Rethinking Schumann

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Rethinking Schumann


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Rethinking Schumann

EDITED BY

Roe-Min KokLaura Tunbridge

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1Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that furtherOxford University’s objective of excellencein research, scholarship, and education.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataRethinking Schumann / edited by Roe-Min Kok and Laura Tunbridge.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-19-539385-9; 978-0-19-539386-6 (pbk.)1. Schumann, Robert, 1810–1856—Criticism and interpretation.2. Music—19th century—History and criticism.I. Kok, Roe-Min. II. Tunbridge, Laura, 1974–ML410.S4R47 2011780.92—dc22 2010012666

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Preface

A composer’s centenary is usually geared toward celebrating the artist’s achieve-ments and investigating forgotten reaches of repertoire. It can also be a usefulopportunity to take stock: to reect on the state of existing views and to suggestnew paths. The essays gathered here aim to rethink scholarly approaches toRobert Schumann (1810–56) on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth.Whether the reader is familiar with Schumann studies or comes to it with littlebackground, it is hoped that the ideas, perspectives, and directions offered willserve as departure points for a broad and continuing discussion of his work andtimes.

Schumann and his works command an enviable amount of attention aroundthe world. Regularly performed and recorded by major artists, ensembles, andorchestras, his music continues to speak to generations beyond his own. Asmay be expected, the scholarly bibliography on Schumann is vast and multilin-gual; it dates back to the early decades of the nineteenth century and shows fewsigns of abating. In particular, the steady stream of publications from theRobert-Schumann-Gesellschaft in Zwickau and the Robert-Schumann-

Forschungstelle in Düsseldorf has made available not only information aboutSchumann’s everyday activities, but also, via the new complete edition ( NeueRobert-Schumann-Gesamtausgabe ), fresh insights into Schumann’s workingmethods by returning to the manuscripts and by disentangling the publicationand reception history of each work. Moreover, like Mozart, Beethoven, andother select composers, Schumann also attracts nonscholarly writings, mostlyin the form of biographies. Briey put, the sheer amount and variety of avail-able information on Schumann is nothing short of impressive—even

intimidating.In many ways this volume is built on this array of collected knowledge.However, in taking up the challenge to rethink Schumann on the occasion of thebicentenary of his birth we have also tried to introduce themes and topics thathave received rather less attention over the years but that promise to enhanceour understanding of this major gure. Thus a hallmark of this volume is that itcovers areas heavily researched and those markedly less so. Among the former,for example, is the reception of Schumann’s biography. The widespread andcontinuing fascination with the story of his life, and its connections to his music,


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Preface vii

Schumann’s engagement with visual arts, making a connection between popularartistic commentaries on Raphael’s well-known “Sistine” Madonna andSchumann’sSzenen aus Goethes Faust . Dana Gooley situates the musical lan-guage of Schumann’s early piano works within improvisational practices of histime, and Ivan Raykoff explores the effect of melodrama techniques on theseeming ability of Schumann’s music to speak.

“Analytical Approaches” offers new work about the composer’s technical-compositional prowess from the perspectives of nineteenth- to twenty-rst-century concepts and methodologies. The number of analytical studies devotedto Schumann’s music from the 1830s still far outweighs those geared toward his

later music, an imbalance that begins to be redressed here, through HaraldKrebs’s and William Benjamin’s examinations of hypermeter in songs and choralmusic from the 1850s. On the other hand, Peter Smith and Julie Hedges Browntake different approaches to one of Schumann’s most famous pieces, the PianoQuintet, the former considering harmonic relationships, the latter the inuenceof the style hongrois . David Kopp places Schumann’s tonal practice in the con-text of mid-nineteenth-century theories of key, a thus far overlooked aspect.

In the nal section, “Twentieth-century Interpretations,” Schumann’s biog-

raphy (or, more accurately, biographies) is revealed to dominate current-dayunderstandings of the composer. These four essays discuss his posthumous lifein creative works (including ballet, ction, lm, and visual art) and how he g-ures in interdisciplinary discourses about late style. Wayne Heisler demonstrateshow ballets based on Schumann’s music continually refer back to the compos-er’s life, refracted through the lens of modernist aesthetics. David Ferris analyzestwo ctional biographies of the composer and his wife from the 1990s, suggest-ing how forms of storytelling lead to different understandings of the couple, andLaura Tunbridge discusses how appearances of Schumann in twentieth-centurycompositions, lms, and paintings seem to be linked to themes of childhoodand mental illness. Scott Burnham approaches the idea of Schumann’s late stylefrom the perspectives of cultural studies and literary criticism (rather than froma historical point of view), bringing in examples of modern artists’ late works inarguing for a subtext of death in the music of Schumann’s nal period.

A provocative reexamination of assumptions about a major romantic com-poser who played so many important roles in the society and culture of his day(and ours), Rethinking Schumann emphasizes interaction with other disci-plines—literature, visual arts, cultural history, performance studies, dance, andlm—allowing Schumann’s oeuvre and reception to be considered afresh fromperspectives current in Anglo-American music scholarship. We may concludethat Schumann was very much a man of his time, informed by not just music,but also the culture and society around him. What is more, the composer’s rep-utation is revealed as having been shaped signicantly by the passing of time, for

example by changes in attitudes toward German romanticism and its historyand by developments in musical scholarship and performance. Drawing on


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viii Preface

interdisciplinary approaches, this volume takes into account cultural and social-institutional frameworks, engages with ongoing and new issues of reception andhistoriography, and offers fresh music-analytical insights to assemble a portraitof the artist that reects the different ways he has been understood over the pasttwo hundred years.

This book could not have come together without the patience and goodwill ofour contributors and the unstinting support of Suzanne Ryan, Madelyn Sutton,and the rest of the production team at Oxford University Press. We gratefullyacknowledge grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

of Canada, the University of Manchester, and McGill University. Readers for thePress have offered invaluable feedback, and friends and colleagues—DavidBretherton, René Rusch Daley, Annegret Fauser, Christopher Goddard, ClaudineJacques, Mikaela Miller, Gavin Osborn, Scott Paulin, Sylvia Heike Rieger, StevenVande Moortele, and Nina Whiteman—generously provided assistance at var-ious stages.

notes

1. For an overview, see Hentschel, “Robert Schumann in Musikgeschichtsschreibungund Biographik.” The most recent Anglophone contribution is Worthen,RobertSchumann .

2. For example,Der späte Schumann , ed. Ulrich Tadday, special issue of Musik-Konzepte Sonderband 11 (2006); Tadday,Schumann Handbuch ; Daverio, “Songs ofDawn and Dusk”; Tunbridge,Schumann’s Late Style . For a study that argues fromthe point of view of recently recovered sources, lost since World War II, see Kok,

“Negotiating Children’s Music.”3. Among these, the study of childhood was brought to attention by Kok’s disser-tation, “Romantic Childhood, Bourgeois Commercialism, and the Music of RobertSchumann.”

4. Nietzsche,The Gay Science . See also Barthes,Camera Lucida , 70.5. On use of the term popular culture in historical studies, see, for example,

Brophy,Popular Culture , 16–17, 17 n. 44.


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Contents

Contributors xi

I The Political Sphere

1 Robert Schumann and the Culture of German Nationhood 3 Celia Applegate

2 Organizing German Musical Life at Midcentury:Brendel, Schumann, and the LeipzigTonkünstlerversammlungen

and Tonkünstlerverein 15 James Deaville3 The Cry of theSchuhu : Dissonant History in a Late

Schumann Song 30 Susan Youens

4 Segregating Sound: Robert Schumann in the Third Reich 51 Lily E. Hirsch

II Popular Inuences

5 At the Interstice between “Popular” and “Classical”:Schumann’sPoems of Queen Mary Stuart and EuropeanSentimentality at Midcentury 69 Jon W. Finson

6 Who Was Mignon? What Was She? Popular Catholicismand Schumann’sRequiem , Op. 98b 88 Roe-Min Kok

7 Entzückt : Schumann, Raphael,Faust 109 Nicholas Marston

8 Schumann and Agencies of Improvisation 129 Dana Gooley


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9 Schumann’s Melodramatic Afterlife 157 Ivan Raykoff

III Analytical Approaches

10 Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann’s Op. 90 183 Harald Krebs

11 Hypermetric Dissonance in the Later Worksof Robert Schumann 206

William Benjamin12 Associative Harmony, Tonal Pairing, and Middleground

Structure in Schumann’s Sonata Expositions: The Role ofthe Mediant in the First Movements of the Piano Quintet,Piano Quartet, andRhenish Symphony 235Peter H. Smith

13 Schumann and thestyle hongrois 265

Julie Hedges Brown14 Intermediate States of Key in Schumann 300

David Kopp

IV Twentieth-Century Interpretations

15 Choreographing Schumann 329 Wayne Heisler Jr.

16 The Fictional Lives of the Schumanns 357 David Ferris

17 Deserted Chambers of the Mind (Schumann Memories) 395 Laura Tunbridge

18 Late Styles 411

Scott BurnhamWorks Cited 431 Index 459


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Contributors

Celia Applegate is professor of history at the University of Rochester. She has writ-ten extensively on German nationalism and national identity with particularattention to senses of places and practices of music. She is the author of A Nationof Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat(1990) and Bach in Berlin: Nation andCulture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion(2005), and co-editorwith Pamela Potter of Music and German National Identity(2002). She serves aspresident of the German Studies Association and is a member of the editorial boardof Oxford University Press’s book series on the New Cultural History of Music.

