Schumann: Symphony no. 3 "Rhenish"
Composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Speaking of Romanticism, we’d be hard-pressed to find a better avatar of that aesthetic (and, indeed, that mindset and that lifestyle) than Robert Schumann. Schumann was as well known in his lifetime for his articulate and even poetic writing, for his one great love affair, and for his moods and melancholy and eventual madness as he was for his powerfully emotional music.
Initially trained as a lawyer, Schumann was inspired by the powerful performances of Paganini and Liszt to pursue serious piano study with the celebrated pedagogue Friedrich Wieck. Never one to do things halfway, Schumann practiced obsessively, even contriving a mechanical device that would strengthen his fingers even as he did other things; within a couple years he had injured his hand so badly he had to give up performing. But even as he was destroying his own manual dexterity, Schumann’s verbal dexterity was driving a career in music criticism that would soon make him among the most respected critics and public intellectuals in Germany. And he was beginning a romance with Wieck’s daughter, the brilliant teenage piano prodigy Clara.
It was in part Wieck’s efforts to keep the two lovers apart that drove Robert’s composition career: if he couldn’t be with Clara in the flesh, he could at least compose for her, and his first great solo-piano works of the 1830’s display his love for her even as they contain hidden messages tucked into their melodies and harmonies. Finally, in 1840, the 21-year-old Clara was able to win a highly public legal battle with her father and marry Robert.
Over the next 14 years the couple had eight children, Clara performed incessantly to make money for the growing family, and Robert experienced bouts of crippling depression that alternated with manic periods of extraordinary compositional energy. By 1854 his psychological distress was acute, and he experienced auditory hallucinations that, for a composer, were torturous: he heard original symphonies in his head, in their entirety – but he couldn’t pause them, which meant that he was unable to write any of them down. He attempted suicide that same year, throwing himself into the Rhine, only to be fished out and institutionalized for the remaining two years of his life. Clara’s visits caused him such anguish that his doctors forbade them, and the two were able to join hands just once more, in the hours before Robert died.
It’s more than a little ironic that the same river Schumann threw himself into was the one that had inspired his most popular and appealing symphony just a few years before. In 1850 he was named Music Director in the Rhineland city of Düsseldorf, and while his tenure there was short and unhappy, it produced the third (and last to be written) of his four symphonies in tribute to the region and the river. The Rhenish symphony captures the sights and sounds as the wide river rolls through the landscape, from the fields and forested hills to (in the fourth of its five movements) the splendor of the cathedral at Köln, culminating in a joyous finale.
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Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.