Steven Isserlis

Enjoyable though they are, anniversary years are of varying importance to the reputations of those they celebrate.

Last year’s Haydn celebrations, for instance, were generally used as an excuse for performers and audiences to enjoy their favourite works for the umpteenth time. (Nothing wrong with that.) Mendelssohn’s bicentenary, on the other hand, provided a chance for a genuine reassessment of his achievements.

2010 is Schumann’s year, the bicentenary of his birth. Of course, Schumann’s reputation as a great composer is assured, but it is surprising, even shocking, how infrequently many of his works are heard in concert halls. Concertgoers will probably have encountered his piano concerto, the song-cycle Dichterliebe, the piano quintet and several of his early masterpieces for piano, but how often do we hear his late piano music or songs, the piano trios or the opera Genoveva – let alone the really unknown works, such as the Choral Ballads or the Requiem? Roughly a third of his output is standard concert fare, a third is heard occasionally, and a third is unknown.

Popular – or deeply unpopular to some of us – wisdom has it that Schumann’s music empties concert halls. His later music, particularly, has its detractors; critics and writers complain more condescendingly about Schumann than any other great composer. Why is that? And why is it that those who love him would be prepared to lay down our lives – well, to take up our pens – to help his cause?

Part of the reason for both extremes lie in Schumann’s life story. He was forced to study law, and it was not until his early 20s that he devoted himself to music, beginning his studies with a notoriously strict piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck. Attempting to speed up his progress, Schumann invented a finger-strengthening device that instead caused a partial paralysis of his hand. His piano-playing dreams shattered, he turned to music journalism. Schumann’s writing, like his music, reflects his deeply romantic nature; many of his articles describe the reactions of two imaginary characters of his own invention, representing different aspects of his character, whom he dubbed Florestan (impulsive and spontaneous) and Eusebius (inward and thoughtful). His first review, of a now rarely performed set of variations by the young Chopin, gives a flavour of his style: “Eusebius dropped by one evening, not long ago. He entered quietly, his pale features brightened by that enigmatic smile with which he likes to excite curiosity. Florestan and I were seated at the piano … With the words, ‘Hats off gentlemen, a genius!’ Eusebius spread out before us a piece of music.”

Meanwhile, Schumann fell in love with his teacher’s brilliant and successful daughter Clara – and she with him. Wieck forbade the match. Schumann turned from commenting on the music of others to creating his own, pouring his passion into a series of piano pieces full of joy, torment and fantasy. The music, as well as reintroducing Florestan and Eusebius, contained secret messages for Clara which now sound like private messages for us, the listeners – as Thomas Beecham put it: “Subtle and secret phrases that each one of us feels to have been devised for his own particular understanding.” Schumann would insert brief allusions to works they both loved, creating magical moments in which time seemed suspended. He was perhaps the ultimate romantic, confessional composer; as he told Clara, everything he experienced in life went directly into his music. But he was also a great classicist, steeped in knowledge of music of the past. It was a unique combination.

Eventually, in 1840, Robert and Clara were married. The marriage was hardly the idyll for which the young lovers had been hoping. Tensions surfaced increasingly as the years went by, but initially Clara was Schumann’s muse and musical voice, using her fame as a performer to propagate her husband’s works. They had several children, and Schumann’s career developed acceptably. He was never an international superstar, like his friend and mentor, Mendelssohn, but that was hardly surprising. Mendelssohn was a great pianist, a fine conductor, and a social charmer. Schumann could no longer play the piano, was a hopeless conductor, and would sit in silence at social gatherings, lost in his own thoughts and dreams. Furthermore, much of his music explored his own deeply private world: rather than tailoring his works to the successful performers or public tastes of his day, he allows us to eavesdrop on his inner life.

