Post-Mortem on Schumann
Tins is not so much a symposium as a post-mortem. In eight studies the music of Schumann is subjected to drastic and exhaustive analysis, pierced and probed to the bone. On every page we see much the same process at work : "The harmonic scheme of No. 3 is greatly disorganised by the efforts of the bass part to maintain an independent broken chord figuration. . . . The assai agitato in question, in the relative minor, displays a syncopated rhythm in three 16-bar periods, emphasised by repetition of the first and of the remainder. . . . The develop- ment begins at bar 152, where the key suddenly changes to A flat, the tempo from common time to six-four."
The last comment might well be quoted as a classic example of observant musicology.
Who reads or has need for this kind of writing ? The trained musician is able to find out such things for himself, and to the average educated man who likes music it is likely to sound so much unintelligible jargon. In a comprehensive chapter on the piano music Kathleen Dale at least once appears without knowing it to make a parody of what I shall here call the style of the facetious- academic : " A further characteristically Schumannesque trait, his life-long delight in enigmas, is manifested for the first time in these variations in the employment of musical letters as the nucleus of the theme, and in the intriguing dedication to an imaginary countess."
Mosco Carner occasionally relates research in technique to style in its larger sense. His paper on the symphonies is scholarly and suggestive. "Schumann never fully obtained an organic unity between movements, a unity by which a movement is felt to be the corollary of the preceding one." (But which composer before Schumann, excepting Beethoven, did achieve this " organic " unity ?) "Like Mendelssohn's symphonies Schumann's are at bottom romantic Spielmusik—music in which the capricious play of romantic fancies and moods dominates over a more abstract, more intrinsically musical, central thought. The whole is less than its parts." Dr. Carner is especially interesting on the familiar matter of Schumann's orchestration in his symphonies, which is not by any means always as unsatisfactory as generally it is supposed to be. Frequently it sounds entirely right for Schumann's expressive purpose, and sometimes it is warm and musical and even evocative of the sublime in its depth and expansiveness. With Schumann instrumentation was part of his way of musical thinking ; in cases where it has been altered, "touched-up," we feel that something alien has entered the composer's psychological core. Better to take the symphonies as written, warts and all. Much depends on the conductor. Even the well-known "superfluous doublings, the insistently rhythmical makeshifts pf the brass, and the hollow inarticulate wood-wind passages have heard them all made to sound essential to the Schumann physiognomy and presence by Georg Szell.
Dr. Carner stirs conjecture afresh when he writes : "Yet I venture to suggest that the marked unevenness of his orchestral writing may have had something to do with his mental illness, the first outward symptoms of which date back to 1834 if not before. We know that intermittently it affected his auricular sense, and it may be that during these periods it also affected the clarity of the inner sound-picture of the music Schumann happened to be writing at this time." • For my own part, I am content to take the symphonies of Schumann as I find them in an understanding per- formance; they contain beauties such as only genius can give us.
Gerald Abraham is fair to the dramatic works, and rightly values Schumann's portrayal of Gretchen in the scenes from Faust. When was this music last heard in London ? Our routine allows so much that is fine to run to waste. Perhaps the best essay in the symposium is on the songs by Martin Cooper. It is in no way a post-mortem, rather an X-ray examination. The thew and sinew, nerves and blood. stream remain alive. The technical set-up is revealed as a by-product of imaginative processes which, we may be sure, were usually instinctive. For example, a comparison of Schumann's and Wolf's settings of Morike's " Er ist's " " Both composers instinctively aim at expressing the atmosphere of expectancy, which is the note of the poem, by a series of generally unresolved dominant sevenths, Schumann's naturally far less sophisticated than Wolf's. Both emphasise the Horch ! ' by a harped dominant seventh right out of the key of the preceding bars : but Schumann continues the shy hesitant manner and the rather self- conscious Dresden-china prettiness already suggested by the mordents in the piano part, whereas Wolf quickly works up to his climax and gives final vent to his excitement in a long piano postlude (twenty-one bars in a song of under sixty).
But even Mr. Cooper cannot resist fashion. In a graphic comparison of Schumann's and Wolf's settings of" Das verlassene Magdelein," he writes : "Again, Wolf's prelude, with its bare open fifths, suggests the misery and desolation of the opening, whereas Schumann has no postlude at all but comes to rest on a rather inept tierce de Picardie,' the tonic triad with the major third instead of the minor."
Contemporary music criticism is endowing the term " tierce do Picardie" with a quite Mesopotamian blessedness. Still, Mr. Cooper's essay deserves expansion into the first definitive book in English on the songs of Schumann. NEVILLE CARDUS.
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