The most extraordinary results in Schumann's career may have occurred in 1840. Until then he had written almost solely for the pianoforte, but in this one year he wrote 168 songs. Schumann's biographers represent him as caught in a tempest of song, the sweetness, the doubt and the despair of which are all to be attributed to varying emotions aroused by his love for Clara. Although there is possibly some truth to this, this rather mawkish view is treated with scepticism by modern scholars, especially since Dichterliebe, with its themes of rejection and acceptance, was written at a time when his marriage was no longer in doubt.
His chief song-cycles of this period were his settings of the
Liederkreis of
J. von Eichendorff (op. 39), the
Frauenliebe und Leben of Chamisso (op. 42), the
Dichterliebe of Heine (op. 48) and
Myrthen, a collection of songs, including poems by Goethe, Rückert, Heine, Byron, Burns and Moore. The songs
Belsatzar (op. 57) and
Die beiden Grenadiere (op. 49), each to Heine's words, show Schumann at his best as a ballad writer, though the dramatic ballad is less congenial to him than the introspective lyric.
The opus 35 (to words of
Justinus Kerner) and opus 40 sets, although less well known, also contain songs of lyric and dramatic quality.
As Grillparzer said, "He has made himself a new ideal world in which he moves almost as he wills."
Yet it was not until long afterwards that he met with adequate recognition. In his lifetime the few tokens of honour bestowed upon Schumann were the degree of Doctor by the University of Jena in 1840, and in 1843 a professorship in the Conservatorium of Leipzig, which was founded that year by Felix Mendelssohn.
On one occasion, accompanying his wife on a concert tour in Russia, Schumann was asked whether 'he too was a musician'. This and other insults left a mark on Schumann's delicate psyche.
Probably no composer ever rivaled Schumann in concentrating his energies on one form of music at a time. At first all his creative impulses were translated into pianoforte music, then followed the miraculous year of the songs. In 1841 he wrote two of his four symphonies. The year 1842 was devoted to the composition of chamber music, and includes the pianoforte quintet (op. 44), now one of his best known and most admired works. In 1843 he wrote
Paradise and the Peri, his first essay at concerted vocal music.
He had now mastered the separate forms, and from this time forward his compositions are not confined during any particular period to any one of them. In Schumann, above all musicians, the acquisition of technical knowledge was closely bound up with the growth of his own experience and the impulse to express it.
The stage in his life when he was deeply engaged in his music to Goethe's
Faust (1844–53) was a critical one for his health. The first half of the year 1844 had been spent with his wife in Russia. On returning to Germany he had abandoned his editorial work, and left Leipzig for
Dresden, where he suffered from persistent “nervous prostration” which is today known as
bipolar disorder. As soon as he began to work he was seized with fits of shivering, and an apprehension of death which was exhibited in an abhorrence for high places, for all metal instruments (even keys) and for drugs. He suffered perpetually also from imagining that he had the note A sounding in his ears. In 1846 he had recovered and in the winter revisited Vienna, traveling to
Prague and
Berlin in the spring of 1847 and in the summer to Zwickau, where he was received with enthusiasm, gratifying because Dresden and Leipzig were the only large cities in which his fame was at this time appreciated.
To 1848 belongs his only opera,
Genoveva (op. 81), a work containing much beautiful music, but lacking dramatic force. It is interesting for its attempt to abolish the recitative, which Schumann regarded as an interruption to the musical flow. The subject of
Genoveva, based on
Johann Ludwig Tieck and Hebbel, was in itself not a particularly happy choice; but it is worth remembering that as early as 1842 the possibilities of German opera had been keenly realized by Schumann, who wrote, "Do you know my prayer as an artist, night and morning? It is called 'German Opera.' Here is a real field for enterprise [...] something simple, profound, German". And in his notebook of suggestions for the text of operas are found amongst others:
Nibelungen,
Lohengrin and
Til Eulenspiegel. Schumann's consistently flowing melody in this work, can be seen as a forerunner to Wagner's
Melos.
The music to Byron's
Manfred is preeminent in a year (1849) in which he wrote more than in any other. The insurrection of Dresden caused Schumann to move to
Kreischa, a little village a few miles outside the city. In the August of this year, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Goethe's birth, such scenes of Schumann's
Faust as were already completed were performed in Dresden, Leipzig and
Weimar, Liszt, as always giving unwearied assistance and encouragement. The rest of the work was written in the latter part of the year, and the overture in 1853. This overture Schumann described as "one of the sturdiest of my creations."
