Kreisleriana

To bring out the fire and fury in Kreisleriana, Lili pushes Rupert to go mad—but little does she know what that leads to . . .  

Schumann himself went mad and lived his final years in an insane asylum. Peter Oswald, a psychiatrist and musician, describes Kreisleriana in his meticulous Schumann: The Inner Voices of  Musical Genius. (To set up the excerpt, Clara was a concert pianist and Schumann’s eventual wife; E.T.A. Hoffman was one of Germany’s most influential writers; Franz Liszt was one of the most celebrated pianists/composers of all time; and Oswald, the author, is commenting on various historical letters and diary entries to try to understand Schumann.)

Excerpt:

Schumann’s Kreisleriana is a musical portrait of violence and madness. Working on these fantasies concurrently with his Scenes from Childhood, Schumann seems to have had another dissociative episode, in which he described to Clara:

I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep—and as I thought my way more and more deeply into you, your mind, and your dream-life, I suddenly said, with innermost strength, “Clara, I’m calling you”—and then I heard it, really loud, as if right next to me, “yes Robert, I’m with you.” A sort of horror fell over me, like the ghosts that traffic with each other over the flatlands. I won’t do it again, this calling, it really wears me out.

We cannot tell from this letter whether he was hallucinating while half-asleep or just idly ruminating. He tried to reassure Clara that he was leading a “sober, industrious life,” and that his melancholia was caused only by “sitting around all night.” Schumann wanted Clara to think that Kreisleriana was a reflection on her:

Just think, since my last letter I’ve again finished a whole book of new things. I will call it “Kreisleriana,” in which you and one of your ideas play the main role, and I will dedicate it to you—yes to you and no one else”—then as you recognize yourself, you will smile fondly.

But this tempestuous music has just the opposite effect. “You shock me sometimes,” Clara wrote Schumann after playing Kreisleriana. “I wonder if it is true that this man will be my husband? Sometimes I have the idea that I will never be able to satisfy you, but in spite of that you could always love me.” Clara probably sensed his physical passion, something he was trying to control in her absence, and she may have been afraid of it. (She was probably still a virgin at this time.) He told her, in regard to Kreisleriana, that “there is a thoroughly wild love in some of the movements.”

The title itself gives Schumann’s preoccupations away. He was thinking about a lunatic, the haunted figure of “Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler” from E.T.A. Hoffman’s famous stories. Kreisler is a reckless musician, scraping his violin or pounding his piano to bits. Drinking heavily, wandering about aimlessly, he harangues strangers and behaves incoherently in public. Hardly a flattering portrait of Clara! Yet she may unwittingly have given some impetus to these fantasies by writing to Schumann about Franz Liszt. Clara wanted to introduce the two men, and that excited Schumann. One of the most gifted musicians of the time, Liszt was a striking figure who, like Paganini, could spellbind an audience. According to Weick [Clara’s father], Liszt’s “passions know no bounds. He often damages the sense of beauty by ripping melodies apart, using the petal too much . . . breaking strings . . . pulling you into him—so that you drown.” Still devoted to her father, Clara adhered strongly to this negative imagery of Franz Liszt.

The juxtaposition of rage and mystery in Kreisleriana may well have been Schumann’s answer to the many conflicts stimulated all at once by Clara’s triumph in Vienna, the fantastic virtuoso Liszt, the spiteful Weick, and Florestan and Eusebius [Schumann’s inner personalities] cavorting madly with each other.