William Benjamin , a music theorist and composer, received a Ph.D. in musicfrom Princeton University in 1976 and has been a faculty member at theUniversity of British Columbia since 1978. He has published in leading theory journals and essay volumes since the 1970s, with studies of works by severalnineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, critiques of present-day analyt-ical method, and contributions to the theories of harmony and meter. Morerecently, his scholarly work has shifted to the intersection of music theory, cog-nition, and aesthetics. In 2008 he was named a Distinguished Scholar inResidence at UBC’s Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies, where he is at workon a book project titled “Music in our Heads: Imagined Music as a Determinantof Musical Behaviour, Musical Values, and Musical Culture.”

Scott Burnham is professor of music at Princeton University and served as chairof the Department of Music from 2000 to 2008. He is the author ofBeethovenHero(1995), translator of A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven(1997),and co-editor ofBeethoven and His World(2000). Other writings include “Schubertand the Sound of Memory” ( Musical Quarterly, 2001), “On the Beautiful inMozart” ( Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, 2005), “Haydn and Humor” (TheCambridge Companion to Haydn, 2005), and “Novel Symphonies and DramaticOvertures” (The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, 2007).

James Deaville is associate professor for music in the School for Studies in Artand Culture of Carleton University, Ottawa. He has authored several books,contributed chapters for many edited collections, written for the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, Journa


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xii Contributors

of Musicological Research, 19th Century Music Review, andEcho(among others),and contributed to the new editions of the New Groveand MGG.

David Ferris is associate professor of musicology at Rice University’s ShepherdSchool of Music. His research interests include musical biography, GermanRomanticism, musical analysis, and the relationship between text and music. Hedivides his time between the Schumanns and the life and music of Carl PhilippEmanuel Bach. He is the author ofSchumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis and theGenre of the Romantic Cycle(2000), and his work has appeared in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Musicology,and Music and Letters.

Jon W. Finson has published and lectured widely on the songs and symphoniesof Robert Schumann. Most notably, he has authored books on Schumann’s FirstSymphony, Op. 38 (1987) and solo songs (2007). He has also edited an award-winning edition of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony in its 1841 version (2003)and is slated to edit a volume of solo songs for the New Complete Edition ofSchumann’s works. He is currently professor of music at the University of NorthCarolina, Chapel Hill.

Dana Gooley is the Manning Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University.His research interests include Franz Liszt, nineteenth-century music criticism,virtuoso performers and the public sphere, performance studies, and jazz. Hisbook The Virtuoso Liszt(2004) discusses Liszt’s pianistic career in relation to thehistorical contexts of the 1830s and 1840s. He was a scholar-in-residence for theBard Music Festival in 2006 and co-edited, with Christopher Gibbs, the essaycollectionFranz Liszt and His World(2006). He is currently writing a book aboutimprovisation and improvisational values in nineteenth-century music andculture.

Julie Hedges Brown graduated in 2000 with a Ph.D. in musicology from YaleUniversity. Her research emphasizes nineteenth-century music, especially thehistory, biography, reception, and analysis of Robert Schumann and his music.She has delivered papers at numerous regional, national, and international con-ferences, and her previous publications have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Societyand 19th Century Music. She has held teachingappointments at Tufts University, Case Western Reserve University, and theOberlin Conservatory of Music. A recipient of a Leylan Dissertation Fellowship,she has also received two Mellon grants, plus two research grants from NorthernArizona University, where she is currently assistant professor of musicology.

Wayne Heisler Jr . is author ofThe Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss(2009).

His work also appears inThe Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, The Musical Quarterly, Opera Quarterly: Performance + Theory + History, andECHO.


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xiv Contributors

books, and has published widely on the tonal and rhythmic structure ofnineteenth- and early twentieth-century music in Canadian, American, andEuropean journals and in numerous collections of essays. His bookFantasyPieces: Metrical Dissonance in the Music of Robert Schumann(1999) won theSociety for Music Theory’s Wallace Berry Award for a distinguished book inmusic theory. He is a frequent presenter at conferences, and has been invited asa guest lecturer at many universities throughout North America and Europe. Hehas served as vice president of the Society for Music Theory (2003–5) and asmember of the editorial boards of the journals Music Theory Spectrum, Theoria,Canadian University Music Review, and Indiana Theory Review.

Nicholas Marston is University Reader in Music Theory and Analysis in theUniversity of Cambridge, and a fellow of King’s College. He has published widelyon the music of Beethoven and Schumann, and on the music theory of HeinrichSchenker. He is a former editor-in-chief ofBeethoven Forum, and his work onSchumann includes the Cambridge Music Handbook on theFantasie, op. 17(1992), as well as essays inThe Cambridge Companion to Schumann, 19thCentury Music, and other publications.

Ivan Raykoff is an assistant professor of music and arts in context at EugeneLang College, the New School for Liberal Arts, in New York, where he teachescourses on music history and aesthetics, music theory, and the intersections bet-ween music and the other arts, including lm music. He studied piano at theEastman School of Music and at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and receivedhis Ph.D. from the University of California–San Diego in 2002. He is co-editor,with Robert Tobin, of A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the

Eurovision Song Contest(2007), and he is completing a book on the image of theconcert pianist in popular culture titled “Dreams of Love: Representing the‘Romantic’ Pianist.”

Peter H. Smith , author of Expressive Forms in Brahms’s Instrumental Music:Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet(2005), is associate professor atthe University of Notre Dame. He has published numerous articles on Brahmsand issues of formal and Schenkerian analysis. He is a longstanding member of

the Board of Directors of the American Brahms Society and currently serves asvice president of that organization and on the editorial boards ofTheory andPractice, Indiana Theory Review, and the Journal of Schenkerian Studies.

Laura Tunbridge is senior lecturer in music at the University of Manchester. Herpublications includeSchumann’s Late Style(2007),The Song Cycle(2011), andcontributions to The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, Cambridge Opera Journal, The Musical Quarterly, Music and Letters, and Journal of the Royal

Musical Association.


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Contributors xv

Susan Youens is the J. W. Van Gorkom Professor of Music at the University ofNotre Dame. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles and eight bookson Lieder, includingHeinrich Heine and the Lied(2007),Schubert’s Late Lieder:Beyond the Song Cycles(2002), Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs(2000), andSchubert, Müller, and Die schöne Müllerin (1997).


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I

THE POLITICAL SPHERE


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1

Robert Schumann and the Culture of German Nationhood

Celia Applegate

In Beyond Good and Evil , Nietzsche observed, “It is characteristic of the Germansthat the question ‘what is German’ never dies out among them.” Moving fromGoethe’s “delicate silence” on the matter to Mozart’s and Beethoven’s indiffer-ence to it, Nietzsche worked his way eventually to Robert Schumann and theGerman question. Schumann’s “quiet lyricism and drunken intoxication withfeeling,” he suggested, made him “merely a German event in music, no longersomething European, as Beethoven was, and, to an even greater degree, Mozart.”With Schumann, he wrote, “German music was threatened by its greatest danger,the loss of its voice for the soul of Europe and its descent to something dealingmerely with the fatherland.”1 Nietzsche’s observations always represent a provo-cation, and it is rarely a defense against them simply to call him wrong. At theleast, though, it is worth noting that he wrote this passage in the mid-1880s,when the framing of the national question was proceeding much differentlythan it had been three decades earlier. Not only had the conservative or old rightlong since gured out how to turn German nationalism to support their ownpolitical agendas, but a new right, familiar to Nietzsche through the Bayreuthcrowd as well as through his sister and her husband, Bernhard Förster, wasdeveloping a more populist politics of racial nationalism, which repelled him.Anything that may have been part of the genealogy of all this could only excitehis criticism.

