3. The decision for music: Heidelberg, 1829–30.

As early as August 1828, Schumann contemplated a move to Heidelberg, ostensibly to spend a year at the university under the jurists Karl Mittermaier and A.F.J. Thibaut. He left Leipzig in May 1829 and after passing through Frankfurt quickly assimilated himself into the easy-going pace of life in picturesque Heidelberg. Although his certificate of study from the university (dated 10 September 1830) confirms his enrolment in courses on Roman, ecclesiastical and international law, his friend Eduard Röller, echoing Flechsig's report on the year before, claimed that Schumann ‘didn't attend a single lecture’. He did, however, take private lessons in French, Italian, English and Spanish, and also ran up a considerable debt with a local moneylender. After matriculating at the university on 30 July 1829, he made plans for a trip to Switzerland and Italy that would extend from 28 August to 25 October. Enchanted by Rossini's operas and the bel canto of the soprano Giuditta Pasta, he wrote to Wieck that ‘one can have no notion of Italian music without hearing it under Italian skies’.

Once resettled in Heidelberg, Schumann kept busy with a broad range of musical activities. In Anton Töpken he found a willing partner with whom to explore the four-hand piano repertory; both friends also experimented with a chiroplast (or ‘cigar-mechanism’, as Schumann called it), a popular finger-strengthening device that may have caused the ‘numbness’ in the middle finger of his right hand, of which Schumann first complained in January 1830. Early in that year his performance of Moscheles's variations on La marche d'Alexandre in a concert sponsored by the Museum (a musical club consisting chiefly of students) earned him the epithet ‘darling of the Heidelberg public’. While Schumann probably learnt little of jurisprudence from Thibaut, the latter's Über Reinheit der Tonkunst (1825) deeply affected his musical-historical thinking; so too did his participation in readings of Handel's oratorios (with up to 70 musicians) in Thibaut's home. His attendance at one of Paganini's Frankfurt concerts in April 1830 provided a musical stimulus of a very different but no less compelling kind.

In a self-analysis entered in his diary during the early summer, Schumann claimed to be ‘excellent in music and poetry – but not a musical genius; [my] talents as musician and poet are at the same level’. But by July he was prepared to opt for music. Writing to his mother early in the month, he prepared her for the inevitable by pleading a lack of the ‘practicality’ and ‘talent for Latin’ that a successful lawyer must possess. Then in a letter of 30 July he outlined his plan to resume musical studies with Friedrich Wieck before spending a year in Vienna under Moscheles. Distressed by her son's decision, Johanna Schumann nonetheless complied with his request to solicit Wieck's opinion. Wieck replied in early August, promising to make Schumann into a greater artist than Moscheles or Hummel, but insisting that he take daily piano lessons, study music theory with a teacher of Wieck's choice and agree to a review of his progress after a six-month trial period. Schumann's mother gave grudging approval in a letter of 12 August.

The compositions either begun or completed in Heidelberg grew out of a milieu in which convivial music-making played an important part, but they also reflect Schumann's growing fascination with early music and contemporary virtuoso idioms. Among the ‘shorter piano pieces’ mentioned in his Projektenbuch for 1829 and 1830 is a set of six Walzer, known to us through the versions of three of these dances later incorporated into Papillons. A series of variations (unfinished, but subsequently mined for the Intermezzos op.4 and Allegro op.8) on the ‘Campanella’ theme from Paganini's Violin Concerto no.2 was probably inspired by Schumann's encounter with the violinist's technical wizardry in the April 1830 concert. During the spring or summer of the same year, Schumann set to work on a piano concerto in F, an ambitious project that occupied him intermittently for about two years. While the solo portions of the first movement were completed by August 1831, and the remaining two movements had been partially drafted by May and November respectively, the concerto appeared in a list of projects dated August 1832 as ‘yet to be finished’. When he approached Hummel as a possible teacher in August 1831, Schumann sent him the solo exposition of the work's first movement, described in a nearly contemporary diary entry as ‘the first of my pieces to tend towards the romantic’. The C major Toccata (originally Etude fantastique en double-sons), parts of which may date back to late 1829, was completed in the spring of 1830, but was reworked in 1833 and published (in this later form) as op.7 in 1834. Both versions are characterized by rapidly alternating double-notes and motor rhythms, and thus represent an attempt to synthesize the chief musical stimuli of Schumann's Heidelberg period: Paganinian virtuosity and Baroque propulsion.

Though first mentioned in a diary entry of 22 February 1830, the Abegg Variations occupied Schumann mainly during July and August. The first work completed after his decision in favour of a musical career, it was issued in November 1831 as his op.1. With the Abegg Variations Schumann presented himself to the ‘great world’ as a virtuoso-composer in the tradition of a figure such as Moscheles, whose Alexandre variations served as a model for the projected version of the work with orchestra (probably begun in the summer of 1831). In addition, Schumann's variations also disclose a fanciful dimension in the generation of the theme from the surname of the work's probably fictional dedicatee, Pauline, Comtesse d'Abegg. The musical cipher inspired a subtle approach to motivic development; as the piece proceeds, less attention is lavished on the musically enciphered name than on the possibilities of the two-note segment (A–B ) with which the theme begins.

Schumann, Robert