Robert Schumann: The Originality of an Imaginative Genius
by Elizabeth Hogsten

Great composers offer the world a unique perspective.  Their creativity and genius produce a language and a world all their own.  Such is especially the case for Robert Schumann, a man who, "[s]hortly before he was twenty... confess[ed] in his diary that wanting to ‘be the first' was something he had been born with."^[1] His ambition and determination were well-rewarded.  Schumann's imaginative and pensive spirit, his deep emotional sensibility, his craving for originality, and his love of exploration led him to compose some of the most powerful music ever written.

Robert Schumann was born not only with confidence and aspiration, but with an especially imaginative mind and creative spirit.  Schumann did not begin his study of the piano until he was seven years old, but his musical creativity became quickly apparent.  By his second year of lessons, he had already begun composing short pieces, and from the start of his study, he loved to improvise at the piano.  As Peter Ostwald notes in his biography Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius, "Schumann had a remarkable talent for improvisation, and he used this gift not only for his own satisfaction but also to entertain and amuse his friends.  Almost every biography of the composer mentions his uncanny ability to produce musical portraits that captured people's mannerisms, movements, speech patterns, and physical appearance in sound."^[2]

As a child, Robert Schumann developed a love for both literature and music, these two interests proving to be the defining passions of his life and the main outlets through which he expressed his creativity.  Schumann later reflected in his diary, "Already in my earliest years I always felt compelled to produce, if not music, then poetry, and I enjoyed a happiness just as great as any I've since felt."^[3] As the son of a bookshop owner, translator of literature, and aspiring writer, Robert was exposed to literature from an early age.  Devouring the many books in his father's library as a child,^[4] Robert developed an affection for and devotion to literature that never left him.

He was deeply inspired by many Romantic writers, including Jean Paul Richter and, later, E.T.A. Hoffmann.  Schumann's love for Jean Paul's novels developed as an adolescent, but he "read and reread Jean Paul throughout his life."^[5] Some critics find Jean Paul's novels impossible to decipher.  The Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle describes Jean Paul's language as "groan[ing] with indescribable metaphors . . . flowing onward not like a river, but an inundation, circling in complex eddies, chafing and gurgling now this way, now that, [until] the proper current sinks out of view amid the boundless uproar,"^[6] but Schumann discovered in Jean Paul's writing worlds that completely captivated him.  Jean Paul's extravagant metaphors, witty humor, love of mystery, and depiction of dual personalities all profoundly affected Schumann's writing style, the way he thought about the world, and his musical development.

E. T. A. Hoffmann's depiction of a fantasy world intrinsically intertwined with reality also deeply influenced Schumann.  "In [Hoffman's] stories, the world of everyday reality coexists with a hallucinatory world of delusion, which gives significance to the former: The ‘real' world has priority but is unintelligible without the irrational and often absurd world of shadows, magic, and paranoia that is always present."^[7] Schumann was fascinated by the idea of delusions and fantasies that were essential, that enriched reality, rather than detracted from it.  The idea of madness and insanity also engrossed him, a premonition of his eventual mental illness and unfortunate mental breakdown in his early forties.  He "played with the idea of insanity, incorporating elements of madness into his work--his criticism as well as his music--inventing wonderful effects of logical incoherence and schizophrenia."^[8]

The ideas that these two writers sparked in Schumann found expression in his poetry and prose, but also in his music.  While Jean Paul Richter's influence is especially apparent in Schumann's adoption of the dual personalities Florestan and Eusebius,^[9] the influence of Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffman are also reflected in Schumann's "suspension of traditional musical logic," wherein he indulges in "occasional attempts to destroy the listener's sense of the bar line."^[10] He also often wrote programs for his music based on stories by Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffman.  The title Kreisleriana, as an example, was inspired by a character in E. T. A. Hoffman's novel Kater Murr.^[11]

^[1] John Worthen, Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 6.

^[2] Peter Ostwald, Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 17.

^[3] John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age," (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 23.

^[4] John Worthen, Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician, 4.

^[5] Erika Reiman, Schumann's Piano Cycles and the Novels of Jean Paul, (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 11.

^[6] John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age," 36.

^[7] Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 648.

^[8] Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 648.

^[9] Erika Reiman, Schumann's Piano Cycles and the Novels of Jean Paul, 11.

^[10] Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 655.

^[11] Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 672.