5 Piano works II: afterimages

l au r a t u n b r i d g e

Faces, not masks: Schumann’s comparison of the Davidsbündlertänze to

Carnaval suggests that his later piano works explore a different musical ter-
ritory from the ciphers, rebuses and radiant texts discussed in the previous
chapter.1 No longer are the members of the Davidsbund dressed as commedia
dell’arte figures, or is Paganini seen in a magic circle; but while the images of
the later music are less artificial – the mask is dropped – they are somehow
also less immediate, haunting the listener as does a distant memory. The
technical reasons for the change are complex. It certainly involves an altered
use of quotations, both from Schumann’s own works and Clara’s; develop-
ments in his harmonic, melodic and rhythmic language; and his occasional
evocation of music and voices ‘aus der Ferne’ (from the distance).
The first of the Davidsbündlertänze took its musical motto from a
mazurka in Clara’s Soirées musicales, Op. 6, which Schumann had reviewed
in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on 12 September 1837 (signed ‘Florestan
und Eusebius’), the day before Clara’s eighteenth birthday, when she had
consented that he might ask for her hand.2 The Davidsbündlertänze, perhaps
more than any other of Schumann’s works, express love and hope for their
union.3 What is more, Clara’s influence over Schumann’s piano music can-
not be overestimated, either as creative muse or as performer.4 His greater
emotional stability (particularly once her father’s objections to their mar-
riage had been overturned by the courts) encouraged him to be produc-
tive, while his increased personal responsibilities seemed to have inspired a
different approach to composition; he became more concerned with public
success, something that manifested itself most obviously in his turn to larger
forms such as symphony and oratorio, but that also influenced the manner
of his solo piano works – alongside the difficult Kreisleriana, for example, he
wrote the more accessible Kinderszenen. In the Davidsbündlertänze it is clear
that even if Schumann still felt an outsider at the masked ball, he now at least
had the emotional confidence to be able to enjoy his own – undanceable –
dances.
The Davidsbündlertänze were published in two volumes in 1838. In this
edition each movement was signed ‘F.’ or ‘E.’, continuing Schumann’s use
of Florestan and Eusebius as alter egos from his criticism (in contrast to
Carnaval, which titled movements ‘Florestan’ and ‘Eusebius’, these are not
[86]

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 87 Piano works II: afterimages

so much portraits of their characters as their supposed compositions). The

last numbers of each volume bore enigmatic inscriptions: at the close of
No. 9, ‘Here Florestan stopped, and his lips trembled sorrowfully’; for No. 18,
‘Quite redundantly Eusebius added the following; but great happiness shone
in his eyes all the while.’ Not for the first or last time, Schumann invokes
extra-musical associations to remark on and in some ways explain peculiar
musical features – in this instance, Florestan’s and Eusebius’s interjections
correspond with each volume unexpectedly ending in C major, while the
basic tonality of the cycle has been B minor; the unexpected tonal close might
be thought the result of their poetic additions. The two characters have cer-
tain stylistic and affective traits: as in the Fantasiestücke, Eusebius was linked
with the marking innig (intimate) and Florestan with rasch (quick or hasty).
Florestan’s signature in the Davidsbündlertänze was often associated with
the designation mit Humor; the verse originally included by Schumann at
the head of the collection referred to Lust und Leid, laughter and sorrow, a
juxtaposition of moods that runs throughout the dances, and which fore-
casts the affective changes of pieces like Kreisleriana and the Humoreske –
the latter Schumann described as his most melancholy composition.5
Clara’s motto is the first of many quotations embedded in the eighteen
movements of the Davidsbündlertänze, some of which are taken from Schu-
mann’s earlier works: ‘Promenade’ from Carnaval and a sketch from the
abandoned variations on a theme from Paganini’s La Campanella appear in
No. 3, and Papillons in no. 17 (bars 35–6). Unlike quotations in the Impromp-
tus and the Concert sans orchestre these citations tend not to come across as
interpolations (there is one notable exception, to which I will return), but
as integral to the musical texture and structure. Clara’s motto, for example,
is not left to stand alone, but is extended to propel the work’s opening ges-
ture and, as Charles Rosen has discussed, becomes a continuous presence
of which listeners are barely aware.6 The distinctive scalic ascent of the first
movement of Papillons is not remarked on in writing in the score as it was in
‘Florestan’ from Carnaval, but is transferred into a bass-line and coincides
with the resolution of chromatic voice-leading (bar 35).7 In other words,
quotes are not simply framed; they are integral to the movement’s structure,
our awareness of which is enhanced by their recognizability.
Quotation also functions as a large-scale, inter-movement structural
marker; for example, the literal return of material from the second move-
ment at bar 51 of the penultimate movement (No. 17) has been thought
to assert the cyclic organization of the Davidsbündlertänze.8 Its placement,
however, is unusual: typically, material from the very beginning would be
expected to reappear at the very end. Perhaps as a result of its preemptory
position, though, the quotation from the second movement is far from a

