Robert Schumann’s life seems to be a greater focus of attention at present than his music, which is currently represented on concert programs only by his most popular songs, piano and chamber-ensemble pieces, and a handful of orchestral works. At least part of the explanation for this lies in our deficient understanding of Schumann’s poetry-in-music, whose immediate appeal hides an art of remarkable subtlety. Three recent, Schumann-related books will no doubt add to our understanding of the composer’s life; whether they will lead to a deeper understanding of his music is another question.
Schumann: Music and Madness, by Dr. Peter R Ostwald, is the first full-length case history in English of the greatest of the German Romantic composers.[1] The book is thoroughly researched and documented, but its shortcomings, the most serious of them stemming from the psychiatric speculations threatened by the title, almost sink it. What keeps the whole afloat—just—is Dr. Ostwald’s contribution to Schumann’s medical history in the context of nineteenth-century knowledge and practice, and the generally commonsensical biography within the psychobiography.
It can be said at the outset that Dr. Ostwald’s comments on Schumann’s music ought to be ignored, although it may be merely inane, and not deeply harmful, for him to write that the A minor quartet has a “light-hearted scherzo,” or that Träumereiexposes a “melody of exquisite tenderness.” In the absence of a study of Schumann’s innovations—in thematic metamorphosis, suspended cadences, and open-ended phrases, for example—and in the presence of
