7. Viennese prospects, 1838–9.

On 19 March 1838 Schumann learnt that Clara had enjoyed a major triumph in Vienna and had been honoured with the title ‘Imperial-Royal Chamber Virtuoso’. That day he wrote to his brothers Eduard and Karl outlining his intention to settle with Clara in Vienna, where he planned to continue to edit the Neue Zeitschrift under the auspices of a Viennese firm, and where Clara, using her influence with the empress, might obtain a teaching post at the conservatory. A preliminary visit to the Austrian capital would be necessary before making the final move, planned for no later than Easter 1840.

When Clara returned to Leipzig on 15 May 1838, Schumann had just entered another depressive phase. Anxiety over his attempts to establish business relations with the Viennese publishers Mechetti and Diabelli, over-indulgence in drink, Wieck's steadfast refusal to come to terms and Clara's departure in early July for a month-long stay in Dresden all contributed to Schumann's mental near-collapse on 31 July. Recovery followed rapidly as he began to prepare for the exploratory trip to Vienna. He and Clara secretly exchanged farewells in mid-September and again later in the month, when he circled back to Leipzig from Zwickau. On 27 September he departed by mail coach for Vienna, ready to take his ‘first step as a mature man’.

Schumann reached his destination on 3 October, hatless and covered with dust but in unusually high spirits. His mood darkened considerably, however, when he failed to make headway with either the publishers Haslinger and Diabelli, or the Austrian court censor, whose approval was necessary if the Neue Zeitschrift was to be issued from Vienna by January 1839, as Schumann hoped. Suspecting that Wieck was responsible for his cool reception by the Viennese authorities, he resigned himself, by late November, to keeping his journal in Leipzig.

In spite of this setbeck, Schumann took some consolation in Vienna's rich cultural life. Regular visits to the opera and theatre rekindled his interest in dramatic music. In the renowned pianist Sigismond Thalberg he found a ‘modest and decorous’ artist among a social élite that he otherwise considered ‘a bunch of gossips’. Writing to Raymund Härtel on 6 January 1839, Schumann could barely contain his excitement over the cache of unpublished compositions by Schubert he had recently been shown by the latter's brother Ferdinand. Deeply impressed by the monumental Symphony in C (d944), he arranged for its première at a Gewandhaus concert under Mendelssohn's direction (21 March 1839). In his celebrated review of the symphony (NZM, xii, 1840), Schumann extolled the work's ‘heavenly length – like a thick novel in four volumes by Jean Paul’. The review was written with a steel pen Schumann had discovered on Beethoven's grave, in a symbolic gesture prefiguring the stylistic synthesis he would achieve in his own Symphony in B op.38.

When it became clear that he would not find a new home for his journal in Vienna, Schumann turned to writing and composing. In November he began a ‘Brautbuch’ for Clara in which he recorded landmark dates in their relationship and adages on married life. An important article for the Neue Zeitschrift on the concerto occupied him in December. By early in the new year, he had even taken a composition student, a ‘hectic fellow’ named Rösle.

After six months of relative inactivity as a composer, Schumann was slow to establish a regular rhythm of creativity. Although he finished a little piece for Clara on 12 November (Fata Morgana, later published as no.14 of the Albumblätter op.124), the following weeks brought only fitful starts on a variety of projects. Within a month, however, he had overcome his creative block, and soon a young runaway, Franz Jüllich, was acting as his amanuensis in exchange for lessons. Before leaving Vienna, he could boast of having made significant progress on about a dozen keyboard pieces. Responding to Clara's request to simplify the ‘far too difficult’ last movement of the G minor Piano Sonata, Schumann drafted a completely new finale in mid-December. Before the year was out, he had probably written two nocturnes (subsequently issued as the first two items of Bunte Blätter) and the Scherzo, Gigue and Romanze which he later rounded off with a Fughette and published as op.32. At the turn of the year came sketches for an Allegro in C minor and by 24 January 1839 a draft for a concerto movement in D minor. It is also likely that the Arabeske op.18 and Blumenstück op.19 were completed during the same month. Another work from this period, which Schumann called Guirlande and described intriguingly as ‘variations, but not on a theme’, is probably lost. But in the composer's view none of these pieces was as significant as the Humoreske op.20 on which he worked between January and mid-March. At the same time he produced sketches and drafts for Faschingsschwank aus Wien op.26, though the work was not ready for publication until May or June 1840, and did not actually appear in print until August of the following year.

In a long diary entry of 20 March 1839, Schumann expressed a desire to leave Vienna within a fortnight. Then on 30 March he received word of his brother Eduard's grave illness, alarming news that motivated his composition of four character-pieces collectively titled Leichenphantasie (‘Corpse Fantasy’). This grim designation was altered to Nachtstücke, an allusion to a series of eight stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, when the work appeared as op.23 in June 1840. Schumann left Vienna on 4 April 1839, but when he arrived in Zwickau on 9 April, Eduard had already been dead for three days. His home town, Schumann noted in his diary, made the impression of a place ‘now completely extinct’.

The compositions of Schumann's Viennese period cover a broad range of genres and styles. Works in the larger forms appear side-by-side with character-pieces and cycles of miniatures. In almost all of them, we sense the emergence of a more accessible strain in the composer's art, a stylistic shift related to his desire to cultivate a larger market for his music. Most striking, however, is the tendency to conflate larger and smaller forms and a resultant dialectic between accessibility and esotericism. Although Schumann appeared to dismiss the Blumenstück (and the Arabeske as well) in a letter of 15 August 1839 as a work ‘for ladies’, it unfolds as a rhapsodic variation form on two ideas of which the first gradually yields primacy to the second. On the surface a kaleidoscopic array of miniatures, the Humoreske is in fact articulated into a series of four or five larger movements, the whole unified tonally by the pairing of G minor and B (a dualism familiar from Kreisleriana) and thematically by a web of recurrent melodies. Conversely, the sequence of movements in Faschingsschwank aus Wien suggests the pattern of a sonata, but on reflection the ‘higher’ form emerges as a cycle of character-pieces in disguise. Schumann's quotation of the Marseillaise in the first movement is only the most obvious sign of his attempt to strike a popular (even political) tone.

Schumann, Robert