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  • Schumann:A Lover's Guide
  • Laura Tunbridge (bio)
Theodor R. Payk , Robert Schumann: Lebenslust und Leidenszeit. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 2006. 269 pp. ISBN 978 3 416 03091 5.
John Worthen , Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. xvi + 496 pp. ISBN 978 0 300 11160 6.

BELOVED Clara, a recital of piano pieces by the Schumanns, Brahms, Liszt and Mendelssohn, alongside excerpts from their diaries and letters, has been touring the UK since 2002.1 Lucy Parham, the pianist who devised the concert in conjunction with writer Jessica Duchen, explains that she always talks to the audience before playing:

But I used to get carried away and find myself speaking for five minutes before playing Schumann. Once, I read out a quote about the Schumann G minor Sonata, which Schumann addressed to Clara as 'One single cry of my heart for you, in which your theme appears in every possible form'. Afterwards, people told me this had added greatly to their appreciation of the piece; the response was so strong that I realised it could be taken further. Beloved Clara has had the most positive response of any concert I've ever done. It's an extremely emotional story, and even if you know nothing about music, you can't help but be drawn in by the human content.2

The show is presented as a tale of 'passion, music and tragedy': 'The diary extracts chart a disturbed history from the Schumanns' troubled marriage and the arrival in their household of the dynamic, 21-year-old Brahms to Robert's decline into mental illness and the deepening relationship between Clara and Brahms.'3 It is a familiar narrative, whose particular qualities suit Parham's purpose: to engage and perhaps entrain her audience. If getting carried away by the 'human content' of the Schumann story encourages people to love the music, what is the problem?

Well, for starters, it raises a whole raft of questions. FriedrichNiecks, writing for the Musical Times in 1881, was already asking 'Is Schumann really the unhealthy, impotent and skill-less composer some critics represent him to be?'4 While most of the music has now been re-evaluated, and while even the most artless examples have been shown to be at worst skilful, the association of the composer with illness lingers on. Maybe listeners enjoy feeling sorry for him, the incapacitated older husband whose talented wife was swept away by a 'dynamic' young eagle. Maybe mental illness is the only way [End Page 144] to explain the eccentricities of Schumann's music. Maybe 'madness' still somehow confers the status of genius. But let us at least give the equations an airing.

So: can we love Schumann's music without all this baggage? It is a question that surfaces repeatedly on reading these two new biographies. Strikingly, and refreshingly, both claim to focus on the life rather than the works. This is probably because the authors are not musicologists - Worthen is a biographer of D. H. Lawrence and an emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Nottingham; Payk is a professor of psychiatry and psychology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Aside from their shared focus, though, the two take very different approaches. For example, while both agree that Schumann's death was caused by syphilis, their attitudes towards the various manifestations of his illness contrast. As might be expected, Professor Payk's biography offers a psychiatric reading, concentrating on personality traits and relationships. Professor Worthen, on the other hand, is determined to prove that Schumann was not mentally ill. What is more, whereas Payk's subtitle is the conventional, romantic Lebenslust und Leidenszeit (roughly, 'the good times and the bad'), Worthen's Life and Death of a Musician strives firmly for the pragmatic.

How Schumann died has become clearer with the recent publication of the records from his two years at Dr Richarz's asylum in Endenich, where he died on 29 July 1856.5 Worthen makes extensive use of this information, and includes a previously untranslated autopsy report (also referred to by Payk), together with an explanation of what he thinks are its implications...

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