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 88 Laura Tunbridge

Example 5.1

XVII.
Wie aus der Ferne. = 126.

consolidation of what has gone before. Movement 16 – Florestan’s ‘Mit

gutem Humor’ – is the only dance that does not reach a formal close. Fol-
lowing its initial quaver-driven scherzo in an unstable G major (that keeps
lurching towards E minor), the somewhat slower B minor trio is diverted
off course, never returning to the first section, instead drifting into the next
movement. The diversion begins, ironically, by what seems to be an attempt
at quotation, or at least cross-reference: the trio takes its initial rhythm and
three forte quavers from the upbeat to bars 3–4.9 Unlike the scherzo, whose
dynamic flourish marks a cadence, the trio’s forte does not: the three qua-
vers ring out an octave F sharp, apparently determined to prevent the music
from making its way back to the tonic (Ex. 5.1). This strange arrest in the
harmonic movement seems to affect the rhythmic impulse, for the quavers
smudge into syncopated crotchets, sinking through the register to an F sharp
pedal that continues into movement 17. This penultimate dance is marked
Wie aus der Ferne (as if from the distance). A sense of space and depth is sug-
gested by the lack of a frame between movements, by the permanently lifted
dampers (a device Schumann also used in the third of the Nachtstücke) and
by the imitation of the soprano melody in the bass, as if an echo (bars 1–16).
Berthold Hoeckner, taking his cue from Franz Brendel’s description of the
Fantasiestücke (Op. 12) as landscape painting (especially ‘Des Abends’ and
‘In der Nacht’), describes ‘Wie aus der Ferne’ as ‘a landscape with a blurred
harmonic background against which melodic shapes stand out like sunlit
objects’.10 The sun’s light seems strongest on the reprise of the second move-
ment from bar 51, with its change of key to B minor and remembered
melody. This extended passage is more of an interpolation than Schumann’s
other quotations in the Davidsbündlertänze; the recalled music appears in
its complete form, now with repeats. Notably, the one aspect missing from

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 89 Piano works II: afterimages

Example 5.2

Stimme aus der Ferne.

its otherwise exact return is the marking innig. Recast as a ‘sunlit object’,
the music loses its intimacy – we watch it, we hear it, from a distance. Yet the
memory continues to haunt the cycle; the B of the final chord becomes the
soprano voice of the next movement in C major, a move that means that
the piece in which the conclusion of the cycle seemed most likely to occur
is left open-ended. The actual final movement seems in this context like
a tonal bookend, providing outside support for the inner movements but
with little content of its own beyond reasserting the ‘official’ tonic of the
cycle – as mentioned, Eusebius added it ‘quite redundantly’.
Another distant voice, another quotation, is heard in the last of Schu-
mann’s Novelletten, Op. 21. Again, this collection of pieces was associated
with his prospective happiness with Clara: he told her she appeared through-
out, ‘in all possible places and situations’.11 In the final movement he quotes
another of her pieces from Soirées musicales, ‘Notturno’, marking it Stimme
aus der Ferne (voice from the distance; Ex. 5.2). Hoeckner and Daverio have
discussed how Schumann’s interlocking of two previously composed Nov-
ellettes sets up the voice from afar: the dotted pedal of the second trio (orig-
inally a D major Novellette) grows quieter to usher in Clara’s languorous
melody, which is brought closer to the surrounding music on being absorbed
into the next section in a more lyrical incarnation.12 The Notturno reap-
pears in the movement’s conclusion, augmented but at its original pitch (in
F major, starting on A); perhaps significantly, its slightly varied ending is
marked innig, as though the distant voice has been internalized. As men-
tioned in the previous chapter, the final sections are marked Fortsetzung