Still, the question remains: In the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, in the three decadesof his adulthood,did Schumann’s commitment to the state of Germany and itscultural health “threaten” the loss of “Germany’s voice for the soul of Europe”?How should one characterize, if not Schumann’s voice, then at least his attentionto the national community? Should we regard him, as Nietzsche ultimately did,as interested only, or mainly, in a narrowly German culture, with deleteriouslong-term consequences? Or should we emphasize, as did a recent conference

volume, his interest in and openness to the music of composers and cultures of

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4 The Political Sphere

many different nationalities, his reception in France or England or the UnitedStates, his enjoyment of his Dutch concert tour—if you will, his cosmopoli-tanism, or at the very least his identity as a European?2 I suggest that neither ofthese characterizations (the national or the cosmopolitan) is accurate as onechoice between two mutually exclusive alternatives. The very notion that we facean either/or situation here reects, in Nietzsche’s case especially, the powerfullynegative inuence of Richard Wagner’s polemic in “Judaism in Music” (andelsewhere), a work that attacked cosmopolitanism in the persons of its allegedlymost prominent representatives, the Jews of Europe. Wagner, with no great orig-inality, argued for the existence of only two kinds of art, authentic and inau-

thentic, produced by two kinds of artists, those rooted in a national culture andthose lacking one.3 Nietzsche, eventually, responded to Wagner by praising cos-mopolitanism, and the game of either/or was on, with Schumann’s reputation amere pawn in the process.

But regardless of whether, like Wagner, one disdains cosmopolitanism or, likeNietzsche, claims to admire it, the distinction between a nationalist and a cos-mopolitan was not so clear-cut then or now, which is, among other reasons, whyboth Wagner and Nietzsche had to polemicize to persuade. Some theorists of

nationalism have suggested, for instance, that nationalisms, just like processes ofnation-state formation, show a great range of attitudes toward the world outsidethe particular nation in play. In his effort to imagine a new kind of narrative ofthe formation of modern China, Prasenjit Duara writes about the need tochallenge “the notion of a stable community that gradually develops a nationalself-awareness like the evolution of a species (History).” He suggests instead thatthe history of communities, national ones in particular, be told as a process inwhich “various social actors—often different groups of politicians and intellec-tuals—” redened the boundaries of community by a “deliberate mobilizationwithin a network of cultural representations.” Duara’s analysis relies on a viewof communities (national or otherwise) not as “well-bounded entities” but asmarked by “various different and mobile boundaries that delineate differentdimensions of life.” Some of these boundaries are hard and cannot be crossedwithout violating the integrity of the community; others are soft and easilycrossed: “One or more of the cultural practices of a group, such as rituals, lan-guage, dialect,music , kinship rules or culinary habits, may be considered softboundaries if they identify a group but do not prevent the group from sharingand even adopting, self-consciously or not, the practices of another.”4 All com-munities, he suggests, consist of a combination of hard and soft boundaries,each marking degrees of privilege and inclusion, intolerance and exclusion,group cohesion and the capacity to change. In a similar vein, theorists of cosmo-politanism have pointed to the existence of a kind of rooted cosmopolitanism,in contrast to the cosmopolitanism of statelessness or expatriotism.5 Kant him-

self wrote inPerpetual Peace that the condition of world citizenship had itsfoundation in ancient traditions of hospitality toward peaceful travelers and


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Robert Schumann and the Culture of German Nationhood 5

hence was a condition more of “temporary sojourn” than permanentplacelessness.6

The terms Duara and others propose for shaping our understanding ofnational communities provide an explanatory framework for the experience ofGerman-speaking central Europe generally and for the activities of musicalactivists such as Schumann in particular. We should be able to nd a way tounderstand both Schumann’s intense relationship to Germany and his place inEuropean musical culture in more exible, pre-Wagnerian terms. Schumann’sentire career fell into a period of transition in the German national movement,and like all transitional moments, however extended, it is difcult to charac-

terize something that came and went. But that we must do if we are not either toconsign Schumann, as Nietzsche did looking back, to a category of the “merelyGerman” or, at the other end of the spectrum, to ignore the extent of real con-gruence between his attitudes and those of the nationalist movement.

For Schumannwas a nationalist of his era, but as with other national intel-lectuals at midcentury his sense of German community and identity lay in hisefforts to create—and contribute to—a particular kind of community that heconceived of as both progressive and therefore necessarily national. This view of

national identity as progressive and available to all Europeans, each in his or herown nation, characterized what historians have called the party of movement,the advocates of reform, renewal, even revolution in culture and society—aparty that was European in scope and thus necessarily also cosmopolitan intheir awareness of developments around them. And although Schumann wasnot one of the liberal reformers who actually gathered in Frankfurt and Berlinto try to formulate practical answers to this question “What is German?” in1848–49, one cannot imagine a musical gure more in tune with the culture,that is to say with the underlying concepts, of liberal nationalism before it rede-ned itself in the presence of Bismarck (and that, of course, did not happenuntil the 1860s). Consideration of these deeper conceptions of nationhood,which underlay Schumann’s and the liberal nationalists’ consciousness of theirown nationality and what it entailed and enjoined, helps to specify just how dif-ferent was the community they imagined as the nation from other kinds ofcommunity. Moreover Schumann’s response to much of the musical culture ofhis time and his understanding of the national community, its potential and itsproblems, remained remarkably stable over the course of his life, suggesting thathowever great the shock of the revolutionary events of 1848–49, they did notlead either him or his fellow nationalists to discard hopes for musical andnational progress.

Schumann’s lifelong association with music journalism represents by far hisstrongest connection with the nationalist movement in midcentury German-speaking Europe.7 In the autobiographical statement he wrote in 1840 in the

process of receiving the degree of doctor of philosophy at the University of Jena,Schumann described his journalistic work in Leipzig as part and parcel of the


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time of movement and change in Europe, an interesting way to characterize aperiod in German public life marked, on the surface, by super-controlling gov-ernments and passive subjects. It tells us of his consciousness not just of upris-ings and artistic fermentelsewhere in Europe but, more important, of a growingmood of spiritual discomfort and activism at home among a small group ofintellectuals—writers, scholars, publicists, and so on—who formed the core ofa nascent political-cum-cultural opposition. In literary circles this phenomenontakes the name of convenience “Young Germany,” a notion inadvertently encour-aged by the Diet of the German Confederation in 1835 (the year Schumannassumed full editorial responsibility for the Neue Zeitschrift ), when it ofcially

chastised a number of writers for allegedly belonging to a literary cabal. But thissense of things changing and needing to change went far beyond a nonexistentliterary conspiracy to encompass an extensive, if dispersed, collection of peopleengaged in reforming public life, of which Schumann must certainly be regardedas part.

Decades ago, insisting on the “single-minded devotion to the arts” ofSchumann’s work, Leon Plantinga explicitly rejected any parallel betweenSchumann’s work and that of such writers as Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Laube,

or Karl Gutzkow, let alone nationalist activists such as Ludwig Camphausen orCarl Welcker.8 But true though it may be that Schumann, as Plantinga pointsout, had none of Young Germany’s “nihilistic radicalism” and commented onlyrarely on political events, to separate him completely from a loose fellowshipwith a reformist oppositional mode in midcentury Germany would be a mis-take—again, both before and after the revolutionary events of 1848. After all, hehimself claimed, “Everything that goes on in the world—politics, literature,people—concerns me.”9 But beyond that we need to be wary of any effort todraw rm lines between cultural and political nationalism or nation building.Such lines impose on this generation a distinction that made only limited senseto them. Nineteenth-century Germans did distinguish between ethnographicand political types of group identity, as we do today, but as one historian has putit, “civic and cultural connotations were equally vivid in their minds when theyconjured up the image of the nation,” and further, for “educated Germans,” “theidea of the cultural nation, immediately suggested political relations while thatof statehood just as surely pointed toward some measure of cultural unity aswell.”10

That said, Schumann’s overriding concernwas with the state of cultural lifeamong Germans, whether in terms of what they produced or in terms of whatthey consumed. Very early in his life he wrote, “True literature, literature, that is,which inspires passion in the soul of the public at large, can never ourish in aland ruled by bondage and slavery.”11 And to read the prospectus for the Neue Zeitschrift , written in 1834 and consisting in part of a critique of existing musical

journals, is to read a critique of Metternich’s central Europe, its images drawnfrom a common store of liberal-reformist objections to the times: “What, then,


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are the few present musical journals? Nothing but playgrounds for ossied sys-tems, . . . nothing but relics of aged doctrines to which adherence is more andmore openly denied, nothing but one-sidedness and rigidity. . . . None is capableof promoting the true interests of music; none is able to fulll the just demandsmade upon it.”12

Moreover for Schumann, as for the liberal, educated Germans who sawthemselves as participants in the project of nation building, the all-importantaspect of their work was its publicness, not its politics, and the publicness thatconcerned them was emphaticallynot that dened either by commerce or bystate authority. This was instead the publicness that Jürgen Habermas dubbed

the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit ), that is, a space for the exercise of rationalityand autonomous judgment. In eighteenth-century French salons and Englishcoffeehouses, as Habermas argued, “opinion became emancipated from thebonds of economic dependence.”13 In theory the public sphere was a neutral andaccommodating space of communication, but in practice it meant much morethan that to Germans. Reading and writing were not neutral activities, in eitherpolitical or cultural terms, especially in a period marked by as much censorshipas were the German states in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Since

the eighteenth century both had worked to question the sovereignty ofestablished authority and even to overthrow it; both were undertaken with moredeliberation and sense of purpose than that with which we run our printingpresses and web blogs today. And although censorship eased considerably afterthe failure of the revolutions in 1848, it did not end entirely, nor did the vitalcharge of the public sphere diminish. If anything, journalism and associationallife became all the more important, given that action in the streets (which liberalnationalists had rarely advocated) had proven so ineffective and, in the view ofmany liberals, misguided.

