大象传媒

Donald Macleod investigates the literary catalysts that fired Schumann's musical imagination. Today, early enthusiasms, including Lord Byron and Jean Paul Richter.

"Get your head out of that book!" is probably not a reprimand the young Robert Schumann was used to receiving. He grew up in a household that lived and breathed literature. His father was a novelist, bookseller and publisher who made a small fortune from his pocket editions of foreign-language classics in translation. As a teenager Schumann wrote copiously, trying his hand at fiction, poetry and plays, and it took him several years to satisfy himself that he was a composer rather than a writer. But his literary passion persisted, informing not only the texts he set but his whole conception of musical narrative and structure.

In today's programme he explores some early enthusiasms: Lord Byron; poet and physician Justinus Kerner; early-Romantic poet and indologist Friedrich Schlegel; and above all the novelist Jean Paul Richter - as fashionable in his day as he is obscure in ours - whose literary style the essayist Thomas Carlyle described as "flowing onwards not like a river, but an inundation, circling in complex eddies, chafing and gurgling now this way, now that, until the proper current sinks out of view amid the boundless uproar".