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 90 Laura Tunbridge

(continuation) and Fortsetzung und Schluss (continuation and conclusion),

terms probably borrowed from serializations of articles in journals such as
Schumann’s own Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The composer’s use of them
here might have been intended to draw attention to the process by which
he treated Clara’s Soirées musicales: first reviewed in words, then quoted
in music, then edited or recomposed and brought to what was perhaps a
conclusion different from what she intended. Liszt described Schumann as
having ‘turned musical criticism into a literary object’; it seems as if, here,
he turned it into music itself.13
Schumann’s playful approach to form in the Novelletten derived, accord-
ing to Erika Reiman, from the narrative strategies of Jean Paul.14 A darker
world-view and even more unorthodox musical composition seems to have
been encouraged by another of the composer’s favourite authors, E. T. A.
Hoffmann. The Fantasiestücke of 1837, Kreisleriana of 1838 and the
Nachtstücke of 1839 all respond to Hoffmann texts, both in terms of their
subject matter and structurally. The Fantasiestücke inaugurated Schumann’s
use of poetic cycles, and in its establishment of tonal coherence between
movements through less traditional harmonic relationships – here, by pair-
ing keys related by a third (a practice continued in subsequent works) –
might have referred to Hoffmann’s unusual means of connecting sections
of his texts. Kreisleriana took its movement titles from the same book on
which the Fantasiestücke were based, Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke in Callots
Manier. But it also seems to have been inspired by Hoffmann’s Lebensan-
sichten des Katers Murr: nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters
Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern: a novel that randomly
intersplices the memoires of the tomcat Murr with the biography of his
master, the musician Kreisler.15 The musical structures in Kreisleriana seem
to owe something to the novel’s narrative form, not only, as in the earlier
works, abruptly changing affect between movements, but also doing so
within them.16 The transitions between sections are often violent (‘some-
times your music actually frightens me’, Clara told Schumann on first seeing
the score): a particular figuration will be established, primarily by repetition,
and then suddenly switch to another, whose relationship to the former is
not always obvious.17 In the seventh movement, Sehr rasch, tumbling semi-
quavers in the right hand, accompanied by accented onbeat broken chords
in the left, dominate the first 41 bars, and are then displaced by a semiquaver
theme that begins in the bass and gradually moves upwards, supported by a
quaver figure that is varied, becoming legato and syncopated, between bars
54 and 70. The subsequent return to a variation of bar 9 onwards, at an even
faster tempo, suggests a kind of ternary form, but suddenly a chorale enters,
piano, slower and, perhaps most surprisingly, cadencing on to B flat. Its
melody bears a skeletal resemblance to the opening, tempestuous C minor

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 91 Piano works II: afterimages

Example 5.3

Example 5.4

theme; as if to confirm its distant relation (and perhaps grant it redemp-

tion), on its repeat, the chorale shifts up a fourth to C minor’s relative major
E flat, the key in which the movement ends (Ex. 5.3). The seventh move-
ment’s harmonic open-endedness interrupts the cycle’s tonal pattern: after
the D minor opening, it alternates agitated G minor movements (3, 5, 8)
with slow ones in B flat major (2, 4, 6).
Rhythm drives the music of Kreisleriana, but just as its harmonies disrupt
rather than define the underlying structure, the blows on the body (which
Roland Barthes famously wrote about) are not the regular throb of a dance
but jolts that throw the listener and performer off balance.18 In the last
movement, the bass does not support the burbling top line by giving it a
firm beat, and so sense of metre, but gently displaces it; the effect is not so
much of playfulness, as the movement’s designation implies, but of anxiety
or teasing (Ex. 5.4).19 Even in the second section (bars 25–49), where the
bass has a melody in common duple time and a relatively regular rhythm,
it is made to struggle against its simplicity by having to break its parallel
octaves, despite its being easy for the performer to play the notes in unison.
The melody of bars 74–113 is submerged between bass and treble lines, and
the pedalling in particular obliges the performer to use maximum strength
to extract the tune (perhaps that was what Schumann meant by the marking

