The Beautiful Month of May, When the Buds Open — Notes on Schumann
Spring, which Heinrich Heine sang of in "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai" (In the beautiful month of May). Schumann wrote "Dichterliebe" as if to nestle close to that poem, and quietly embedded the same motif of May within his "Album for the Young."
The arabesque motif (C# - B - G# - F#) — the contour of that melody, containing a major sixth, secretly binds the two works together. Spring, love, and loss form a single constellation within Schumann.
Raised surrounded by books, Schumann viewed the world through a poet's eyes and expressed it in a poet's words. The words of the literary figures he engaged with — Heinrich Heine, Jean Paul, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Michael Ende — are dissolved into his musical scores.
The "Musical House-Rules" included in "On Music and Musicians" are still cited today as writing directed at young musicians, but their style is something that could be called an "arabesque woven from intellect and sensibility." If one follows only the text because it is easy to read, the result is the same as a performance that captures only the inflections of the melody — just as I did when I was a student.
If I were to describe Schumann's musical style in one word, I would say it is introversion. His writing style, characterized by dense intervals, is an expression of a sensibility in an age that could not harmonize emotion and life, as if he had expressed Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" as music.
The words Schumann had Florestan speak — "Where the eye without a machine thinks it sees clouds or fog, the eye equipped with a machine sees stars" — truly strike at the mystery of the Romantic era. It is the artist's mission to "send light into the depths of the human heart," and the performer's job is to cultivate the eyes for that purpose — through score reading, interpretation, touch, and pedaling.
This introversion also manifests as the "difficulty of sounding" in his orchestral works. It is hard to balance the harmony without listening closely to the other voices, and the inner voices are always caught between the upper and lower parts. Perhaps that is why Schumann wrote, "Join a choir and sing diligently, especially the middle parts. That will make you musical." Awareness of the inner voices is the very entrance to delving into Schumann's music.
The "Album for the Young" is also a family diary gifted on the seventh birthday of his eldest daughter, Marie. In this collection, where his daughter's growth and daily events are spelled out in sound, "First Loss" is particularly impressive. The image of Marie grieving over the small bird that died at the beginning of that year — that bird reappears exactly one year later in "Forest Scenes." This time, it merely sings in the twilight as a somewhat ominous presence. Loss in Schumann's music, once it visits, never disappears. It returns repeatedly, changing its form.
Regarding the role of the piano, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau wrote in "Following Schumann's Songs": "The musician becomes a companion on the poet's journey, and without stopping at a literal depiction of the program, supplements what is left unsaid or merely hinted at." The piano as prelude and postlude "delves into the life of the poem" — this statement strikes at the essence that runs through all of Schumann's piano music. The piano in his songs is not an accompaniment, but another poet.
At the Heinrich Heine Institute in Düsseldorf, many of Schumann's and Mendelssohn's autograph scores are preserved. In contrast to Mendelssohn's scores, which look like arabesques drawn precisely with a thin quill pen, one can see a burst of madness from Schumann's fingertips that seems to overflow even the staff lines. A human voice, which cannot be conveyed by the images stored on the IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project) online site, can be heard from his handwriting. The coda of the first movement of his "Piano Sonata No. 2" is madness itself.
When facing Schumann's works as a performer, they always pose questions. It is not about trying to solve the mysterious words, but about taking the form of the poem, the pulse of the poem, and the breath of the poem into one's own body. "If you do not have the courage and strength to be a creator and at the same time a destroyer, walking the path of wishes to the end in fantasies, it is better to avoid joining hands with the child of the moon from the beginning" — those words by Michael Ende are also a warning to those who intend to play Schumann.
"No day without a line" is a phrase by Paul Klee, who took up his pen while listening to the sound of military boots. What appears in the brushwork is not the shape of things, but the person themselves. I want to devote myself to the work until I am burned out and reduced to ashes. But the work is a phoenix — it revives again when the next performer appears.
Every time I face Schumann, I think of Marguerite Long's words: "One must mature, and only life can make one mature." All I can do now is continue to stand before that flame.