Robert Schumann, lithograph by Josef Kriehuber, 1839. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Düsseldorf, Carnival Monday, 27 February 1854. While the city is out in the streets in costume, Robert Schumann leaves his house in a dressing gown and slippers, in the rain, walks to the bridge of boats over the Rhine and throws himself into the river. Boatmen pull him out almost at once. Brought home, in the following days he himself asks to be taken to an institution: he fears harming the people he loves. On 4 March he enters Dr Richarz’s clinic at Endenich, near Bonn. He will never leave it: he dies there on 29 July 1856, at forty-six.
The days before the act are documented with a precision that wrings the heart, because diaries were kept in that house. For weeks Schumann had been hearing sounds that were not there: first a single obstinate note, then choirs, then a melody he said was dictated by angels. He transcribed it and wrote variations on it for piano that would remain his last work, known today as the Ghost Variations. The theme is of an unreal calm, and is almost identical to a song he had already used in the Violin Concerto: the angels, as often happens, were quoting Schumann to Schumann.
The hardest part of the story concerns Clara. The Endenich doctors, following the convictions of the day, prevented her from visiting her husband for almost the whole stay: she saw him again two days before his death, after two and a half years. In between, shuttling between the clinic and the family, was a twenty-one-year-old whom Schumann had just proclaimed in his magazine the future of music: Johannes Brahms. The letters between Brahms and Clara in those months are one of the great correspondences of the nineteenth century, and what followed, the absolute and never-named friendship that bound them for forty years, is a story this magazine will tell separately. Clara, left alone with seven children, returned to the piano and invented the modern concert.
For more than a century Schumann’s illness was romanticised as the price of genius. The clinical records of Endenich, published in full only in 2006, tell instead of an illness and nothing more, with its degradation and its solitude, and no poetry. The music has no need of that rhetoric: the Ghost Variations move us because they are beautiful, not because the person who wrote them was unwell. And one thing has really changed since 1854: today one can be helped through that suffering. Anyone who feels it close, for themselves or for others, does well to ask for help, right away and without shame.