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 92 Laura Tunbridge

Mit aller Kraft – with all your strength!). On the opening’s return, in bar 114,
the wayward bass line seems to have become still more reticent, dropping
out entirely in bar 125. The extent to which the metre is displaced can be
gauged by observing that it is difficult to remember after hearing the piece –
or even between sections – where the rhythmic blows fell: all we have are the
aural bruises that change colour with time, eventually fading into normality.
Against the emotional and structural complexity of Kreisleriana, Schu-
mann’s most popular work, Kinderszenen, strikes a radical contrast. Debates
as to whether this music is for or about children seem best solved by Liszt,
who imagined the pieces as stories to be read to children; they are probably
too hard for them to play.20 Schumann pursued many of the same musi-
cal and poetic features as in his other piano works: movements 1 and 4,
and 2 and 6, are connected motivically; the last three movements revolve
around the tonal dualism of E minor and G major; and vigorous, repeated
rhythmic patterns drive movements such as ‘Hasche-Mann’ and ‘Wichtige
Begebenheit’, while ‘Bittendes Kind’ and ‘Kind im Einschlummern’ entwine
melodic and accompanimental figuration almost as much as movements
from Kreisleriana. As in the Davidsbündlertänze and the Novelletten, towards
the end of the cycle a voice enters – in this case, that of ‘the poet’. If we follow
Liszt’s interpretation, and consider the final movement as the poet’s attempt
to speak directly to the children rather than tell them a story, we also have
to admit that while this music is the hardest to understand, it is because it
seems the least – not the most – profound communication. Having happily
told tales, the music seems to struggle to find its own voice: beginning in
chorale fashion, none of its opening phrases finds its way to the tonic G
major: starting from a V7d chord, bar 4 cadences on to the dominant, D;
the next bars seem to move on to a chord of A major, but there is no root
until the perfect cadence on to A two bars later (Ex. 5.5). Bars 9–12 slip into
conventional lyrical piano figuration, with a sustained melody accompa-
nied by falling quavers, pausing over diminished seventh chords on F sharp.
The following recitative passage is based on two implied harmonies, built
on diminished seventh chords on D sharp in its first inversion, and on A
sharp. While the recitative is perhaps the most overt attempt at vocal expres-
sion, its flourishes only lead back to a repetition of the chorale, which now
ends in G major. What has the poet said? Somehow the borrowed, multiple,
distant voices of the Davidsbündlertänze and the Novelletten seemed more
convincing: we might now see the poet’s face, rather than a mask; but his
voice remains unclear.
Schumann briefly moved to Vienna in 1839, to investigate the feasibility
of establishing a new life there with Clara, away from her father’s interfer-
ence. His next compositions, Arabeske (Op. 18) and Blumenstück (Op. 19),
were in keeping with his determination to make a mark professionally,

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 93 Piano works II: afterimages

Example 5.5

rit. rit.

rit.

Example 5.6

ritard.

being written in a more accessible style; he described them in a letter

to Ernst Becker as ‘delicate – for ladies’.21 As with the Kinderszenen, the
explanation is disingenuous.22 While on the surface song-like, compara-
ble to Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte and the Nocturnes of John Field,
the Blumenstück is in double theme and variation form. The second, A flat
theme grows parasitically from the first in D flat, and soon dominates: in
fact, although D flat resurfaces in sections III and IV, and at the end, the first
theme never reappears. The Arabeske is a winsome little rondo whose coda,
while not questioning the piece’s tonal closure in C, opens out the ending
by introducing a new arpeggiated texture and melody. In its penultimate
bar the head-motto reappears, not to pursue the main theme yet again, but
to blossom into the resonance of the final chord: what is quite an unas-
suming piece finally suggests something more – the poet speaks, perhaps
(Ex. 5.6).
The idea of a piece being left open-ended, or not explaining as much as
it might, has been tied to the Romantic aesthetic of the fragment.23 Accord-
ing to Friedrich Schlegel’s famous Athenaeum Fragmente 116, Romantic

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 94 Laura Tunbridge

poetry exists in a perpetual ‘state of becoming’: it is work in progress.24

The implication is not that Schumann’s ‘fragmentary’ piano pieces should
be thought incomplete: a piece such as ‘Warum?’ from the Fantasiestücke
remains, in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s words, ‘eternally suspended . . . forever
interrogative’, never expecting a musical answer.25 The fragment’s challenge
is one of interpretation; listeners are left to make their own connections and
conclusions about meaning. Carl Koßmaly, reviewing Schumann’s piano
works in 1844, remembered Novalis (the archetypal ‘fragmentary’ author)
having written ‘that a work is all the more interesting, and a genuine expres-
sion of personality, the more impulses it gives – the more meanings, varieties
of interest, points of view, indeed the more ways it has of being understood
and loved’.26 A complex work such as the Humoreske (Op. 20) ‘gradually
communicates itself to the listener’ and as such, Koßmaly claimed, was one
of Schumann’s most significant and outstanding piano compositions: ‘the
great variety of content and form, the continual and quick, although always
natural and unforced succession of the most varied images, imaginary ideas
and sentiments, fantastic and dreamlike phenomena swell and fade into one
another, and not only maintain but continually increase one’s interest from
beginning to end’.27
The varied images of the Humoreske might be thought a kind of photo
album of Schumann’s earlier keyboard styles, with snapshots of Bach-like
invention pasted next to character pieces and free fantasies; the fourth move-
ment travels from a B flat major Innig section to an overwrought G minor
Sehr lebhaft, which winds back towards its relative major, concluding with
a stretto, before the mock-grandiose Mit einigem Pomp in A flat, which
is eventually diverted back towards the tonic, and an extended conclusion
to the whole piece (another of Schumann’s quasi-journalistic references,
Zum Beschluss). The transitions between sections are in part guided by
cross-reference and quotation; here, more than in any other of Schumann’s
solo piano works, the process of memory, its internalization of remembered
voices and melodies, is made apparent. At the end of the first movement,
we return to its opening, as if nothing has happened; a further recollec-
tion of this music then returns before the final movement’s Sehr lebhaft.
It is not an exact quotation, but it is still recognizable – to borrow Koß-
maly’s description, as if images in a dream. The second movement, Hastig,
includes a middle stave marked in parenthesis innere Stimme (inner voice):
an impossible melody, imagined to float out from amidst the surrounding
figuration (Ex. 5.7). Typically thought of as Augenmusik, to be seen but not
heard, this ‘inner voice’ is nonetheless a memorable presence; in bars 197–
232, when the passage returns, stretched into sustained chords, no middle
line is given, and we might think that we miss it.28 In fact, we hear the notes
it suggested (if not at pitch) on both occasions; the trick is one of visual

