohn, toasted Schumann, "and spoke of me in such beautiful French and such tender words, that I turned blood-red." January 31, 1840, Schumann had taken up his plan to gain himself a doctor's degree to match Clara's t.i.tles. He had asked a friend to appeal to the University of Jena to give him an honorary degree, or set him an examination to pa.s.s; for his qualifications he mentioned modestly:

"My sphere of action as editor on a high-cla.s.s paper, which has now existed for seven years; my position as composer and the fact of my having really worked hard, both as editor and musician."

He began an essay on Shakespeare's relation to music, but without waiting for this the University of Jena granted him his doctorate on February 24, 1840, a bit of speed which must have been marvellously refreshing to this poor victim of so much delay.

The very day the degree was granted, he had decided to take legal steps for libel against the attack of Wieck's, which had been printed in pamphlet form and distributed. Toward Wieck he is still pitiful, "The wretched man is torturing himself; let it be his punishment." The libel suit was not prosecuted and his anger vanished in the rapture of being made a doctor of philosophy in flattering terms. As he confesses:

"Of course the first I did was to send a copy to the north for my betrothed; who is exactly like a child and will dance at being engaged to a doctor."

In May he went to Berlin and visited Clara's mother for a fortnight; here he had two weeks' bliss listening to Mendelssohn's singing to Clara's accompaniment some of the manifold songs that were suddenly beginning to bubble up from Schumann's heart. It was to his happiness that he credited this lyric outburst, for he had hitherto written only instrumental music.

"While I was composing them I was quite lost in thoughts of you. If I were not engaged to such a girl, I could not write such music."

Songs came with a rush from his soul, and he exclaims:

"I have been composing so much that it really seems quite uncanny at times. I cannot help it, and should like to sing myself to death like a nightingale."

He begged Clara to come to him and drag him away from his music. Yet all he wished was to be "where I can have a piano and be near you."

On July 4, 1840, he made her a present of a grand piano as a surprise, taking her out for a long walk until the piano could be placed in her rooms and hers taken to his.

It will not be possible to tell here in detail the story of the process of law, or its many postponements or disappointments. Long ago they had set their hearts upon marrying on Easter Day, 1840; they had determined not to permit their father to drive them past this date. But they went meekly enough under the yoke of the law and pa.s.sed many a month until it seemed to the litigants that the condition of waiting for a decision was to be their permanent manner of life. But suddenly, as Litzmann says, "there stood Happiness, long besought, on the stoop, and knocked with tender fingers on the door."

On the 7th of July, 1840, Clara was told the good news that the father had withdrawn the evidence upon which he based his opposition. The case was not ended, but the lovers immediately began to hunt for a place to live. On the sixteenth of July they found a little, but cosy, lodging on the Insel Stra.s.se. Grief had not yet finally done with them, however, for Clara must write in her journal:

"I have not for my wedding what the simplest girl in town has, a trousseau."

On the 1st of August the case reached a stage where the father had but ten days more to make his final appeal. Worn out and lacking in further weapons of any kind, he let the occasion pa.s.s, and rested on the decision of the court. Clara went for one last concert tour as Clara Wieck.

On the 12th of August, the super-deliberate court handed down its awesome verdict. It was a verdict of reward for the lovers. Since Wieck had withdrawn his evidence, the verdict was strongly worded in favour of the lovers. Schumann wrote Clara, "On this day, Clara, three years ago, I proposed for your hand."

There was no delay in crying the banns, and the lovers went about as in a dream of rapture.

On September the 12th, between ten and eleven o'clock of a Sat.u.r.day, at Schoenefeld, a village near Leipzig, they were married by an old school friend of Schumann's. On the 13th, a Sunday, and Clara's birthday--her twenty-first--she was the wife of the man who had for four years made her possession his chief ambition, and who had loved her better than he knew, long years before that.

Thus the lovers gained only one day by their lawsuit, for Clara was now of age. But who could estimate the value of the struggle in strengthening and deepening their love for each other and their worthiness for each other? It is the struggle for existence and the battle with resistance that bring about the evolution of strength in the physical world, and in the mental. Can we not say the same of the sentimental?

Would it not be a great pity if there were never such a gymnasium as parental resistance for lovers to exercise their hearts in? Shall we not, then, thank old Wieck for his fine lessons in psychical culture? His daughter Marie, by the way, Clara's half-sister, has only this year (1903) published a defence of the old man in answer to the first volume of Litzmann's new biography.