And Schumann certainly held a conception ofÖffentlichkeit , or an activistpublic sphere. This is revealed by the way he took to the printing press withreformist, even revolutionary purposes in mind. The musical times wereawry—an arid desert, “from which, even with the best of will, hardly a drop ofthe sap of life can be pressed,” or sometimes, on the contrary, a hothouse ofquickly wilting but extravagantly colored plants—and someone had to dosomething about it.14 Although his sale of the journal to Franz Brendel mainlybrought an end to his writing, it is no coincidence that when a moment he per-ceived to be of overwhelming importance came (the arrival of Brahms on hisdoorstep) it was to journalism he returned. “New paths” indeed.

Moreover behind Schumann’s attitude toward Meyerbeer, who came to sym-bolize all that was wrong with the musical scene of his day, one nds the tellingcontrast betweenÖffentlichkeit , the public sphere, and mere publicity or fashion,commerce. Meyerbeer’s sins, quite apart from the musical particularities of his

compositions, resided of course in his commercialism, but to put it slightly dif-ferently, in his failure to understand the public as anythingbut a marketplace,


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wherein value is determined not by the autonomous judgment of the enlight-ened and free individual but by an irrational clamor of an unthinking crowd.Hence Schumann’s infamous, but from this perspective philosophically andpolitically considered comparison of Meyerbeer to the “performers in Franconi’scircus,” and his operaLes Huguenots as a “farce at a fair for the purpose of raisingmoney and applause.”15 As conceived of at midcentury, the public sphere waspeculiarly vulnerable to both commerce and autocracy, and Meyerbeer playedthe systems of both.

But what exactly was either liberal or nationalist about this conception anduse of the public sphere? The liberalism of it is clear enough. These men and

women believed in freedom of speech, thought, association, and all that, but asthe historian Brian Vick has shown, the implications of such beliefs for theirunderstanding of the order of things in the world were extensive. Liberalsbelieved that the course of history involved the advance of culture, a progressfrom merely organic institutions to new institutions that would be increasingly“infused with spiritual, moral, and intellectual self-consciousness.”16 All had insome way absorbed the Kantian idealist emphasis on the importance of the con-scious mind, itself in a sense making the world. And they were nationalists, not

because they paraded around with their German ags, but because they shareda belief that the advance of culture meant a transition from communities ofpeople based merely on blood ties and extended kinship (these were unreectedinstitutions) to communities of people who were connected to places andcapable of forming more and more complex and participatory states.17 Thesecollections of people were marked, above all, by a community of mind, a“spiritual national unity,” in the words of the philosopher Jakob Fries, who wasat the time of Schumann’s early career the most famous post-Kantian philoso-pher and who held a post at Jena, from which, in 1840, Schumann had wangledthat honorary doctorate.18

Such communities also represented the eclipse of what was increasinglyregarded as the articiality and inauthenticity of cosmopolitanism, which cre-ated ties among people, to be sure, but ties that reected only privilege andcommerce, not authentic communal life. “Cosmopolitan community” was thusan oxymoron, sustainable only by people (aristocrats and so forth) so discon-nected from genuine human bonds as to be incapable of full maturity—inKant’s memorable phrase, “the ability to use one’s own understanding withoutthe guidance of another.” Enlightenment (again Kant: “man’s emergence fromhis self-incurred immaturity”), progress, freedom, and nation thus all belongedtogether, in an unbreakable bonding—or so it was thought.19

But none of this, neither freedom nor progress nor the common conscious-ness and self-awareness that liberals believed to be the essence of nationhood,existed automatically: again, Fries, “Spiritual national unity and personality, a

national intellect, are only formed from the scattered lives of individuals throughpublic opinion.”20 National consciousness had, in other words, to be constructed,


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inculcated through activities in the public sphere, through speeches and meet-ings, through monuments, organizations, scholarship, education, and, yes,musical performance. And people had to be free to undertake such participa-tion. Participating in the culture of nationhood took place in public, and thecommunity of the nation in which people believed and which people helped tocreate was a living community, made real through action and consciousness.

The degree to which Schumann shared such underlying assumptions, whichone nds articulated in many different ways, depending on the person—from abelief in local self-government as a school for national citizenship to advocacyof involvement in associational life of all sorts—can be found in the texts of

many an essay he wrote during his years of editorship and afterward. “Let us notbe mere spectators!” he remembered had been their battle cry, “Let us lend ahand ourselves for the glory of things! Let us bring the poetry of our art intohonor once again!”21 To quote again from the journal’s prospectus, Schumannwrote, “It seemed necessary . . . to create for the artist an organ which wouldstimulate him to effectiveness, not only through his direct inuence, but alsothrough the printed and spoken word, a public place , for him to express what hehas seen with his own eyes, and felt in his own spirit, a journal in which he could

defend himself against one-sided and false criticism.”22

At the same time, also in common with even the most ardent publicist,writing alone would not be enough to shape public opinion, a view he charac-teristically represented by posing a disagreement between Florestan and Eusebiuson the usefulness of journalism altogether. “What is a musical paper comparedto a Chopin concerto?” asks Florestan. “Away with your musical journals! Itwould be the victory, the triumph of a good paper, could it so advance mattersthat criticism would no longer be read.”23 Instead, as it had been for A. B. Marxa decade earlier, the gathering of a scattered community of conscious peoplehad also to be achieved through a new kind of concert programming that wouldbind together the great artists of the past with those of present and future. Theconstruction of an arc of historical continuity within the conscious nationalcommunity was only conservatism in our retrospective view. Schumann calledit “a sign of the enlightened artistic sensibility of our own era,” and as early as1828 he was writing to a friend, “Every question once asked of the past, we willnow put to the future, and we shall receive an answer.”24 For the 48er intellec-tuals in general, establishing and then sustaining these lines of continuity was away of promulgating the core values that dened the national community, a wayto make explicit their criteria for national authenticity.

Moreover they tended to believe that only the authentic would or could sur-vive; only the authentic was progressive in the truest sense of the word; and allauthentic art was, by the very denition of authenticity,national , the expressionof the most advanced and spiritually whole form of human organization, that of

the nation. As the most famous liberal nationalist of all, not a German but anItalian, Giuseppe Mazzini, wrote in his 1844Essay on the Duties of Man : “The


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means [of working for the moral improvement and progress of Humanity] wasprovided for you by God when He gave you a country; when, even as a wise over-seer of labor distributes the various branches of employment according to thedifferent capacities of the workmen, he divided Humanity into distinct groups ornuclei upon the face of the earth, thus creating the germ of nationalities.” Just ashe believed that people who lived in true nations, not “disgured” by “kings andprivileged castes,” would exist in a state of “harmony and fraternity,” so too did hebelieve that all progress, in cultural as well as political and economic matters, waspossible only when each person, “fortied by the power and affection of manymillions, all speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies, and

educated by the same historical tradition,” lived in such nations.25

The markedly utopian element in Mazzini’s thinking was not necessarilyshared, at least not to that extent, by other liberal nationalists of his era, but histendency to nd something inherently disturbing about nonnational aggregates,whether in cultural life or, as he often railed against, in the “egotism of caste anddynasty,” did nd echoes in many of his contemporaries, Schumann included.To return to Schumann’s suspicions about Meyerbeer, his criticisms often cen-tered on the problem of eclecticism in Meyerbeer, which is to say, lack of stable

national character: “Meyerbeer’s extreme externalism, his lack of originality andhis eclecticism, are as well known as is his talent for dramatic treatment, prepa-ration, polish, brilliancy, instrumental cleverness, also his considerable varietyin forms. It is easy to trace in Meyerbeer Rossini, Mozart, Herold, Weber, Bellini,even Spohr, in short, all there is of music.”26 Felix Mendelssohn, a musicianwhom Schumann of course admired, shared the same cultural habitus of a kindof soft-bordered but nationally constituted musical world. Not surprisingly hehad similar things to say about Meyerbeer, which likewise reected the Mazzinianand liberal nationalist distrust of eclecticism as disguring and inauthentic. In aletter to a friend written in 1831, three years earlier than Schumann’s infamousreview ofLes Huguenots , Mendelssohn described Meyerbeer’sRobert le Diable ashaving music that was “not bad at all: there is no lack of suspense, the right pun-gencies are tted into the right places; there is melody to be hummed, harmonyfor the educated listeners, instrumentation for the Germans, contredances forthe French, in fact, something for everybody—but there is no heart in it.”27