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 95 Piano works II: afterimages

Example 5.7

Hastig. = 126.

(Innere Stimme)

rather than aural perception, which makes hearing the innere Stimme no
kind of transgression, as it would be to play out loud the ‘Sphinxes’ from
Carnaval.29 After bars 9–24 have been repeated without their extra voice
they do not suddenly fly off into another mood as before, but reflect on
their figuration, repeating the phrase as if unsure where to go next. Not
onward, for now, but to an Adagio reminiscent of the Etwas lebhafter close
to the first movement’s Einfach – a reference subtly acknowledged by the
grace note tied to the final chord. Details such as this provoke the listener to
forge links between sections, extending a web of associations, of memories
and afterimages, over the Humoreske so that, as Koßmaly explained of the
fragment, ‘we shall not have missed the truth but instead [have] come close
to it, even if in our own way’.30
After the death of his brother Eduard, Schumann composed a Leichen-
phantasie (Corpse fantasy), naming the movements Trauerzug (Funeral
march), Kuriose Gesellschaft (Strange company), Nächtliches Gelage (Noc-
turnal revels) and Rundgesang mit Solostimmen (Round with solo voices).31
It was published in June 1840 as Nachtstücke (Op. 23), the title after E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s eight tales by the same name.32 Schumann’s grief seems appar-
ent in the musical language, which obsessively repeats rhythmic and melodic
patterns, perhaps as Julia Kristeva describes the chronically depressed com-
pulsively making the same movements over and over again.33 The opening
movement has been described as transforming ‘Von fremden Ländern und
Menschen’ from Kinderszenen into a funeral march, making what might be
appropriate associations with the loss of childhood (Ex. 5.8).34 The repet-
itive, weary melody recurs throughout the movement; its rhythm is even
more persistent, continuing in other sections, with a remnant returning
in the fourth movement. Schumann’s tendency to fixate on certain rhyth-
mic configurations in works like Kreisleriana has already been noted, and
it would become one of the defining aspects of his late style, suggesting the

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 96 Laura Tunbridge

Example 5.8

Nachtstücke to be both a transitional and visionary set of pieces, and one

haunted by foreboding.
For most of the 1840s, Schumann concentrated on genres other than the
solo piano piece, producing only a few fugues and pieces for children. But
then, at the close of 1848, he began Waldszenen – completing a draft within
a fortnight, but taking two years over revisions. Initially each movement
had a fanciful title taken from the writings of Gustav Pfarrius and Heinrich
Laube, but in the end only the fourth, ‘Verrufene Stelle’, retained its morbid
motto from Hebbel’s Waldbilder:

Die Blumen, so hoch sie wachsen,

Sind blass hier, wie der Tod;
Nur eine in der Mitte
Steht da im dunkeln Roth.
Die hat es nicht von der Sonne:
Nie traf sie deren Gluth;
Sie hat es von der Erde,
Und die trank Menschenblut.
[The flowers here, grown tall, are pale as death;
Just one amongst them is deep red.
That one never knew the sun’s glow:
It drew its colour from the earth, which drinks human blood.]35