But both his inner and outer lives were to reach a crisis. In 1850, desperate for a regular income, he accepted a post as music director in Düsseldorf – a position for which he was eminently unsuited. By early 1854, he had lost his job, his marriage was deeply problematic and his mental health was failing. Schumann attempted suicide, throwing himself into the Rhine (the inspiration for one of his most joyous works, the Rhenish symphony – cruel irony). Rescued against his will, he was still desperate to escape from the world. A few days later, he had himself committed to the asylum at Endenich, near Bonn. Lingering for two-and-a-half dreadful years, a living ghost, he described himself as “Robert Schumann, honorary member of heaven”. He died there in 1856; Clara’s only visit took place as he lay, changed almost beyond recognition, on his deathbed.

The cause of his madness was probably tertiary syphilis, although his (apparent) manic depression cannot have helped. Clara, bereft and shamed, supported the household by endless concert tours, often leaving her children in the charge of a young man who had fallen passionately in love with her – Johannes Brahms. Poor Brahms, who had met Schumann about four months before his incarceration, still revered the older man, and was one of the few people to visit him in the asylum; the emotional crisis scarred him for life.

Brahms was not the only one to be shattered by Schumann’s condition. The tragedy had a devastating effect upon many of the older composer’s inner circle, many of whom later suffered nervous breakdowns. His children, in effect abandoned by both parents (and pretty horribly treated by Clara), were scattered, and most of them met sad ends.

Even today, there seems to be something of a curse on those who become too closely involved with Schumann. The scholar who edited Robert and Clara’s letters suffered a breakdown and was hospitalised; the author of one of the few good books in English about Schumann, John Daverio, drowned in mysterious circumstances in the Charles river in Boston; and then there is the group of writers who have been rude about Schumann over the years, and have all suffered from a strange form of writers’ cramp that has prevented them from writing another word.

No, that last sentence was just wishful thinking on my part. But Schumann’s late music seems to have emanated a dangerous glow. Perhaps it is not surprising that Clara, the most famous champion of her husband’s works, suppressed or ignored almost all the late works, forever associated in her mind with his illness.

But surely, over the years, the lack of understanding of Schumann’s later thoughts should have been corrected, as it has been with so many other composers (Beethoven included)? But no: instead of following the fascinating labyrinth of Schumann’s musical development, too many commentators have dismissed all but the most popular works. Where Schumann’s late music embarked upon experimental paths – including two major pieces of church music (almost severe in their archaic beauty), a set of piano pieces inspired by the dawn described by Christoph Eschenbach as “Mahler for the piano”, uniquely personal concertos for cello and violin, a fascinating set of almost Wagnerian Choral Ballads based on German legends, and so on – many writers have made no attempt to understand them, but have bleated about loss of inspiration and a sad falling-off of mental powers. This, in turn, has meant that performers and concert promoters have shied away from programming works perceived as unpopular, just because they are unknown.

Schumann has, however, always had his passionate champions. Particularly for other composers, his music represents freedom, an unfettered creativity – stream of consciousness, even – that transcends schools and styles. While the composers of the 19th-century French, Czech and Russian nationalist movements tended to reject Beethoven and to detest Brahms, they still loved Schumann. And in our times, there are many composers – Kurtag, Holloway, Holliger, Rihm to mention but a few – who have paid tribute to him in countless works. Oliver Knussen puts it well: “Schumann is quite merciless – just as you’re getting over having your heart broken by some incredible bit of harmony, he does it to you again in the very next phrase.”

Schumann’s music is curiously alive today. One cannot pigeonhole him (perhaps that’s why critics have difficulties); he is too experimental, too close to the edge of the known soundworld. Harmonically, rhythmically, emotionally he is way ahead of his time – outside of time, in fact, looking simultaneously into the past and the future.

In short, he is a genius, unlike any other, one who can lead us into worlds undreamed of by anyone else. Every time I work on his music (as I am now doing for my upcoming residence at the Cheltenham festival), I marvel afresh, not just at the power of his imagination, but also at the brilliance of his mind. It is so exciting to follow his thought patterns as he moulds formal conventions into new, half-hidden shapes: miracle after miracle.

This bicentenary is the chance for more of us to engage with him (concert promoters, record companies and performers permitting). Far be it from me to be fanatical – but if you catch anyone being condescending about any aspect of Schumann’s music or personality this year, please feel free to gently, but firmly, shoot them. For their own good.