The search for music that would be heart-felt brings us in conclusion to aconsideration of the distinctive sense of place that went along with theconstruction of the nation through public activity. The nationalists of midcen-tury central Europe were place-makers, by their activities attempting to redeneLeipzig and Frankfurt and Berlin and Breslau as integral parts of somethingthey called Germany, not just seats of princes or centers of commerce. Place canbe something of a hidden dimension in the study of nineteenth-century musicalculture, but Schumann believed himself to be engaged at midcentury in a

struggle over places, some of which he believed had in effect been won over(though always in danger of being lost) and some of which had not, but all of


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which were signicant as sites of change and of resistance to it. The issue was not just people and music, in other words, but people and music in particular places.Musical improvement happened in these places, in cities, which had to be trans-formed from the places in which aristocrats, philistines, andSalonmenschenruled to the sites of musical and cultural renewal. One could see all this as fairlybanal. But at the risk of overinterpreting his geographical consciousness, onemight regard Schumann as someone who was, in concert with the nationalizingproject, trying to remake the map of central Europe from an assortment ofcommercial cities andResidenzstädte , dominated by court and purely commercialmusical establishments, into a genuinely national network of trueBürgerstädte ,

cities of autonomous, self-governing, self-regulating citizens, in which a newkind of cultural life, neither courtly nor commercial but authentically national,would replace both the oldand the degraded new or contemporary. If there wasa capital in this mental map (and there really was not, because the mental geog-raphy of all Germans, nationalizing or not, was profoundly anticentrist), it wasnot Berlin or Frankfurt or Bonn but, of course, Leipzig. Schumann repeatedlyreferred to Leipzig as “musically healthy” and by extension to other musicallyhealthy places as “Leipzigian.” Nor is it coincidence that Leipzig was the very

center of liberal nationalism both before and after 1848, the hotbed of discussionand debate, and above all the site of the rapidly mythologized Battle of theNations in 1813, which for most liberal nationalists was the ground zero of thenationalist project—that is, the point at which the old Germany came to an endand a new one began.

Schumann’s consciousness of this national geography was a constant in hislife and is nowhere better expressed than in his famous comparison ofMendelssohn and Meyerbeer, which begins with words that deliberately evokethe Battle of the Nations (Völkerschlacht ) and the possibility of the defeat ofFrance and all it symbolized: “Today I feel like a young warrior, who for the rsttime takes up his sword in a great cause. This small Leipzig, where questions ofworld importance [Weltfragen ] have already been decided, is called upon tosettle musical ones as well. Because here we see meeting, probably for the rsttime anywhere in the world, the two most important compositions of ourtime.”28 Geographically speaking, Meyerbeer was the ruler of a degraded andcommercial urbanity, fatally tied to princes and their false glitter, against whicha reformist, even revolutionary movement had to assert a new national urbanity,a nationalizing public sphere. Revolutions are, after all, rst and foremost urbanaffairs.

In this regard, at least, Brendel’s Neue Zeitschrift continued to represent amusico-geographical understanding of Germany very much in sync withSchumann’s own. Theodor Uhlig’s and others’ extensive reviews of Meyerbeer’sLe Prophète in 1850 carried forward, making even more explicit, Schumann’s

depiction of two musical cultures—an articial, outdated one and an authentic,progressive one—battling it out for dominance in the cities of Germany. “A false


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prophet,” declared Uhlig, “stalks through the regions of our disunited and unfreeGermany.”29 In the post-1849 era the failure to transform the musical culture ofGerman cities directly reected the failed effort at political reform, and theclearest demonstration of this was the very public, very ceremonial relationshipbetween Meyerbeer, the court Kapellmeister, and Friedrich Wilhelm IV, king ofPrussia and himself a false prophet, once seen as the potential leader of Germantransformation but now revealed as its most implacable opponent.30

Schumann himself, when he spoke privately or wrote publicly about the stateof cultural life in Germany after 1849, expressed discouragement and a sense ofisolation that one nds in many of the nationalist liberals. The small band of

like-minded people who would create a new national community through theiractivism and example now seemed smaller than ever, the threat of commer-cialism more widespread, and the power of the established and unfriendly insti-tutions more implacable. “The revolution has scattered us in all directions,” hewrote to Liszt, referring literally, to be sure, to the temporary exodus of musi-cians from cities under siege and revolutionary disruption.31 But the phrase alsoresonates with a sense that all momentum toward the cultural renewal thatprerevolutionary reformists had sought had been lost in the scattering of “gen-

uine music-lovers [wahren Kunstmenschen ].” “I have long known your zeal inthe cause of good music,” he wrote to D. G. Otten in Hamburg in 1849, “. . . thenews of which is carried, independently of newspapers, you see, by invisiblespirits. . . . Such thingsshould be discussed more in the press but rarely are,simply because most writers lack real knowledge or conviction—so things go,and so things will remain.”32 But despite this gloominess, he concluded with oneof the stock phrases of theBurschenschaften , those nineteenth-century studentassociations who embodied the revolutionary and reformist zeal of liberalnationalism: “Vereint vorwärts [forward united], is my greeting to you. We mustgo forward, never abandoning our effort to bring to the fore all that which weknow to be good and true [ gut und echt ].”33

Vereint vorwärts is not a bad summation of Schumann’s public activities inthe 1850s. Even if the future seemed at least as likely to lie in the hands of thecourt favorites as of the “gute und echte”Kunstmenschen , and even if nothing inhis nal six years of life suggested that the princes of central Europe were anymore inclined either to embrace political reform or a more progressive form ofnationally minded cultural patronage, he nevertheless retained a kind of loyaltyto the project of nationhood as conceived in the prerevolutionary decades—aproject of consciousness raising and public activism, which many liberals stillhoped would lead to the reformed world of which Mazzini spoke. Thus didSchumann the German live suspended between the old and the new, avatar of aliberalizing national community, which the failure of the revolution, had heonly known it, had excluded from Germany’s future for nearly a century to

come. Yet it is worth recognizing the coexistence of a national identity markedby soft boundaries and cosmopolitan awareness, not just out of fairness to


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28. R. Schumann, Music and Musicians , 193.29. Uhlig, “Zeitgemässe Betrachtungen,” 168.30. On the hopes and disappointments invested in Friedrich Wilhelm IV, see

Barclay,Frederick William IV , 52–167. On Felix Mendelssohn’s brief and ultimatelydisappointing efforts to work with the king in what liberals hoped would be pro-gressive directions, see Brodbeck, “A Winter of Discontent.”

31. Schumann to Liszt, May 31, 1849, inSchumanns Briefe: Eine Auswahl , ed.Karl Storck (Elberfeld: Wuppertaler Druckerei, 1905), 188–89.

32. R. Schumann,The Letters of Robert Schumann , 261–63.33. Schumann to D. G. Otten, April 2, 1849, inRobert Schumanns Briefe ,

254–55.


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2

Organizing German Musical Lifeat Midcentur yBrendel, Schumann, and the LeipzigTonkünstlerversammlungen and Tonkünstlerverein

James Deaville

In the desire to document the rise of German national identity during theVormärz , historians and musicologists have explored the various organizationsthat brought together musicians—more specically, amateur singers—for theostensible purpose of social interaction through collective performance. As suchscholars as Dietmar Klenke, Friedhelm Brusniak, and Heinrich Lindlar haveargued, however, associations like theGesangvereine (choral societies) and festi-vals like the Niederrheinisches Musikfest (Lower Rhine Music Festival) were alsopolitically charged.1 Perhaps their most subversive aspect is that such groups

and events assembled individuals at a time when citizens normally did notgather, thereby providing a forum for the discussion of the latest politicaldevelopments.

Despite the activity of these and other scholars, arguably the most signicantmusician gatherings in Germany at midcentury, the LeipzigTonkünstlerver-sammlungen (musicians’ assemblies) of 1847, 1848, and 1849, have remained all butunknown to scholarship (and that despite the indirect participation of RobertSchumann). In an important paper, Sanna Pederson has reported about the

meetings’ political ramications in light of the revolutions of 1848, yet the broadersignicance of these assemblies and the resultantTonkünstler-Verein (musicians’associations) for German musical life have yet to be explored.2 In this study Ireview varied documentation—correspondence of Schumann, reviews of theVersammlungen in the musical press, and the minutes (published and unpublished)from the core group’s meetings—to uncover the nature and signicance of themeetings in general and in relationship to Schumann. As we shall see, on the onehand they represented the rst attempt to gather German musicians for the purposeof having a dialogue about music, and as such established a precedent and laid a

15


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foundation for the national organization Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein andfor the eventual unication of Germany through theKulturnation .3 On the other,the meetings of the late 1840s provide the Schumann specialist with new perspec-tives on his activity and role in theVereinswesen of his day: his relationship to theTonkünstlerversammlungen was more involved than the silence of the secondarybiographical sources would suggest.