We are far from the friendly, cajoling flowers of Dichterliebe here. Hebbel’s
vampyric blooms incite some of the oddest music of Waldszenen, combining
a distant relation of the French overture – which shares its dotted rhythms,
but is pianissimo rather than proclamatory – with a yearning sequential
phrase decorated by a mordent (it is unusual to find such ornamentation
in Schumann), and a semiquaver figure that slips in and out. ‘Verrufene
Stelle’ is in D minor, the furthest the cycle strays from its guiding B flat
tonality. Generally, the musical language of Waldszenen is much simpler
than that of Schumann’s earlier piano pieces. On entering the woods we
are greeted by a movement that sounds like a song accompaniment without

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 97 Piano works II: afterimages

Example 5.9

words: no longer is the absent voice heard from the distance or within. A
Biedermeier sensibility of the friendly forest is appealed to by the hunters’
song, the scene in the shelter or on lookout, and the artless picture of the
lonely flower – apart from ‘Verrufene Stelle’, the one troubling moment
comes in ‘Vogel als Prophet’.36 The bird’s flitting around G minor is suddenly
interrupted by a muscular, lyrical chorale, which glides up from G major to E
flat before disappearing as quickly as it came: the bird, untroubled, continues
to swoop and peck around its arpeggiated figuration (Ex. 5.9). Originally,
the movement’s motto was from Eichendorff’s ‘Zwielicht’, ‘Hüte dich, sei
wach und munter!’ (Be on your guard, be awake and alert!): Eric Jensen
has interpreted the bird as a messenger of danger.37 Christopher Reynolds
extends this reading to treat the chorale as a quotation, suggesting the source
in a line from the boys’ chorus in Part III of Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes
Faust that warns innocents, much as the bird might.38 But can we really
say it is the bird speaking? In the poem, a voice advises deer to beware of
man; the chorale is a quintessentially human genre, more likely to issue from
man than from a bird that, after all, returns immediately to its flight around
the forest, as unimpressed as the fishes listening to St Anthony’s sermon
in Des Knaben Wunderhorn. A further reason for assuming the voice to
be mortal will become apparent when considering Schumann’s final piano

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 98 Laura Tunbridge

work, where the chorale’s melody no longer predicts the future, but is a
reminder of the past.
The final version of Waldszenen was published as Opus 82 in 1850.
Around that time, Schumann started to revise many of his solo piano works.
In a letter to the publisher Friedrich Whistling he wrote that he had ‘heav-
ily revised’ Kreisleriana, explaining that earlier he often wilfully ruined his
pieces.39 Schumann edited out the fragmentary quality of the second and
fifth movements, cutting passages from and adding repeats to the former
and adding a perfect cadence to the end of the latter.40 A second edition of the
Davidsbündlertänze was published under Schumann’s direction, renamed
Davidsbündler and omitting the references to ‘F.’ and ‘E.’ and the poetic
inscriptions. As with Kreisleriana he attempted to ‘normalize’ the music: the
B was no longer to be held over between the last two movements, curtailing
the original’s open-endedness, and repeat signs were added to the first two
movements, as if to make the music more solid and balanced. Schumann’s
motivations have been credited to a shift in his aesthetic viewpoint, a rejec-
tion of Romanticism for Hausmusik, an embracing of proto-Brahmsian aca-
demic Classicism, or to a desire not to reveal his personal life to the public
as do works such as the Novelletten and Kreisleriana.41 As Rosen comments,
it is understandable that a composer should lose sympathy with his ear-
lier works; in Schumann’s case, however, the situation was complicated by
his medical condition.42 As a young man, he played on ideas of insanity
as a creative tool, using the eccentric texts of Jean Paul and Hoffmann as
models to overturn conventional musical structures. In later years, as he
became aware of his mental weaknesses, Schumann seems to have become
desperate to re-establish formal stability in his music. As his ‘real’ madness
took over he attempted to quell its imaginary predecessor – perhaps he
was concerned that one had brought about the other. Today, despite mod-
ern concerns with performance practice and Urtexte, we tend only to hear
the revised versions of the solo piano works; that they nevertheless retain
something of their audacity is testament to the extent of the composer’s
innovation.
Schumann’s solo piano works were rarely performed in public during his
lifetime: the rare exceptions were Liszt’s 1840 performance of Carnaval in
Leipzig, and Clara’s inclusion of some of the less complex later movements,
such as a selection of the Fantasiestücke, in her recitals.43 The earlier pieces
were considered by the composer, his wife and their audience to be too
difficult for general understanding. After Schumann’s death, Clara brought
Kreisleriana, Davidsbündler, Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Humoreske and
Kinderszenen into her repertoire. However influential she was in bringing
some of her late husband’s music to the public, Clara also prevented certain
works from being performed; one such was Waldszenen. The weaknesses

