The German Genius

in Germany but beginning to take off in the 1830s, and gathering pace in the 1840s, made this a period of technical innovation as the steamship, the steam railway, sewing machines, gas lighting, and the mass production of more and more objects became common. This had the perhaps predictable effect that the “Biedermeier person” came to take pride in his or her artistic taste, identifying craft works as superior to machine-made items. Tableware and glassware became adorned with detailed miniature paintings, and highly decorated porcelain flourished, as did handmade fashions. In painting, the laborious copying of nature became popular and in portraiture realism prevailed, with intimately observed psychological detail. Pictures of family life were popular, the bourgeois parlor a refuge from commercial and industrial reality.
    This mustn’t be overdone. The Viennese did get out. Theater became chiefly known for its spectacle (it became customary, for example, to announce ahead of time in the newspapers how many shots would be fired in the battle scenes). The Biedermeier period also saw the rise in popularity of Schubert’s songs (considered earlier), when his friends began to organize the famous “Schubertiaden,” sponsored evenings in which nothing but his music was played. 33
    Schubert wrote several symphonies and it was his last, the Ninth, the “Great” in C Major, that was famously rediscovered by one of the other great composers of the time, Robert Schumann. He had heard of its existence and ten years after Schubert’s death visited Franz’s brother, Ferdinand, who showed him great swaths of manuscripts, among which Schumann recognized an entire symphony, and was allowed to take it away. Just over a year later, Mendelssohn conducted the world premiere in Leipzig. When he heard it, Schumann said, “This Symphony has created a greater effect among us than any other since Beethoven…”
    Schumann (1810–56) was himself the most complete Romantic. Surrounded by insanity and suicide in his family, he worried all his life that he too would succumb in one way or another. The son of a bookseller and publisher, he grew up suffused in the works of great writers—Goethe, Shakespeare, Byron, and Novalis—all of whom exerted a great influence on him (he burst into tears when he read Byron’s “Manfred,” which he later set to music). Schumann tried to write poetry himself and emulated Byron in other ways too, embarking on numerous love affairs. In the early 1850s he suffered a week of hallucinations in which he thought that the angels were dictating music to him while he was threatened by wild animals. He threw himself off a bridge but failed to kill himself and, at his own request, was placed in an asylum in 1854. His best-known work, and perhaps the best-loved, is Carnaval , in which he paints pictures of his friends, his wife, Clara Vieck, Chopin, Niccolò Paganini, and Mendelssohn. ( Carnaval was a great influence on Brahms.) 34 However, Schumann’s music was intensely disliked during his lifetime, and he found it necessary to earn a living as a critic. He was a good one—one of his first reviews introduced Chopin to the German public (“Hats off, gentlemen. A genius!”), and one of the last introduced Brahms. He could have been a great pianist but, in attempting to improve his fingering technique, Schumann stretched his hands so much that he permanently ruined one of his fingers.
    By the time of his death in 1856, after several difficult years, Schumann’s music was at last beginning to earn an international reputation and is mainly remembered for two things. The Fantasy in C Major , his greatest work for solo piano, is now recognized as “one of the trinity of pieces upon which all romantic piano music rests” (the others are Chopin’s Sonata in B Flat Minor, and Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor). 35 Schumann’s second achievement occurred with his move from piano music to song. Some of his songs, such as Dichterliebe , now rank with Schubert’s Die Winterreise because, in a very real sense, he took up where Schubert left off, expanding the role—formal, technical, and emotional—of the piano, adding preludes and postludes, for example. He composed 250 songs and expanded the repertoire of voices, producing a series of very melodic vocal duets.
    T HE I NVENTION OF THE M ODERN M USICAL R EPERTOIRE
     
    Schumann himself revered Mendelssohn, for Felix Mendelssohn was possibly the most widely