On Clara's marriage-day she wrote in her diary a little triumph song of joy. The wedding had been very simple and--

"There was a little dancing. Though no hilarity reigned, still in every face there was an inner content; it was a beautiful day, and the sun himself, who had been hidden for many days, poured his mild beams upon us in the morning as we went to the wedding, as if he would bless our union. There was nothing disturbing on this day, and so let it be inscribed in this book as the most beautiful and the most important day of my life. A period in my existence has now closed. I have endured very many sorrows in my young years, but also many joys which I shall never forget. Now begins a new life, a beautiful life, that life which one loves more than anything, even than self; but heavy responsibilities also rest upon me, and Heaven grant me strength to fulfil them truly and as a good wife. Heaven has always stood by me and will not cease now. I have always had a great belief in G.o.d, and shall always keep it."

As for the old Wieck, his bitterness must have been almost suicidal. He did not forgive his daughter even after the birth of her first child, on September 1, 1841, the year also of Schumann's first symphony. It was only after a second child was born, in April, 1843, that Schumann could write to a friend:

"There has been a reconciliation between Clara and old Wieck, which I am glad of for Clara's sake. He has been trying to make it up with me too, but the man can have no feelings or he could not attempt such a thing. So you can see the sky is clearing. I am glad for Clara's sake."

But the cherishing of such a grudge even with such foundation was not like Schumann, and a year later, from Petersburg, where he had accompanied Clara on a triumphal tour and where they had the most cordial recognition from the Czar and Czarina, he addressed old Wieck as "Dear Father," and described to him with contagious pride the immense success of his wife. A little later he reminded him that "It is the tenth birthday Of our _Zeitschrift_, I dare say you remember." And yet again he writes to him as "Dear Papa," adding "best love to your wife and children, till we all meet again happily." And so ended the feud between the two men.

The romance of Robert and Clara did not end at the little village church, but rather they seemed to issue thence into a very Eden of love and art commingled. The gush of song from his heart continued, he dedicated to her his "Myrthen" and collaborated with her in the twelve songs called "Love's Springtime." As Spitta, his biographer, writes:

"As far as anything human can be imagined, the marriage was perfectly happy. Besides their genius both husband and wife had simple domestic tastes and were strong enough to bear the admiration of the world, without becoming egotistical. They lived for one another and for their children. He created and wrote for his wife, and in accordance with their temperament; while she looked upon it as her highest privilege to give to the world the most perfect interpretation of his works, or at least to stand as mediatrix between him and his audience, and to ward off all disturbing or injurious impressions from his sensitive soul, which day by day became more irritable. Now that he found perfect contentment in his domestic relations, he withdrew from his intercourse with others and devoted himself exclusively to his family and work. The deep joy of his married life, produced the direct result of a mighty advance in his artistic progress. Schumann's most beautiful works in the larger forms date almost entirely from the years 1841-5."

He went with her on many of her tours. They even planned an American trip. Once they were received with a public banquet; these two whom Reissman calls "the marvellous couple." In his letters there are always loving allusions to "my Clara," and though he could not himself play because of his lame finger, she was to him his "right hand." Once in referring to a prospective concert he even wrote, "We shall play"

such and such numbers.

In 1853 he and Clara went to the Netherlands, where he found his music well known and himself highly honoured, though they say that the King of Holland, after praising Clara's playing, turned to Robert and said: "Are you also musical?" But then one does not expect much from a king.

The musicians knew Schumann's work, and he rejoiced at finding friends of his art in a far-away country. "But," says Reissman, "this was destined to be his last happiness."

For the dread affliction which throws a spell of horror across his life and his wife's devotion, did not long delay in seizing upon him after his marriage. As early as 1833, the ferocious onslaughts of melancholia had affected him at long intervals. In 1845, on the doctor's advice, he moved to Dresden. His trouble seems to have been "an abnormal formation of irregular ma.s.ses of bone in the brain." He was afraid to live above the ground floor, or to go high in any building, lest he throw himself from the window in a sudden attack. He was subject to moods of long, and one might almost say violent, silence. In 1845 he described it as "a mysterious complaint which, when the doctor tries to take hold of it, disappears. I dare say better times are coming, and when I look upon my wife and children, I have joy enough."

Later he wrote to Mendelssohn, that he preferred staying at home, even when his wife went out.

"Wherever there is fun and enjoyment, I must still keep out of the way; the only thing to be done is hope ... hope ... and I will!"