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 99 Piano works II: afterimages

Clara claimed to feel in these pieces were possibly compounded by the sense
that this was haunted music. The middle section of ‘Vogel als Prophet’,
already discussed as a possible quotation from the Szenen aus Goethes Faust,
bore a striking resemblance to the theme of Schumann’s Thema mit Vari-
ationen für das Pianoforte (WoO 24) – the so-called Geistervariationen –
supposedly a transcription of the melody dictated to the composer by angels
on the evening before his 1854 suicide attempt. (It is also similar to the
second movement of the 1853 Violin Concerto, WoO 23, another work
Clara suppressed.) Brahms used the theme as the basis for his Op. 23 four-
hand variations, dedicated to Julie Schumann.44 In the same way that the
melody seemed to have plagued Schumann – recurring in so many pieces
in such significant contexts – it might have haunted his family and friends,
burnt on the aural retina so even with eyes shut it remained an afterimage:
the unforgettable face once glimpsed behind the mask.

Notes
1. In a letter to Clara Wieck (17 March 1838), Schumann wrote: ‘I think [the Davidsbündlertänze]
are quite different from Carnaval, compared to which they are what a face is to a mask.’ Robert und
Clara Schumann: Briefe einer Liebe, ed. Hans-Josef Ortheil (Königstein, 1982), p. 97.
2. Linda Correll Roesner, ‘The sources for Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6: composition,
textual problems, and the role of the composer as editor’, in Mendelssohn and Schumann:
Essays on Their Music and its Context, ed. Jon W. Finson and R. Larry Todd (Durham, NC, 1984),
pp. 53–70. Roesner suggests that Schumann’s designation of the Davidsbündlertänze as Opus 6,
outside the established number order of his works, might have been another reference to Clara’s
composition.
3. ‘If ever I was happy at the piano, it was when I composed them’, Schumann wrote. Letter of 6
February 1838, Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Eva Weissweiler (Frankfurt, 1984), 3 vols.,
vol. I, p. 90.
4. On Clara’s influence, see David Ferris, ‘Public performance and private understanding: Clara
Wieck’s concerts in Berlin’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56 (2003), 351–408, and
Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Ithaca, NY, rev. edn, 2001),
pp. 249–78.
5. Letter to Ernst Becker, 7 August 1839: Briefe. Neue Folge, ed. F. Gustav Jansen (Leipzig, 2nd edn,
1904), p. 166. On Humor in Schumann’s compositions see Heinz J. Dill, ‘Romantic irony in the
works of Robert Schumann’, Musical Quarterly, 73 (1989), 188, and Ulrich Tadday, ‘Life and
literature, poetry and philosophy: Robert Schumann’s aesthetics of music’, this volume, pp. 38–47.
6. Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (London, 1996), p. 235.
7. Rosen describes the quotation of Papillons in Carnaval as occurring ‘with the same effect as
quotation marks’, in Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen (Cambridge, MA, 1998), p. 97. See
also John Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New York, 1993),
pp. 58–61.
8. Peter Kaminsky, ‘Principles of formal structure in Schumann’s early piano cycles’, Music Theory
Spectrum, 11 (1989), 207–25.
9. Kaminsky argues that the thrice repeated F sharps establish a ‘surface motivic relation’ with
movement three, ‘Etwas hahnbüchen’; Berthold Hoeckner connects this to the first waltz from
Clara’s Valses romantiques (Op. 4), which Schumann had already quoted in Carnaval. Kaminsky,
ibid., pp. 219–20, and Hoeckner, ‘Schumann and Romantic distance’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 50 (1997), 101–2.
10. Hoeckner, ibid., 96.
11. Letter of 30 June 1839, Briefwechsel, ed. Weissweiler, vol. II, 608.

