Music and madness have ever been allies: the composer, Robert Schumann, born 200 years ago this June, is our otherworldly tiptoeing genius plagued by celestial harmonies and voices from beyond the grave. It is surely no coincidence that his music ripples eternally through the filmscapes of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and ‘Willow’.

Musically Schumann represented a vanishing point, the vanishing point of the older ideals of Romanticism that were enshrined as much in literature as in music. After his death aged 46 in 1856, the century would roll out the scorch the earth stuff of Wagner and Mahler. But we get out the kid gloves for Schumann and whisper of leaves, moonlight, infinite darkness, glittering frosts of hard edges and evoke the keening ghost of Goethe.

‘Schumann’s music goes beyond the ear, it penetrates into the muscle by the pounds of its own beat, breaking further into the human organs, by the lavish raptures of his melodies,’ said Barthes, and continued somewhat erotically, ‘his music shudders with leaps of desire’.

Yet, his four symphonies are often dismissed. Conductors like Mahler and Weingartner redrafted his scores and altered his wandering tempos in an attempt to supposedly rescue the fragments of his genius from the pall of his poor orchestration. Yet his output was as varied as it was prodigious. He composed Masses, Requiems, oratorios, quartets, marches, fugues, scribbled ideas of operas, realized later by Wagner, but most come to Schumann through his piano music. Listen to Sviatoslav Richter’s peerless 1958 recording of the Piano Concerto in A minor, recorded behind the Iron Curtain and I defy you not to be moved.

So who was Schumann? History remains divided, mainly on how the imaginative, bookish young man from a middle class Zwickau family became an incarcerated madman at 43. His voluminous diaries and correspondence don’t offer conclusive proof: we read his early unhappiness in Leipzig studying law, his lack of funds, his piano unbearably out of tune, his cravats worn through. Law was only a pretence - he practiced the piano seven hours a day and tried to strengthen his finger with some, now notorious, contraption he fastened to the ceiling, referred to as a ‘chiroplast’ or a ‘cigar mechanism’. Whatever the device was, it ruined his finger and his nascent career as a pianist.

Later, we read something of the louche litterateur. His diaries fill with binge-drinking, hangovers, the occasional prostitute and ‘voluptuous night with Greek dreams’. There is an ‘English girl with the lisp of an angel’, the mysterious ‘La Faneuse’ and ‘Christel/Chiara’, the woman, academics assume, who gave him syphilis in 1831 and so sowed the pale spirochetes of his eventual insanity, though opinion remains divided. He considered himself cured of the pox after dunking his penis in Narcissus water, (as Schopenhauer marinated his in limewater).

A few male names crop up in his diaries too: Ludwig Schunke, the pianist and composer and later Joseph Joachim the violinist, In his later years Schumann wrote to Joachim “…between the lines of my letter there is a secret message that will break through later… I dreamt of you, dear Joachim, that for three days we were together. In your hands you were holding heron feathers, from which showered champagne…” Is this lovesickness, romantic prose at its gushiest or the visioning of a madman, predisposed because his sister had committed suicide before him and his mother suffered bouts of melancholy?

As a young man of letters, Schumann fell under the spell of ETA Hoffman’s strange tales of bewitched musicians, lovesick mechanical dolls and men who’d lost their shadows. ‘Read that accursed Hoffman in the evening… one hardly dares to breath whilst reading Hoffman… new worlds.’ (diary entries of June 5-6th 1831) Hoffman’s half crazy figure of Romantic composer, Kapelmeister Johannes Kreisler dominated the imaginations of many 19th century German composers. Brahms signed himself ‘Johannes Kreisler Jun.’, and Schumann’s piano work ‘Kreisleriana’ is supposedly an unsettling musical evocation of the moods of Kreisler. Certainly it is jarring, full of odd leaps with ‘no theme, no contour, no grammar, no meaning’ (Barthes).

Schumann married the pianist and child prodigy Clara Wieck in 1840. Posterity has been harsh to Clara, often painting her as a Yoko Ono, stifling her husband’s creativity and locking him up in a lunatic asylum so she could continue an affair with the young Brahms. Yet it was she who held the family together financially, putting her own compositional ambitions on hold, keeping up a punishing touring schedule as well as giving birth to 8 children. And it was her not her husband who braved the smoking streets of the Dresden uprising to rescue her children.

During his tumultuous and difficult courtship Schumann hid love notes as ciphers within his music. There’s Clara’s name spelled out over and over again underpinning the billowing stuff of the D Minor Symphony.

