大象传媒

Donald Macleod investigates the literary catalysts that fired Schumann's musical imagination. Today, Hans Christian Andersen, Friedrich von Schiller and Heinrich Heine.

"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.

Today's writers are Hans Christian Andersen, whom Schumann's wife Clara unflatteringly described as "still somewhat young, but very ugly, and also frightfully vain and egotistic"; Friedrich von Schiller, of Ode to Joy fame; and Heinrich Heine, a divisive figure to this day, who has the distinction of having been set to music more often than almost any other German-language poet. According to Andersen's autobiography he was delighted by Schumann's settings of his poetry, which he heard at a dinner in 1844 at which the composer was also present. Schumann considered writing an opera based on Schiller's tragedy The Bride of Messina, but got no further than the overture, which condenses the essence of the play into eight searing minutes. Heine is the poet behind Schumann's first Liederkreis cycle. The two men met just once, in 1828; Schumann, then a student on a visit to Munich, paid a house-call to Heine, who showed him the sights of the city. When twelve years later Schumann sent Heine a copy of his new song-cycle, the poet didn't even acknowledge it.