Should a real musician be so tormented with music?

Misha Donat

• Robert Schumann: Herald of a ‘New Poetic Age’ by John Daverio
  Oxford, 618 pp, £30.00, June 1997, ISBN 0 19 509180 9
• The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by E.T.A. Hoffman, translated by Anthea Bell
  Penguin, 350 pp, £7.99, April 1999, ISBN 0 14 044631 1

When the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim visited Schumann in the asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, in May 1855, he discovered that the composer – by this time in the tertiary stage of syphilis – had been spending his time compiling an alphabetical list of cities. Nearly a year later, Brahms found Schumann doing almost the same thing: ‘I looked again at his reading matter,’ he reported back to Joachim. ‘It was an atlas and he was occupied with making excerpts, childish ones, of course. Towns, rivers, etc. whose names begin with Aab, Ab, Aba, etc., gathering together the many St Juans, etc. He showed me a whole lot of paper completely covered with such writing.’