A while ago I had to write a short text on Schumann's writing. He had an important journal where he and others published music criticisms. He is an extremely interesting writer and I  tried to explain the logic of his writing. This place seems to me a perfect place to start a discussion around it, or simply to share a thought.


Schumann’s Logic

His music is “like the singing of a child in its sleep.” “I wish I could capture in words a picture of this extraordinary man.” “Hats off gentlemen, a genius!” Schumann was indeed a genius.

Schumann is mostly known as a composer, but he was also a writer, a music critic. His writing, even if less known, was not a violon d'Ingres (a hobby) for him, rather it was an activity he took as seriously as composing, with as much time and effort put into it. Moreover, his literary writings are classics in the realm of writing on art.

His literary writings show us, perhaps more clearly than his musical ones, how Schumann listened to music. His writing (both literary and musical) is that of someone who spent his life “dreaming at the piano” and “with books”. Not dreaming in bed, but a daydreamer, and his writings are fantasies, in between reality and fiction. They are not unconscious dreams, but conscious reveries. They are poems.


Counterpoint

Both his musical and literary writings are written in 'counterpoint'. That is, he employs diverse independent voices which are part of a single unified being; he deploys an army. Schumann wrote using, mostly, the two “fantasy characters” of Eusebius and Florestan who represented different aspects of his being. There were others, such as master Raro, who took the place of the voice of his teacher Wieck (Clara’s father) inside him, and once even Robert Schumann when criticizing his own work. In the same way, diverse emotions appear almost simultaneously in Schumann’s music. Another counterpoint in his writings is the duality of reality and fiction which is constantly mixed to a single experience of daydreaming.

An amazing, though more difficult to elucidate, facet of this 'counterpoint' has to do with a splitting of the senses, that is, a juxtaposition of different sensory inputs and of different languages of art (painting/music/literature). Schumann’s writings are filled with the breaking of hearing/seeing/smelling. He writes on Henri Vieuxtemps: “His playing has the fragrance of a flower.” Or, after telling someone to go away: “I repeated it in Flemish with my eyes.”

He also plays with juxtaposing pictures/words/music. On Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ symphony he writes: “The instruments literally seem to speak.” On a John Field concerto: “Only were I a painter would I presume to attempt a critique – possibly in a picture showing one of the graces defending herself against a satyr.” And on Clara’s piano playing (a day before her 18th birthday when he will write her father asking for her hand): “Whole books could be heard on the subject. I say ‘heard’ advisedly.… Not everything can be told in the letters of the alphabet.”

In a few lines of a real tour-de-force Schumann writes: “One cannot define such things precisely in words. Pictures are better. Thus, I shall compare that mystical light with the rings that one sees during a morning shower on certain days around the silhouettes of certain heads.” Here Schumann moves from words to pictures, only to describe to us a picture which is fictitious, as those “rings” cannot really be seen by the eye – they are imaginary, that is, a picture which can only be described in words and not in a picture. A fantastical image.

This aspect of the more general counterpoint writing can be seen in Schumann's treatment of the piano. His understanding of a singular containing a multitude was used by him to write for the piano as an orchestra, in, among others, the “Symphonic Études,” and his sonata “Concerto without orchestra.” In Schumann’s words: “Defying the symphony, contemporary piano playing seeks to dominate by its own means and on its own terms.” And on his musical son Brahms: “…which made of the piano an orchestra of mourning or jubilant voices. There were sonatas, more like disguised symphonies; songs, whose poetry would be intelligible even to one who didn’t know the words.”

The counterpoint is not limited to the heard voices. A fundamental issue, for a writer and a musician, is the question of sound and silence. On reading music he says: “There is something magical about this secret enjoyment of music unheard.” And on criticizing Florestan says: “The music critic’s noblest destiny is to make himself superfluous! The best way to talk about music is to be quiet about it!” (Wittgenstein will, a century later, say the same thing about philosophers). Eusebius will respond with the duty of speaking in order to teach and have an effect.


Battle
“Whoever will not dare to attack what is bad in a thing can only half defend what is good.”

When one thinks of Schumann, or Mendelssohn, tough fighting and military moves seem very far off. He is known more for his love – his love of Clara Schumann. But Schumann saw the world as battle, and constantly fought, more a fighter than a lover maybe (not physically mind you). Marches – his works are full with them. And Mendelssohn, has there been a march to whose tunes more people have marched than Mendelssohn's (wedding) march, lover's or not. Schumann's most famous literary battle was that of his Davidsbund (The league of David, a secret society he founded) against the so called philistines.

Schumann’s literary writing teaches us again how he listened to, and wrote, music. His pieces are in essence counterpoints, that is, a battle of many independent forces each pulling and pushing in different directions, one against the other. Nothing is ever stable but always changing. Musical lines push down, pull up – there is always a certain maelstrom of opposing forces, all battalions in the same battle. And to listen to them is to partake in this battle – are you with us, with David, or are you a Philistine who likes just flashy, technically impressive, empty music. To be David is exactly to see a single picture in the multitude of lines. To be a poet.

With regard to this we should recall Schumann's description of Chopin:

"For if the mighty autocratic monarch in the North [the Russian Czar] could know that in Chopin’s works, in the simple strains of his mazurkas, there lurks a dangerous enemy, he would place a ban on music. Chopin's works are cannons buried in flowers."