Pederson makes a strong case for the ideological and aesthetic background oftheTonkünstlerversammlungen in the HegelianWeltanschauung of Franz Brendel,Schumann’s associate in Leipzig and his successor at the helm of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (henceforth NZfM ) in 1845.4 As Pederson summarizes,

Young Hegelians like Brendel and Arnold Ruge “set out to push philosophicalidealism into the concrete realm of action.”5 For Brendel music making “wasan . . . endeavour directed by the goals of the human spirit” that should be pro-gressive and ultimately lead to freedom. Brendel’s musical assemblies of the late1840s were a manifestation of this spirit of human progress; he argued in the callfor such a meeting at the very beginning of 1847:

A gathering of German musicians and friends of music . . . [would] create a hith-erto lacking bond through lectures, discussions [and] acquaintances. [It would]collaboratively pursue the most important goals so that a true consensus mightbe reached and a collective will could oppose harmful inuences.6

Brendel called upon the annual national meetings of scientists and philologists,beginning in 1822 and 1846, respectively, as models for how musicians can takeconcrete action.7

However, when we examine Brendel’s specic goals of having an inuenceupon the practical state of music, establishing for example standards formusic teachers, Pederson’s assessment of the initialTonkünstlerversammlung may appear overly politicized. First and foremost Brendel entered into the idea ofa national gathering of musicians as a means for the reform of existing condi-tions, not for a revolution or an overthrow of the means of production; in doingso, he was (at least initially) advocating a goal not far removed from that whichSchumann promulgated for much of his life.8 It was as political events took theircourse in 1848 that the typically cautious Brendel and theTonkünstler-versammlungen took on the aggressively, overtly political position that Pedersonhas identied.9

In his introductory remarks to the assembly on August 13, 1847, Brendel makesit clear that he had entertained the idea of such a meeting for some time; it solidi-ed in the summer of 1846 through a chance encounter in Leipzig with two col-leagues, who agreed on the desirability of “a personal rapprochement of musiciansand the unied and decisive action that will result from it.”10 There exists no evi-dence that Schumann was involved in the planning of the event, yet shortly before

the assembly, in a letter dated August 8, Brendel received from the composer a seriesof proposals for public discussion (Figure 2.1 presents the text of the letter).


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Figure 2.1. Robert Schumann, letter to Franz Brendel, Dresden, August 8, 1847, inTheLetters of Robert Schumann , ed. by Karl Storck, trans. Hannah Bryant (London: John

Murray, 1907), 256–58.

Dear Friend,

Accept my hearty congratulations on the inauguration of your scheme, which

must have entailed much care and trouble in the preliminary stages. I may be able to dropin for an hour or so, but more of that later.

I have been defining my propositions more accurately this morning, and find that

my chief difficulty lies in choosing a form of expression. If I had time to work them out

in separate essays, this would certainly be best. But it would take time, a great deal of it,

especially as I am past the alphabet stage. I think the most profitable way will be for me

to give you a brief outline of my ideas, from which you can select anything you think suited for public discussion, mentioning my name or not, as you please [Author’s Note:

Schumann appears to be presenting Brendel with a true alternative, yet the tone and detail

of the arguments, as well as Brendel’s own actions in response, suggest that Schumann

did want to be associated with the proposal.]

[1] First, then, I think it desirable that a section should detach itself from the

Convention to consider the protection of classical music against modern adaptations. The duty of this section would be to obtain information of all such publishers –

that is, of all new editions of old compositions of importance; to see how far the original

was left untouched, or whether unwarranted alterations had been made; and finally to

report on the result of their labours at the next (as I hope) annual meeting of the

Convention.

[2] I should then like to propose that another section be formed for the research

and restoration of corrupted passages in classical works, in the sense in which I dealt

with it in my essay: On Some Presumably Corrupted Passages in the Works of Bach,

Mozart, and Beethoven ( Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, vol. xv, p. 140).

This section would, like the first, be required to search out and collect the

necessary material to lay before the next meeting…

The section given up to minute inquiry would render a very great service, for

instance, by looking into Mozart’s Requiem, about which the grossest misconceptions are

still current, for the existing version is not merely corrupt, but, except for certain

numbers, spurious.


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Thus Brendel’sTonkünstlerversammlung elicited the indirect participa-tion of Schumann, who allowed his own ideas to be expressed in a nationalforum, not unlike in the days when he edited the NZfM ; indeed, in the letter,to Brendel he suggests that a written format would have been preferable.11Schumann’s seemingly ambivalent attitude toward the assembly—he sent inpoints of discussion, yet he did not attend meetings—reflects his problem-atic relationship with associations in general, a topic to which this study willreturn.

And what were the proposals Schumann wished to have presented to his fellowGerman musicians? First, “the protection of classical music against modern adap-tations.” As he explains to Brendel, this duty would be fullled by a committee thatwould review the accuracy of editorial practices in new publications of importantolder compositions. Second, “the research and restoration of corrupted passages

Figure 2.1. Continued

[3] I should next like to raise the question of the use of French for titles, also the

misuse of Italian for marks of expression, by Germans in their own compositions. I

should be glad if you would move the abolition of French titles, and the rejection of suchItalian expressions as may be rendered as well, if not better, in German.

[4] Finally, the Convention should consider by what means their future meetings,

which will become, it is to be hoped, an annual institution, may be made to benefit and

encourage youthful composers especially. This end might be assured by a public

invitation, issued by a section told off for that purpose, to composers to send in

manuscripts of any important works (such as oratorios, masses, symphonies, string

quartets), the best of which be selected for performance at the next general Convention;

or again, by announcing a prize competition, or in some other way.

These, my dear Brendel, are my suggestions, which I leave you to bring forward,

either as your own or in any way you please. I feel how much easier it would be to say all

this in a few rapid, forcible words than to write it.

And now I want to ask you, if you are not too busy, to send me a line with the

proposed programme for both days, the 13 th and 14 th; I should like to know how the day

is to be divided, and also if anything will be done on Sunday. I may perhaps come for

Saturday or Sunday.

I was surprised to hear that you have chosen a president, as I think this should have

been done in full council. But I may be mistaken.


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Organizing German Musical Life at Midcentury 19

in classical works,” which Schumann himself addressed in an essay in 1841 andwhich particularly concerns Mozart’sRequiem . Third, “the use of French titles,also the misuse of Italian for marks of expression, by Germans in their own com-positions.” He asks Brendel to move “the abolition of French titles, and the rejectionof such Italian expressions as may be rendered as well, if not better, in German.”Fourth, future meetings (which he hopes will become an annual institution)should “benet and encourage youthful composers especially.” Schumann seesthis as occurring through a public invitation for the submission of scores forperformance at the next assembly or through a prize competition.

These practical proposals correspond both to issues that Schumann advocated

historically and at the time, and to Brendel’s overriding concern for the reform ofexisting musical conditions: the opposition of harmful inuences on Germanmusic. The broader issues they outline are the preservation of the classical heritage,the establishment of a German musical nomenclature (thus a unifying musicallanguage), and the promotion of the next generation of composers. Althoughthese matters are not ostensibly political, we can see Schumann here using theopportunity to present an agenda appropriate for an assembly of German musi-cians, many of whom he personally knew. In fact upon examining the list of 141

participants (selectively presented in Table 2.1), we would have to call the rstassembly at least quasi-Schumannian, given the names represented there, whichincluded the sympathetic Alfred Dörffel, Ernst Gottschald, and EmmanuelKlitzsch.12 Moreover, these and other Schumann supporters gured prominentlyin the discussions at the rst meeting.13 As already mentioned, the rst meetingwas primarily concerned with practical matters, which accounts for the largenumbers of music pedagogues and music directors in attendance (Table 2.2).

Table 2.1. LeipzigTonkünstlerversammlung participants, August 13, 1847

Name Profession Location

Gustav Albrecht Musiklehrer LeipzigC. F. Becker Organist LeipzigHerr Becker Finanzsecretair FreibergFanny Bergas Pianistin Altona

Robert Beyer Tonkünstler LeipzigC. F. Bierwirth Tonkünstler HamburgFerdinand Böhme Gesangslehrer am Conserv. LeipzigElisabeth Brendel Pianistin LeipzigF. X. Chwatal Musiklehrer MagdeburgConstantin Decker Pianist St. PetersburgAugust Dörffel Musiklehrer LeipzigM. C. Eberwein Musiklehrer DresdenHeinrich Enke Pianist LeipzigGustav Flügel Componist StettinRobert Franz Musikdirector Halle

(continued)


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Name Profession Location

Robert Friese Buch- u. Musikhdlr. LeipzigN. W. Gade Musikdirector LeipzigCarl Götze Hofopernsänger WeimarHerr Gotter Präcentor LeipzigErnst Gottschald n/a LeipzigW. R. Griepenkerl Professor BraunschweigHerr Haase Advocat LeipzigRaimund Härtel [Music publisher] LeipzigBaron v. Haugk n/a LeipzigMoritz Hauptmann Musikdirector LeipzigFerdinand Heinze Orchestermitglied LeipzigHeinrich Henkel Tonkünstler LeipzigErnst Hentschel Musikdir. u. Seminarlehrer WeißenfelsFriedrich Hofmeister [Music publisher] LeipzigAugust Horn Tonkünstler LeipzigLouis Kindscher Seminarlehrer DessauLouise Kindscher n/a DessauEmmanuel Klitzsch Gymnasiallehrer ZwickauJulius Knorr Musiklehrer Leipzig

