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Loving Schumann

There is a kind of French prejudice, writes Marcel Beaufilsin his stud y of Schumann's piano music, against Schumann: heis readily seen as a kind of "th icker Faure. " I do not supposewe need attribute th is lukewarm estimation to some oppositionbetween "French clarity" and "German sentimentality"; tojudge by current discograph y and radio programs, the Frenchthese days delight in the affecting musicians of "heavy" roman­ticism, Mahler and Bruckner. No, the reason for this lack ofinterest (or this minor interest) is historical (and not psycho­logical) .

Schumann is very broadl y a piano composer. Now the piano ,as a social instrument (and every musical instrument, from thelute to the saxophone, implies an ideology) , has undergone fora century a historical evolut ion of which Schumann is thevictim. The human subject has changed : interiority, intimacy,solitude have lost their value, the individual has become in­creasingly gregarious, he wants collective, massive, often par­oxysmal music, the expression of us rather th an of me ; yetSchumann is trul y the musician of solitary intimacy, of theamorous and imprisoned soul that speaks to itself (whence the

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ing a field of achievements-it is also that whichcertainly existed in Schumann's since he wanted to becomea virtuoso equal to Paganini, has suffered a it nolonger has to match the worldly hysteria of concerts and salons,it is no longer now, because of the it has be­come a somewhat chilly prowess, a perfect achievement (with­out flaw, without accident), in which there is nothing to :findfault with, but which does not exalt, does not carry away: farfrom the body, in a sense. Hence, for today's pianist, enormousesteem but no fervor and, I should say, referring to the word'setymology, no sympathy. Now Schumann's piano music, whichis difficult, does not give rise to the image of virtuosity (in effect,virtuosity is an image, not a technique); we can play it neitheraccording to the old delirium nor according to the new style(which I should readily compare to the "nouvelle cuisine"­undercooked). This piano music is intimate (which does notmean gentle), or again, private, even individual, refractory toprofessional approach, since to play Schumann implies a tech­nical innocence very few artists can attain.

Finally, what has changed, and fundamentally, is the piano'suse. Throughout the nineteenth century, playing the piano wasa class activity, of course, but general enough to coincide, byand large, with listening to music. I myself began listening toBeethoven's symphonies only by playing them four hands, witha close friend as enthusiastic about them as I was. But nowadayslistening to music is dissociated from its practice: many virtu­osos, listeners, en masse: but as for practitioners, amateurs­very few. Now (here again) Schumann lets his music be fully

we have from a at the very most a listen-to a public listening-each record, even when listened to at

abundance of in his like that of the splendid

sixth variation of the Kreislerianav, in short of the childno link than the Mother.

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heard only by someone who plays it, even badly. I have alwaysbeen struck by this paradox: that a certain piece of Schumann'sdelighted me when I played it (approximately), and rather dis­appointed me when I heard it on records: then it seemedmysteriously impoverished, incomplete. This was not, I believe,an infatuation on my part. It is because Schumann's music goesmuch farther than the ear; it goes into the body, into the musclesby the beats of its rhythm, and somehow into the viscera by theVOluptuous pleasure of its melos: as if on each occasion thepiece was written only for one person, the one who plays it;the true Schumannian pianist-c'est moi.

Then is this an egoistic music? Intimacy is always a littleegoistic; that is the price which must be paid if we want torenounce the arrogances of the universal. But Schumann's musicinvolves something radical, which makes it into an existential,rather than a social or moral experience. This radicality hassome relation to madness, even if Schumann's music is con­tinuously "well-behaved" insofar as it submits to the code oftonality and to the formal regularity of melismata. Madnesshere is incipient in the vision, the economy of the world withwhich the subject, Schumann, entertains a relation which grad­ually destro ys him , while the music itself seeks to constructitself. Marcel Beaufils puts all this very 'well : he clarifies andnames those points where life and music change places, theone being destro yed, the other constructed.

This is the first point : for Schum ann the world is not unrea l,reality is not null and void. His music, by its titles , sometimesby certain discreet effects of description, continuously refers toconcrete things : seasons, times of the day, landscapes, festivals,professions. But this reality is threatened with disarticulation,dissociation, with moveme nts not violent (nothing ha rsh) butbrief and , one might say, ceaselessly "mutant": noth ing lastslong, each movement interrupts the next : this is the realm ofthe intermezzo, a rather dizzying notion when it extends to allof music, and when the matrix is experienced only as an ex-

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hausting (if graceful) sequence of interstices. Marcel Beaufilsis right to set at the source of all Schumann's piano music theliterary theme of th e Carnival; for the Carnival is trul y thetheater of thi s decentering of the sub ject (a very modern temp­tation ) which Schumann expresses in his fashion by the carouselof his brief forms (from this point of view, the Album for theY oung, if played in sequence, is not so well-behaved as itappears) .