His wife was still "a gift from above," and his allusions to her were affectionate to the utmost. In 1846, and again in the summer of 1847, he suffered a violent melancholia. In these periods he experienced an inability to remember his own music long enough to write it down. He saw but few friends, among them the charming widow of Von Weber, Ferdinand Hiller, Mendelssohn, Joachim, and a few others. Wagner wrote some articles for Schumann's journal and was highly thought of at first, but Schumann soon lost sympathy with him; the final sign of the break-up of his wonderful appreciation of other men's music.

His life was more and more his home, and that more and more a voluntary prison. In 1853 he presented his wife on her birthday with a grand piano, and several new compositions. He took great delight in his family, and could even compose amid the hilarity and noise of his children. Concerning children he had written in 1845 to Mendelssohn, whose wife had presented him with a second child, "We are looking forward to a similar event, and I always tell my wife, 'one cannot have enough.' It is the greatest blessing we have on earth."

Clara bore him eight children, and at her concerts there was usually a nurse with a babe in arms waiting for her in the wings. Schumann wrote three sonatas for his three daughters, and other compositions for them.

His famous "Kinderscenen" were, however, composed before his marriage.

It was in 1853 that his old enthusiasm for new composers broke forth in his ardent welcome to Brahms (who was then twenty years old), who became a devoted friend and was of much comfort to Frau Schumann after Schumann's death. This was not far off, but before life went, he must suffer a death in life.

Worst of all in that final disintegration of his great soul was the interest he took in the atrocious frauds of spiritualism. He was even duped into believing in the cheap swindle of table-tipping. The bliss of Robert Browning's home was broken up in this same form, of all-encompa.s.sing credulity, only it was Mrs. Browning who was the spiritualist in this case and resisted Browning's sanity in the matter.

Schumann fancied that he heard spirit voices rebuking and praising him, and he rose once in the night to write down a theme given him by the ghosts of Schubert and Mendelssohn, on which he afterward wrote variations which were never finished and were the last pathetic exercise of his magnificent mind.

He was also distracted by hearing one eternal note ringing in his ears--the same horror that drove the composer Smetana mad, after he had embodied the nightmare in one of his compositions. Clara herself in later life was long distressed by hearing a continual pattern of "sequences" in her head, and Bizet's early death was a release from two notes that dinned his ears interminably.

Schumann's eccentricities became a proverb. Alice Mangold Diehl tells of meeting Robert and Clara, and finding him peevish and her a model of meekness and patience. Poor Schumann realised his failings and his own danger, and often suggested retirement to an asylum. But the idea was too ghastly to endure.

On February 27, 1854, after an especial attack of the bewilderment and helpless terror that thrilled him, he stole away un.o.bserved, and leaped from a bridge into the Rhine. He was saved by boatmen and taken home.

He recovered, but it was now thought best that he should be placed under restraint, and he pa.s.sed his last two years in a private asylum, near Bonn. Periods of complete sanity, when he received his friends and wrote to them, alternated with periods of absolute despair. Under the weight of his affliction, his soul, like Giles Corey's body in the Salem witchcraft times, was gradually crushed to death, and at the age of forty-six he died. Clara, who had been away on a concert tour to earn much-needed funds, hastened back from London just in time to give him her own arms as his resting-place in his last agony.

After his funeral she and her children went to Berlin to live with her mother. She found it necessary to travel as a performer and to teach until 1882, when her health forbade her touring longer.

She had shown herself a woman worth fighting for, even as Schumann fought for her, and she had given him not only the greatest ambition and the greatest solace his life had known, but she had been also the perfect helpmeet to his art.

Schumann's music was not an easy music for the world to learn, and it is to Clara Wieck's eternal honour, that she not only inspired Schumann to write this music, and gave him her support under the long discouragement of its neglect and the temptations to be untrue to his best ideals; but that she travelled through Europe and promulgated his art, until with her own power of intellect and persuasion she had coaxed and compelled the world to understand its right value, and his great messages.

She never married again, but devoted her long widowhood to his memory personally as well as artistically. She edited his works and published his letters in 1885, with a preface, saying that her desire was to make him known for himself as well as he was loved and honoured in his artistic importance. As she had written in 1871, "the purity of his life, his n.o.ble aspirations, the excellence of his heart, can never be fully known except through the communication of his family and friends."

In return for her devotion he never made genius an excuse for infidelity or selfishness. It seems actually and beautifully true, as Reissman says, that "Schumann's devotions were as chaste and devout as those of the soul of a pure woman."

Such a love, such a courtship, and such a wedlock as that of Robert and Clara Schumann enn.o.ble not only the art and history of music, but those as well of humanity.