Herr Kunstmann Kaufmann ChemnitzLouise Lallemant Pianistin LeipzigEmil Leonhard Componist LeipzigJ. C. Lobe Professor LeipzigIgnaz Moscheles Professor LeipzigJulius Mühling Musikdirector MagdeburgGustav Nauenburg Gesangslehrer HalleLouise Otto Schriftstellerin MeißenLouis Plaidy Lehrer am Conservatorium LeipzigGustav Rebling Musiklehrer Magdeburg

A. F. Riccius Musiklehrer LeipzigE. F. Richter Musikdirector LeipzigClara Riese Musiklehrerin LeipzigA. G. Ritter Musikdirector MerseburgAlbert Robinson Tonkünstler StockholmF. A. Roitzsch Musiklehrer LeipzigHeinrich Sattler Organist Blankenburg

am HarzHeinrich Schellenberg Organist LeipzigFriedrich Schneider Kapellm., Ritter DessauGustav Siebeck Musikdirector GeraXaver Sipp Orchestermitglied LeipzigFritz Spindler Musiklehrer DresdenN. Tautmann Violoncellist LeipzigF. W. Tschirch Musikdirector LiegnitzElise Vogel Concertsängerin LeipzigErnst Wenzel Clavierlehrer am Conserva. LeipzigA. Whistling [Music publisher] LeipzigC. F. Zöllner Director des Gesangvereins Leipzig

This table includes all seven women in Brendel’s list. Overall, women represent only 5 percentof the 141 participants at the assembly.

Table 2.1. Continued


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The participants assembled at 9 a.m. on August 13 in the hall of theGewandhaus . After Brendel’s words of greeting and extended introductoryremarks of justication for theTonkünstlerversammlung and a brief welcomingaddress by the assembly chair (Vorsitzender ), C. F. Becker, Brendel presentedSchumann’s letter as the rst item of business.

Brendel read the entire letter and, as he notes, “stayed then with the rst selectedproposal.” Figure 2.2 presents his accurate rendering of Schumann’s proposal. Heexplained that Schumann did not intend the abolition of widely used technicalterms likesonata and adagio , but rather of newly invented Italian expression marksand French phrases like “composé pour le Pianoforte et dedié.” The discussion, tran-scribed in the pages of the NZfM , favored the motion, with Brendel himself makingthe interesting distinction that “virtuoso compositions and ephemeral works cankeep the French titles, [since] these pieces in part have their audience in all lands . . . ,but truly German works that are intended for a German public should appear withGerman titles.”14 The nal motion, abridged and reworked into a positive statement,reads, “German composers should provide German titles.”15 It passed with asignicant majority. As a gloss to his transcript Brendel invokes the spirit ofSchumann to make this issue one of political importance: composers will reveal

themselves as German artists who identify with theirVolk , for whom “the battles forthe assertion of the awakening nationalism have not passed by without a trace.”16

Table 2.2. LeipzigTonkünstlerversammlung participants’ occupations,August 13, 1847

Musical NonmusicalMusiklehrer/in / Gesangslehrer 28 Advocat 4Musikdirector 13 Lehrer 3Orchestermitglied 13 Oberlandsg. Auscultat. 2Organist 11 Kaufmann 1Tonkünstler 8 Procurator 1Pianist/in 7 Präcentor 1Componist 3 Beamter 1Cantor 3 Finanzsecretair 1[Music publisher] 3 Schriftstellerin 1Professor 2Violoncellist 2Kapellmeister 1Violinist 1Clavierlehrer 1Flötist 1Hofopernsänger 1Kammermusikus 1Buch- u. Musikhdlr. 1

The designations of occupations are taken from the journal, except for the three musicpublishers, for whom Brendel has inexplicably not indicated any profession.


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Figure 2.2. Franz Brendel, “Die erste Versammlung deutscher Tonkünstler undMusikfreunde in Leipzig,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 27, no. 18 (1847): 108.

Among the items for discussion, a proposal of Herr Dr. R. Schumann was listed as the

first. Herr Dr. Schumann had sent to me several proposals with the comment that, if he

himself were hindered from attending, I should take over their presentation. Since the

proposer was not present, I accordingly opened the discussions, read the entire letter and

stayed then with the first selected proposal:

“Regarding the nature of French titling, the same regarding the misuse of

Italian expression markings in compositions by German composers–and the

abolition of all titles in French language and the removal of those Italian

expression markings that can be expressed just as well, if not better, in

German.”

I noted here that Herr Dr. S. did not intend to abolish such words as sonata,

symphony, allegro, adagio and the like, which–as technical expressions–have

long ago made their home [here]. Rather, the proposer had in mind the ever more

popular excess of newly invented Italian expression markings, as well as the

“composé pour le Pianoforte et dedié” and so forth in titles.

Unter den Gegenständen der Besprechung war ein Antrag des Hrn. Dr. R. Schumann als

der erste verzeichnet. Hr. Dr. S. hatte mir brieflich mehrere Anträge mitgetheilt, zugleich

mit der Bemerkung, daß, wenn er selbst zu erscheinen verhindert sei, ich den Vortrag

derselben übernehmen möchte. Da der Herr Antragsteller nicht zugegen war, eröffnete

ich demnach die Erörterungen, las zuerst den ganzen Brief vor, und blieb sodann bei dem

zunächst gewählten Antrag stehen:

“Ueber das französische Titelwesen, desgleichen über den Mißbrauch

italienischer Vortragsbezeichnungen in Compositionen Deutscher Tonsetzer,—

und Abschaffung aller Titel in französischer Sprache und Ausmerzung

solcher italienischer Vortragsbezeichnungen, die sich eben so gut, wo nicht

besser, in deutscher Sprache ausdrücken lassen.”

Ich bemerkte hierbei im Sinne des Hrn. Dr. S., daß hier nicht die Abschaffung

solcher Worte, wie Sonate, Symphonie, Allegro, Adagio u.s.w. gemeint sei, Worte,

welche als technische Ausdrücke längst das Bürgerrecht erhalten haben, im Gegentheil

daß hier der Hr. Antragsteller das neuerdings mehr und mehr beliebte Uebermaaß

neuerfundener italienischer Vortragsbezeichnungen, so wie auf den Titeln das “composé

pour le Pianoforte et dedié” u.s.w. im Auge gehabt habe.


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The continuing discussion on the rst day did not pick up on Schumann’sother points, but rather turned to questions of making unpublished musicavailable in print or copies, of opposing mechanical reprinting of music byGesangvereine and individuals, and of reforming the procedures for the testing ofnew organs. A late-afternoon concert included chamber music by Bach, Beethoven,Schubert, Schumann, and Flügel, in other words, an all-German concert (Table2.3 presents the concert program). On August 14 the dialogue focused on musiceducation, in particular the exclusion of second-rate compositions from musicpedagogy and the establishment of examinations for music teachers. At the end ofthe second day’s discussions Brendel broached the topic of the desirability of

performing early music; this was not directly taken from Schumann’s rst twoproposals, yet the issue would be identied with Schumann for anyone familiarwith his thought. After a series of lectures about the current state of music teaching,opera, and music theory, the 1847 assembly concluded with a concert of Germanorgan music, which included one of Schumann’s six fugues on Bach’s name from1845, and a banquet.

The 1847Tonkünstlerversammlung merits this closer investigation because itwas the assembly associated with Schumann. Not only did he indirectly address

the gathering, but one of his proposals was the rst point of business and itfound broad support, his music was heard at both concerts (one of only veliving composers on the programs), and a number of his friends and associatesfrom Leipzig were in attendance. Schumann did not need to be present to leavea mark on this historically signicant event, which would lead to two moreTonkünstlerversammlungen in successive years, even though current events ledto a substantial truncation of the 1848 and 1849 assemblies. At the same timeBrendel was able to accomplish his political agenda through open discussion oftopics that would unite German musicians in efforts at reform and progress.