In this fragmented world, disto rted by whirling appearances(the whole world is a Carnival ) , a pure and somehow terriblymotion less element occasionally breaks through : pain. "If youasked me th e name of my pain , I could not tell you. I think itis pain itself, and I could not designate it better." This purepain without object, this essence of pain, is certainly a mad­man's pain; we believe th at only the mad (insofar as we canname madn ess and demarcate ourselves from it ) quite simplysuffer. Schumann experienced this absolute pain of the madmanpremonitorily on th e night of October 17, 1833, when he wasseized by the most dreadful fear : that, precisely, of losing hisreason. Such pain cannot be expressed musically; music canonly express the pathos of pain (its social image), not its being;but music can fleetingl y express, if not pain , at least purity­the unprecedented quali ty of purity: to offer th e listen er a puresound is an entire musical action by which modern music hasoften profited (from W agner to Cage ) . Schumann , of course,had not conducted such experiments; and yet : Marcel Beaufilsvery rightl y points out the enigmatic B natural which open s thesong Mondnacht and which vibrates in us so "supernaturally."It is in this perspective, it seems to me, that we must listen, inSchumann's music, to the positions of tonality. Schumanniantonality is simple , robust; it does not have the marvelous sophis­tication of Chopin's (notably in the Mazurkas). But precisely:its simplicity is an insistence : for man y Schumannian pieces,th e tonal range has the value of a single sound which keepsvibrating until it maddens us; the tonic is not endowed with a

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"cosmic widening" (like the first E flat of Rheingold) , butrather with a massiveness which insists, imposing its solitude tothe point of obsession.

The third point where Schumann's music encounters hismadness is rhythm. Marcel Beaufils analyzes this very well; heshows its importance, its originality, and finally its dissolution(for example, through the generalization of syncopations).Rhythm, in Schumann, is a violence (Beaufils shows how it doesviolence to the theme, rendering it "barbarous," which Chopindid not like at all); but (as with pain) this violence is pure, it isnot "tactical." Schumannian rhythm (listen carefully to thebasses) imposes itself like a texture of beats; this texture can bedelicate (Beaufils shows that the lovely though little-knownIntermezzi are differentiated and extended studies of purerhythm), yet it has something atypical about it (as is provedby the fact that we never consider Schumann a composer ofrhythm: he is imprisoned in melody). To put it differently:rhythm, in Schumann, singularly enough, is not in the serviceof a dual, oppositional organization of the world.

Here we touch on Schumann's singularity, I believe: thatpoint of fusion at which his fate (madness), his thought, andhis music converge. This point Beaufils has seen: "His universeis without struggle," he says. This is, at first glance, a veryparadoxical diagnosis for a musician who so often suffered, andso cruelly, from opposition to his projects (marriage, vocation)and whose music always shudders with the leaps of desire(despondencies, hopes, desolations, intoxications) And yetSchumann's "madness" (this is not, obviously, a psychiatricdiagnosis, would horrify me in many respects) arises (orat least can be said to arise) from the factflictual (I should say in my language: paradigmatic) structureof the world: music is based on no simple and. one

frontation. No Beethovenian or even Schubertianfragility (tender melancholy of a subject who sees death

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him) . This is a music at once dispersed and unary, continuallytaking refuge in the luminous shadow of the Mo ther (the lied,copious in Schumann's work, is, I believe, the expression of thismaternal unit y) . In short, Schumann lacks conflict (necessary,it is said, to the prop er econom y of the "normal" subject ),precisely insofar as- paradoxically- he multiplies his "moods,"his "humors" (another important notion of the Schumannianaesthetic: humoresques, mit Humor) : in the same way, hedestro ys the pulsion (let us play on words; let us also say: thepulsation) of pain by experiencing it in a pure mode, just ashe exhausts rhythm by generalizing syncopation. For him , onlythe external world is differentiated, but according to the Car­nival's superficial fits and starts. Schumann ceaselessly "att acks,"but he always does so in the void.

Is this why our period grants him what is doubtless an "hon­orable" place (of course he is a "great composer") , but not afavored one (there are man y W agnerites, many Mahlerians, butthe only Schumannians I know are Gilles Deleuz e, Marcel Beau­fils, and myself)? Our period, especially since the advent, byrecordings, of mass music, wants splendid images of great con­flicts (Beethoven, Mahler, Tchaikovsky) . Loving Schumann, asBeaufils and his publisher give evidence that the y do, is in away to assume a philosophy of Nostalgia , or, to adopt aNietzschean word, of Untimeliness, or again, to risk this timethe most Schumannian word there is: of Night. Loving Schu­mann, doing so in a certain fashion against the age (I havesketched the motifs of this solitude ), can only be a responsibleway of loving : it inevitably leads the subject who does so andsays so to posit himself in his time according to the injunctionsof his desire and not according to those of his sociality. But thatis another story, whose narrative would exceed the limits ofmusic.

1979