Robert Schumann: A Fan Turns 200

Today is Robert Schumann’s 200th birthday. Schumann is my personal desert-island Romantic composer, if I had to pick just one. Though it would be sad to give up the rest, I can’t imagine life without Schumann. But if you have the impression that, so far, Schumann has been having his 2010 bicentennial thunder stolen by Frederic Chopin, you’re right. And even if things pick up for the summer and fall (the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for example, is programming all four Schumann symphonies next season), I can’t imagine that Schumann’s music will suddenly be everywhere, like during a Mozart anniversary year, or a Handel year—or a Chopin one. Chopin is polite; Schumann is—well, not rude, but a little too enthusiastic for polite company.

He was a pianist, then a composer, a conductor, a writer, a proselytizer, but, first and foremost, Schumann was a fan—possibly the first notable example of the type. Writing in Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a journal he co-founded, he was effusive and voluble, rarely qualifying an opinion with caution or hindsight, acting out his impressions in dialogues and counterpoints. (Reviewing a set of etudes by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Schumann’s two literary stand-ins, Eusebius and Florestan, sharply disagree—Schumann arguing with himself—until another fictional avatar comes in at the end and scold them both for being wrong.) He paid homage at the graves of Beethoven and Schubert; he extolled Chopin and Mendelssohn; he despaired at audiences’ shallow taste for virtuosity, yet lauded Liszt, the supreme virtuoso, as a force of nature. He was, in short, preternaturally susceptible to music.

It carried over into his compositions, the sensitivity rebounding back out towards the listener. Schumann’s works are, at their most characteristic, unapologetically fanciful and emotionally naked to a nearly unparalleled degree. His music is simultaneously exotic and intimate. He is the Brian Wilson of Romanticism, seeming both too creative and too naïve for comfort. And yet the awkwardness reveals itself as sheer magic.

My favorite Schumann moment comes in the slow movement of his second, G-minor Piano Sonata. It starts off in a gently piquant, slowly tolling C major; the second theme is more chromatic, but rounds off its first paragraph back to C. In the second paragraph, though, the modulations veer off into handfuls of flats—until seven bars of stuck-record figuration, over tolling A-flats in the bass, set up a cadence in D-flat major.

A composer more concerned with advertising his own competence would have engineered a clever modulation back into C major. Here’s what Schumann does instead:

He does nothing at all. He starts into his first theme again, in C major, with no modulation, as if nothing has happened. And for the listener, it’s like the world has suddenly shifted on its axis. Schumann has musically gone exactly where you expect him to go—back to the original key—but it feels like he’s turned the music inside out. It’s exponentially more endearing than a polished transition would be, in the way that the crude, jump-cut special effects of the Méliès brothers contain more wonder than any CGI photorealism ever could. That’s what Schumann does better than anyone—leave you in a daze, uncertain where you are, surprised at how happy disorientation can make you.

The disorientation always carries a whiff of the tragic, as well—Schumann died in an asylum, not the first musician to succumb to madness, but the first whose madness became inextricably bound up with his music. I think that’s why Schumann has always been one of the more tentatively canonic classical composers—there’s a sense that the music brings you too close to the man itself. It does. But it’s not his madness that you brush up against; it’s his ardor. It’s oversharing and disconcerting and probably a little dangerous. It’s what Schumann was listening for all along.

Below: Martha Argerich plays the second movement of Schumann’s Second Piano Sonata: