John Worthen

An amazingly detailed, meticulously researched biography of one of the greatest composers of his generation. I actually read the paperback edition of this 2007 work, copies of which came to me via interlibrary loan from both the Ashland (OH) University and the University of Wisconsin--Superior, WI libraries. It is a chronological account of Schumann's very fruitful life and work and of his sad, early death from syphilis. This is the first book I've ever read that contains an autopsy report, brief as this one, translated from the original German, is. Schumann seems to have been "a regular guy" who just happened to be really good at writing music despite being largely self-taught. I enjoyed reading it and recommend it as a great biography of an underrated musician and composer.… (more)

Perhaps even more than his standing as a musical genius, Robert Schumann's life is a gift to biographers: his courtship of and marriage with Clara Wieck can be played as Great Romance and/or Feminist Cautionary Tale; his illness and tragic early death present almost unlimited scope for after-the-fact diagnosis. Not surprisingly, a great deal has been written about him since the 1850s. No programme-note to a concert or CD is complete without a reference to his "madness", no travel article about Düsseldorf fails to mention the spot where he jumped into the Rhine in his bedroom slippers...

John Worthen, however, is neither a musicologist nor a medic, but a literary scholar who spent most of his career working on D.H. Lawrence and has also written biographical books about the English romantic poets (and can thus be presumed to know a thing or two about self-mythologisers...). He shifts the focus away from the romantic myths surrounding Schumann to look critically at what we actually know from the written record, and comes up with some surprisingly prosaic answers. In particular, he argues fairly convincingly that the evidence 20th century biographers have found for a history of either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia stretching back to the 1820s is no more than hindsight. On the other hand, there is very clear evidence in Schumann's diaries (only published in the 1980s) of Schumann seeking treatment for a sexually-transmitted disease, presumably syphilis, in 1831. The infection resulted from a liaison with a woman only referred to by her first name, Christel, who (Worthen concludes) must have been a servant in the house where Schumann was living. Contemporary medicine didn't know about tertiary syphilis, but the long-term effects of this infection would account for a slow accumulation of damage to his body and brain over a period of several decades, causing the odd succession of minor ailments Schumann experienced in the 1840s and the "madness" that ultimately destroyed his life.

Of course, the Christel episode does its bit to undermine the conventional narrative of Schumann's lifelong devotion to Clara. Worthen stresses, however, that having sex with working-class women would have been perfectly normal behaviour for a middle-class young man at the time. It wouldn't have been something he would have felt he needed to feel especially guilty about, any more than getting drunk every night (which he also did). And it certainly wouldn't have been perceived by Schumann, Christel, or anyone else as having anything to do with romantic love. But Worthen also spends more time on the surprisingly large number of middle-class young women (single and married) that Schumann did fall in love with before committing himself to Clara. Several of them, including the most serious, Ernestine von Fricken, were piano pupils of Clara's father, and Worthen has fun deconstructing what Clara wrote to Robert to show us how much it pained her to watch him falling in love with all these grown women while treating her as just a little girl.

Worthen tells us a lot about the circumstances of Schumann's work as a composer, but doesn't go very deeply into the music itself, reasonably enough, as there are plenty of other writers better qualified to do that. But I was a bit disappointed that he says almost nothing about Schumann's journalism except how much he earned by it - I would have welcomed a bit of context and analysis there, as it does seem to have been something that took up a big chunk of his working life, and as he was one of the few major composers of his time who had the taste and talent for expressing himself in printed words.

All in all, this seems to be an interesting and worthwhile biography.… (more)