The German composer’s final works before his tragic end have long been controversial. Jessica Duchen explores their unique qualities
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
Composer of the month
On 27 February 1854, in the middle of carnival season in Düsseldorf, Robert Schumann leapt off a bridge into the river Rhine. He then spent the last two-and-a-half years of his life in a mental hospital at Endenich, near Bonn. The medical records demonstrate that he was suffering mental disintegration caused by tertiary syphilis. There is evidence, too, that he had suffered episodes of mental ill health across his whole adult life. The perennial question is, of course, about how these conditions impacted upon his music.
The Violin Concerto of 1853 is one of the works most prone to the misapprehensions, contradictions and general uncertainty that surrounds all this. Joseph Joachim, the violinist for whom it was written, played it once and found it unsatisfactory (to be fair, Joachim half-destroyed Dvořák and Bruch by being hypercritical of their concertos). After the composer’s death, when a complete Robert Schumann edition was being prepared, his widow Clara and her close advisers – Joachim and Brahms – left the Violin Concerto unpublished, considering it unworthy. Suppressed for 80 years, the manuscript turned up in Berlin in the 1930s and was conscripted for propaganda by the Nazis – but that’s another story.
Today the world seems to divide into those who think that Clara, Brahms and Joachim were right, and those who champion the Violin Concerto as a raw, emotional, high-Romantic creation. Was Robert losing his abilities? Or was he reinventing his approach, creating an alternative ‘music of the future’?
Arguably, both are partially right. Today we are more aware than ever of the infinite shades of grey within the area of mental health. Critics, medics, musicians and biographers have been arguing for more than 150 years over what exactly was the matter with him; in this time theories about mental illness and social attitudes towards it have been through innumerable cultural shifts and reassessments. While the evidence seems to demonstrate that tertiary syphilis caused his deterioration and death, that doesn’t explain the almost impossible founts of energy that had once enabled him to write a symphony (his First) in four days flat.
Around ten years before his final collapse, Robert consciously set out to make his music clearer and, possibly, saner than before. Could there be anything ‘crazier’ than a piano sonata – No. 2 in G minor (1830-38) – in which a marking instruct