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 100 Laura Tunbridge

12. Hoeckner, ‘Schumann and Romantic distance’, 102; John Daverio, Crossing Paths: Schubert,
Schumann, and Brahms (Oxford, 2002), pp. 138–9.
13. Franz Liszt, ‘Robert Schumann (1855)’, trans. Christopher Anderson, in Schumann and His
World, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton, 1994), p. 345.
14. Erika Reiman, Schumann’s Piano Cycles and the Novels of Jean Paul (Rochester, NY, 2004).
15. On the structure of Hoffmann’s novel see Lora Deahl, ‘Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana and
double novel structure’, International Journal of Musicology, 5 (1996), 132–4.
16. See Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 62.
17. Letter of 30 July 1838, Briefwechsel, ed. Weissweiler, vol. I, p. 213.
18. Roland Barthes, ‘Rasch’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and
Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 299–312. See also Robert Samuels,
‘Music as text: Mahler, Schumann and issues in analysis’, in Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music,
ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 162–3.
19. On metric displacement in Schumann’s music see Harald Krebs, Fantasy Pieces: Metrical
Dissonance in the Music of Robert Schumann (New York, 1999).
20. Franz Liszt, ‘Robert Schumann (1855)’, p. 354. See also Daverio, Robert Schumann, p. 166.
21. Letter of 15 August 1839, Briefe. Neue Folge, ed. Jansen, p. 169.
22. See Schumann’s letter to Clara 24 January 1839, Briefwechsel, ed. Weissweiler, vol. II, p. 365.
23. On the aesthetic of the Romantic fragment see Beate Julia Perrey, Schumann’s ‘Dichterliebe’ and
Early Romantic Poetics: Fragmentation of Desire (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 26–32; Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German
Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY, 1988), pp. 39–58; and John
Daverio, ‘Schumann’s systems of musical fragments and Witz’, in Nineteenth-Century Music,
pp. 49–88.
24. See David Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff ‘Liederkreis’ and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle
(Oxford, 2000), pp. 62–6.
25. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, 2003), p. 19.
26. Carl Koßmaly, ‘On Robert Schumann’s piano compositions (1844)’, trans. Susan Gillespie, in
Schumann and His World, ed. Todd, p. 312.
27. Ibid.
28. R. Larry Todd mentions the tendency to think of the inner voice as Augenmusik : ‘On quotation
in Schumann’s music’, ibid., p. 80.
29. On the ‘Sphinxes’, see Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton, 2001), pp. 240–2 and
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Robert Schumann: The Romantic Anti-Humanist’, in The Plague of Fantasies (New
York: Verso, 1997), pp. 203–6.
30. Koßmaly, ‘On Robert Schumann’s Piano Compositions’, p. 312.
31. See Schumann’s letter to Clara, 7 April 1839, Briefwechsel, ed. Weissweiter, vol. II, pp. 473–4.
32. On Hoffmann’s influence see Christine Moraal, ‘Romantische Ironie in Robert Schumanns
Nachtstücke op. 23’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 54 (1997), 68–83.
33. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1989).
34. Moraal, ‘Romantische Ironie’, pp. 77–8.
35. My translation. On the mottos’ sources, see Peter Jost, Robert Schumanns ‘Waldszenen’ op. 82:
Zum Thema ‘Wald’ in der romantischen Klaviermusik (Saarbrücken, 1989), pp. 285–9.
36. On representations of the woods in literature and visual arts in nineteenth-century Germany
that might have influenced Schumann, see Jost, ibid., pp. 21–70.
37. Eric Frederic Jensen, ‘A new manuscript of Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen, op. 82’, The Journal
of Musicology, 3 (1984), 83–4.
38. Christopher Alan Reynolds, Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century
Music (Cambridge, MA, 2003), pp. 77–82. Another reference might be Schumann’s setting of
Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s ‘Frühlings Ankunft’ in the Lieder-Album für die Jugend (Op. 79,
No. 19), composed in 1849.
39. Letter of 20 November 1849, in Robert Schumann’s Leben aus seinen Briefen geschildert, ed.
Hermann Erler (Berlin, 1887), 2 vols., vol. II, p. 105.
40. See Charles Fisk, ‘Performance analysis and musical imagining, Part II: Schumann’s
Kreisleriana, no. 2’, College Music Symposium, 37 (1997), 95–108.
41. Anthony Newcomb argues that Schumann’s aesthetic views had shifted towards a Hausmusik
style in ‘Schumann and the marketplace: from butterflies to Hausmusik’, Nineteenth-Century Piano
Music, ed. R. Larry Todd (New York, 1992), pp. 258–315.

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42. Rosen, Romantic Generation, p. 663.

43. On Clara’s performances of Schumann’s music, see Martin Schoppe, ‘Schumann-
Interpretationen Clara Schumanns (Tageskritik und Konzertbericht)’, 3. Schumann-Tage (1979),
17–24, and Beatrix Borchard, Robert Schumann und Clara Wieck: Bedingungen Künstlerischer Arbeit
in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Ph.D. diss., University of Bremen, 1985).
44. See David Brodbeck, ‘The Brahms–Joachim counterpoint exchange: or, Robert, Clara, and “the
best harmony between Jos. and Joh.”’, in Brahms Studies, ed. Brodbeck (Lincoln, 1994), p. 72.

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