A, E♭, C, B
Paul Driver
- BuyRobert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician by John Worthen
Yale, 496 pp, £25.00, July 2007, ISBN 978 0 300 11160 6
- BuyThe Cambridge Companion to Schumann edited by Beate Perrey
Cambridge, 302 pp, £19.99, June 2007, ISBN 978 0 521 78950 9
- BuySchumann’s Late Style by Laura Tunbridge
Cambridge, 246 pp, £50.00, October 2007, ISBN 978 0 521 87168 6
Robert Schumann died in an asylum near Bonn in 1856, having committed himself there two years before, following a suicidal plunge into the Rhine near his home in Düsseldorf. He had had many periods of depression and anxiety before that, and biographers have tended to regard his life as a continuous fight against the congenital mental instability to which the deaths of his sister and father when he was in his teens have also been attributed. The black cloud at the end of Schumann’s life has been seen as overshadowing everything on the way, but John Worthen’s biography refuses idle teleology. An emeritus professor of English at the University of Nottingham, Worthen has written about D.H. Lawrence and the Wordsworth circle and makes no claim to musical expertise; but he has been seized by the Schumann case. Paying fierce attention to original sources, among them Schumann’s autopsy report (printed as an appendix) and the domestic diaries that he kept jointly with his pianist wife, Clara, he shows that Schumann’s problems can be explained without a theory of inherited madness. What Schumann faced was the purely physical nemesis of syphilis.
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Letters
Vol. 30 No. 6 · 20 March 2008
From Christopher Campbell-Howes
Schumann’s enigmatic ‘AE♭CB’, about which Paul Driver wrote (LRB, 21 February), needs decoding if it’s to make any sense. The problem arises from the differences between English and German musical note-names, particularly those of sharps and flats. A is A in both languages, E flat in German is Es; C is C in both, while English B is H in German. (The German B is the same as the English B flat.) Strung together, these give A-(e)S-C-H, indicating Asch, a small town in Bohemia now called As, where Schumann’s early love, Ernestine von Fricken, came from. It doesn’t get any less involved: A flat is As in German, leading to an alternative spelling and note-sequence As-C-H.
Schumann saw hidden messages in these letters, not only because they occurred in his full name (Robert Alexander SCHumAnn), thus providing a fortuitous if tenuous link with his beloved, but also because they could be realised musically. Carnaval, the work of which this is a part, abounds with musical tags, themes and allusions based on the sequences A-(e)S-C-H (in English, A-E flat-C-B) and As-C-H (A flat-C-B). They give an unexpected unity to a mixter-maxter of some 21 miniatures, a sort of harlequinade portraying real and imaginary people and situations, in which Ernestine von Fricken masquerades as ‘Estrella’, an agreeably bouncy 17-year-old if Schumann’s musical account of her is to be trusted.
It’s unlikely that Schumann regarded these tarradiddles as more than a sophisticated chat-up technique. He’d used the idea once already, probably as a calculated novelty, to launch his Opus 1, the bravura A-B-E-G-G variations, dedicated to Pauline, Countess Abegg, a fanciful person not known to the Almanach de Gotha. He grew out of this practice after Carnaval, reverting only in mid-career to compose a set of six organ fugues on the notes B-A-C-H, not the first nor the last composer to pay homage in this way.
Christopher Campbell-Howes
Olargues, France
Vol. 30 No. 7 · 10 April 2008
From Judith Chernaik
Christopher Campbell-Howes discusses Schumann’s musical puns (Letters, 20 March). Apart from the ‘sphinx’ letters in Carnaval, probably the best known is the late F-A-E Violin Sonata composed for Joachim, a collaboration between Schumann, the young Brahms and Schumann’s friend and colleague Albert Dietrich. Each movement of the sonata begins with the musical notes signifying Joachim’s ‘motto’: Frei aber einsam (‘free but lonely’). Brahms joked that his own motto was Frei aber froh – ‘free but happy’. Schumann’s two movements were among his last compositions. Two years earlier, in 1851, he had composed a violin sonata for his friend Ferdinand David which punned on the musical letters in ‘David’. Following hints in Schumann’s letters to Clara, Eric Sams proposed the existence of an astonishing number of musical ‘codes’ in the songs, most of them signifying Clara’s name in five notes weaving about C or A, in keys associated with her (C major, C minor, A minor), and in the falling fourth or fifth which ‘says’ or sings ‘Cla-ra’. Mendelssohn used this theme (D falling to A) to open the collection of Songs without Words that he dedicated to Clara in 1844, and Brahms echoed Schumann’s ‘Clara’ themes in the Andante and Intermezzo (Rückblick) of his F minor Piano Sonata, with an inscription describing two loving hearts musically in double stops.
Judith Chernaik
London NW3
Vol. 30 No. 9 · 8 May 2008
From Michael Houstoun
Judith Chernaik is a little hasty in her declaration that ‘each movement’ of the F-A-E Violin Sonata – the collaboration between Schumann, Brahms and Albert Dietrich – ‘begins with the musical notes signifying Joachim’s “motto”’ (Letters, 10 April). The most famous movement of the sonata, Brahms’s Scherzo, makes no reference to them at all. In the first movement Dietrich doesn’t introduce them until the 19th bar, and in the Finale Schumann waits 17 bars before using the motto. Only in the Intermezzo, also composed by Schumann, do we hear these notes at the outset.
Michael Houstoun
Feilding, New Zealand