It is interesting to note that, even though “Germany’s musical revolutionariespresented their most detailed and ambitious recommendations for bringingmusic into alignment with the new political order” at the second meeting, asPederson argues, that gathering was severely curtailed.17 What had beenannounced as a larger assembly was reduced to one day (July 26, 1848) “becauseof the state of affairs” (“in Folge der Zeitverhältnisse”), so that the meeting wasa “private one in a smaller, closed circle” (“eine Privatversammlung im kleineren

Table 2.3. Concert program, LeipzigTonkünstlerversammlung , August 13, 1847

J. S. Bach, Concerto in D Minor, performed by Ignaz Moscheles with quartet accompanimentBeethoven, Quartet in B-at Major, performed by David, Hunger, Gade, WittmannSchubert, Andante from Quartet in D Minor, performed by David, Hunger, Gade, WittmannGustav Flügel, Piano Sonata (manuscript), performed by Elisabeth BrendelAugust Riccius, “Waldweib,” performed by Frl. VogelSchubert and Schumann, Lieder, performed by Frl. Agathe and Hr. Götze


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geschlossenen Kreise”).18 The primary concern for Brendel at the second assem-bly was the continuation of the work in establishing a national organization.19

Brendel’s original intention for the 1849 assembly may have been for it toserve as the proper secondTonkünstlerversammlung , but political conditionsdid not improve to allow more than another one-day gathering, again inLeipzig, on July 26.20 The local musicians invited guests from afar, but Brendel’sreport lists only twenty visitors. This was his last attempt to stage a large-scaleTonkünstlerversammlung , until the renewal of the idea in 1859, ostensibly on theoccasion of the twenty-fth anniversary of the NZfM .

What happened to Schumann’s participation in those assemblies of 1848 and

1849? I believe that two related developments mitigated his further involvement:the creation of city-basedTonkünstler-Vereine and the politicization of the gather-ings. No scholar has yet noted the emergence of the LeipzigTonkünstler-Verein outof the rst assembly at the end of 1847 and Brendel’s intentions for it to carry onthe work of theVersammlung in regular meetings during the year. According to hisown assessment in early 1848 (Figure 2.3 ), the Leipzig society would be a chapterof a general or national musicians’ association (Allgemeiner Tonkünstler-Verein),which at rst would consist of chapters in nearby cities such as Magdeburg, Dessau,

Zwickau, and Dresden. This attempt to forge a national society of musicians seemsto have had success, since the Leipzig chapter numbered almost fty memberswithin its rst two months and by the middle of 1849 branches had been establishedin Leipzig, Berlin, Magdeburg, Dessau, Freiburg, Darmstadt, and Stettin.21

The NZfM published periodic reports on the activities of the LeipzigVerein ,which drew on the minutes carefully maintained by the chapter’s secretary.22These documents reveal a well-organized, active local society that was interestedin meeting on a regular, at least monthly basis for the purpose of intellectualexchange through presentations, musical stimulation through performances,and actions to support the larger organization and the other chapters. TheTonkünstler-Verein in Leipzig held its meetings and concerts on a biweekly ormonthly basis at least until the end of 1851. Here is where we will nd the con-tinuation of Brendel’s idea, which carried on beyond the collapse of the assem-blies in 1849. The minutes of theVerein unfortunately do not always recordprograms of performances; however, those that do make it clear that the con-certs featured works by Schumann.23

It was to the concept of theVerein and not theTonkünstlerversammlung thatSchumann objected in a letter to Brendel from late 1847, in which the composerrejected Brendel’s suggestion that he participate in the newly foundedVerein :

Please excuse me from joining your association, dear Brendel. You know thatI have always treasured freedom and independence, have never joined anassociation, whatever its character, and will also never do so in the future.Everyone must be allowed to full his responsibilities towards art in his own

manner, and so allow me my own.24


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Schumann’s explanation that he did not join organizations as a rule is supportedby research recently undertaken by Kazuko Ozawa.25 In tracking down Schumann’sactual relationships with contemporary societies, Ozawa has engaged in verydetailed research, with the results summarized in Table 2.4. From her documentswe can observe that Schumann was more broadly involved inVereine of his timethan previously thought. Still, few of these associations were initiated by Schu-mann himself, with the category “regular member” (ordentliches Mitglied ) par-

ticularly underrepresented.

Figure 2.3. Franz Brendel, “Bekanntmachung, die zweite Versammlung deutscherTonkünstler und Musikfreunde zu Leipzig im Jahre 1848 betreffend,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 28, no. 16 (1848): 95.

I still have to report on the creation of the Leipzig Tonkünstler-Verein, which has

been in place since the end of last year as a chapter of the national one that has yet to be

established. At the present it already has 47 members. Its goal is that of the national

assembly, and its structure is essentially the same as well. Proposals are made and

lectures are held… I want to express the desire that wherever possible similar

associations form in other cities–I am thinking first of Magdeburg, Dessau, Zwickau and

Dresden–before the next annual assembly. To that end, and to produce organizational

unity, [they should] procure our by-laws in writing. The existence of the national

Tonkünstler-Verein should in essence altogether depend upon such chapters, which are

its main rationale.

Noch habe ich zu berichten über die Errichtung des seit Ende vorigen Jahres bei

uns bestehenden “Leipziger Tonkünstler-Vereins”, als eines Zweig-Vereins des

allgemeinen, demnächst zu errichtenden. Dieser zählt bis jetzt bereits 47 Mitglieder. Sein

Zweck ist der der allgemeinen Versammlung, und die Einrichtung im Wesentlichen

dieselbe wie dort. Es werden Anträge gestellt, und Vorträge gehalten… Hier spreche ich

den Wunsch aus, daß wo möglich noch vor der nächsten Hauptversammlung sich

ähnliche Vereine an anderen Orten–ich denke zunächst an Magdeburg, Dessau,

Zwickau, Dresden–constituieren und zu diesem Zweck, und um Einheit der

Organisation zu bewirken, unsere Statuten abschriftlich von uns beziehen möchten. Die

Existenz des allgemeinen Tonkünstler-Vereins, –dies ist der Grundgedanke dafür–

beruht überhaupt wesentlich in solchen Zweigvereinen.


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The turn of political events in early 1848 caused the nascent organizationbehind theTonkünstlerversammlungen , with Brendel at its helm, to enthusiasti-cally embrace the revolutionary spirit of the times.26 As Laura Tunbridge sum-marizes, scholarship has established Schumann’s reluctance to participate in therebellions around him, even in Dresden.27 His interiority may be exaggerated in

the literature, as John Daverio argues, yet here the composer did withdraw fromthe political turmoil, which undoubtedly contributed to his nonparticipationin the revolutionarily chargedVersammlungen of 1848 and 1849.28 As Pedersonconvincingly posits, the general disillusionment over the failure to accomplishtrue changes in the musical realm ultimately led to the collapse of theTonkünstlerversammlungen shortly after the abbreviated gathering of 1849.29 Inhis published report on the assembly Brendel noted that one day was inadequatefor such a meeting, and if conditions were to become more favorable for anotherVersammlung , two or three days should be set aside (which happened in 1859).30However, a icker of the original concept for the Allgemeiner Tonkünstler-Verein persisted in the Zweigverein in Leipzig.31 Further research will be neededto determine whether the other local chapters survived after 1849 or whetherthe LeipzigVerein carried on its existence as an individual association, like themany local singing and orchestral societies of the rst half of the century.

The assemblies were not universally greeted with approbation. J. C. Lobe andthe Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung took issue with the need for and univer-sality of theTonkünstlerversammlungen in 1847 and 1848.32 It is true that Brendelwas not able to gather musicians from across the country at the meetings, andthe Vereine also largely established themselves in cities relatively close to Leipzig.Still, for the rst time, German musicians came together not to attend or per-form at a music festival like the Niederrheinische Musikfeste or those of theGesangvereine , but rather to discuss the state of the art and how it could beimproved. Here music participated in the nationalistKulturnation movement,

which encouraged the creation of associations and activities that instillednational identity through the identication and promotion of a common

Table 2.4. Schumann’s relationship with contemporary societies

1. Founding member ( Neue Zeitschrift , Abonnement-Concerte in Dresden, Chorgesangverein inDresden)

2. Regular member (Verein zur Errichtung einer Gemäldegalerie in Dresden)3. Extraordinary member (Düsseldorf Künstlerverein Malkasten)4. Corresponding member (Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst in Nederland)5. Honorary member (Euterpe-Verein, Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst in

Nederland, Universitäts-Sängerverein zu St. Pauli Leipzig, Association Royale des SociétésLyriques d’Anvers, Städtischer Männergesangverein zu Düsseldorf, Dresdener Liedertafel,Akademie der Tonkunst in Wien, Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, MusicalInstitute of London)

Summarized from Ozawa, “Robert Schumann.”


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German culture. The 1850s would bring forth such associations as the AllgemeineDeutsche Kunstgenossenschaft (in 1856) and the Deutsche Schillerstiftung (in1859).33 That the endeavor for music did not survive the 1840s can be attributedin part to its creation only one year before the rebellions; the organization couldnot congeal enough to weather the politically tumultuous times. NeverthelessBrendel’s intention to create an Allgemeiner Tonkünstler-Verein through theannual Versammlungen and, more important, the local Zweigvereine (branchsocieties) deserves recognition as the rst attempt to establish a national musicsociety in Germany, a bold and far-sighted plan.

The idea experienced a revival in 1859 with anotherTonkünstlerversammlung

in Leipzig, also engineered by Brendel but now with the support of Liszt.34

This assembly would lead to the creation of the Allgemeiner DeutscherMusikverein at the next meeting in Weimar two years later, an organizationthat would hold annual “assemblies” of musician

Documents

Rethinking Schumann