For most of the 1830s though, Schumann was better known as the editor of the slightly madcap magazine ‘Der Neue Zeitschrift für Musik’ that was launched from the crucible of the Leipzig coffeehouse ‘Kaffeebaum’ in 1834. Schumann later commented that had he not made himself feared as an editor he would not have managed to get his own works published. It was here he experimented with his 2 famous alter egos: Florestan and Eusebius. Some see in this the beginnings of schizophrenia but it was just as likely a Romantic literary device as he was constantly experimenting with alter egos. Vociferous, florid and self-righteous, the magazine attacked philistinism where ever it saw it: Rossini and soft porn Italian opera, the effete fingers of Liszt and the powders and perruques of salon music were high on their hit list. Its writers were to descry for decades ‘the circus of the moderns’. Their intellectual heir was Eduard Hanslick, their spiritual heir, Brahms. When eventually in a black cloud of despair, Schumann sold the magazine, it turned upon its old editor.

Despite the unrest of the 1830s Schumann wasn’t political unlike Wagner who was in the streets making hand grenades during the Dresden uprising. The ever expanding Schumann family fled Dresden after the May uprising and eventually ended up in Dusseldorf where Schumann was given a post of musical director and conductor. By then Schumann’s behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic and withdrawn - he was dismissed from his post. Once when an old friend wrote that he meant to visit him Schumann replied ‘I shall be delighted to see you but there is not much to be had from me. I hardly speak at all – in the evening more and most at the piano.’

As the 1850s progressed, his mental condition became increasingly fragile: he became afraid to climb a height in any building because he feared he might throw himself off. He was terrified of metal objects no matter how small. In 1853, he started to attend séances and imagined that Beethoven was trying to communicate with him by four knocks on the table. He was so impressed with the power of his kitchen table to conjure Beethoven, he promised to buy it ‘a new dress’, i.e a table cloth. No one knows whether Schumann’s fascination with the occult was a manifestation of his increasing illness or an attempt to explain his psychosis to himself. He believed the long-dead Schubert begged him to complete his Unfinished Symphony. The note ‘A’ was continually resounding in his ears and whole compositions seemed to materialise in his mind around it. Curiously enough it was this that drove the composer Smetana mad, who was also confined to an insane asylum because of progressive syphilis. (2nd String Quartet – hear the shrill sustained high notes on the violin) We now think that this is a form of tinnitus and prefigures deafness. Schumann quoted Schlegel in his ‘Fantasie’ preface long before his tinnitus: ‘Through all sounds there resounds in Earth’s variegated dream a hushed note, drawn out for whoever harkens in secret.’ Curious, though at the time he was likely talking about Clara. The celestial voices turned to demons and three years after the mastery of the Rheinish Symphony, he flung himself in his pyjamas into the freezing waters of the Rhine in February 1854 during the carnival season from where he was taken, at his own behest, to Endenich Asylum.

He died there two years later, plagued by voices telling him that he was sailing to the Arctic. He was no longer scribbling lieds and musical motifs but alphabetical lists of towns and rivers. He suffered progressive paralysis, speech and personality deterioration. The autopsy evidently revealed a yellowish gelatinous mass at the base of the brain, bone tumours at the base of the skull and a heart that was ‘big, flaccid, thick-walled, in all chambers symmetrically too large’.
Tragedy seemed to enfold many who comprised the Schumann family. Clara continued to play the concert halls of Europe swathed in black crinoline, largely estranged from her family. One son died of a morphine addiction, another languished for 31 years in Colditz lunatic asylum. Their youngest daughter, Eugenie fled to London to live with her lover, the singer, Marie Fillunger and popped up briefly in the New York Times in 1920 with her stoical sister Marie, penniless octogenarians begging for public assistance.

There is talk that Schumann’s last years were imprisonment, that during this period he stumbled across a new aesthetic, writing pieces his wife destroyed after his death, aged 46, because she thought them tainted by madness when they were in fact a new form. Indeed, it would take a séance in London in 1933 to unearth his last violin concerto from the state library of Nazi-ruled Berlin. It was violinist Jelly D’Aranyi, the great niece of Schumann’s old friend Joachim who heard the ghost voice of Schumann directing her to his lost violin concerto. (Joachim had hidden the concerto because he thought it too morbid.) When it was finally played in 1937, it was proclaimed to be the missing link between Beethoven and Brahms.
Roland Barthes, analyzing ‘Carnaval’ wrote: ‘In this fragmented world, distorted by whirling appearances… a pure and somehow terribly motionless element
occasionally breaks through: pain . . . . this essence of pain, is certainly a madman's pain . . . .’ I’m not sure that I agree - ‘Carnaval’ is a fiendishly difficult puzzle, filled with musical cryptograms, riddles, pastiches and the famous elusive Sphinxes but it also has moments of sugary, shimmering kitchness. If anything it has moments of proto-conceptualism. I think we pour too much lithium salts into the fissures and folds of his works. He is doomed to pathology not musicology yet his music lies somewhere between mystery and revelation.