[In the following excerpt, Brion defines Schumann's criticism as a work of art.]

It was partly to do justice to the great men of the past, partly to give a helping hand to young musicians scorned by the critics and unnoticed by the public, that Schumann decided to found a musical review. The idea was born in a cloud of pipe and cigar smoke at the Stammtisch of the Kaffeebaum, where he and his friends were accustomed to meet. This silent meditative man, who liked to sink into himself to listen to the music that was humming in his heart, was also a fighter. It would perhaps be better to say a knight-errant, for he was always ready to take up his lance to tilt at self-satisfied mediocrity and artistic insincerity—in a word at Philistinism. To instruct the ignorant by standing up for all that was great and good and deflating hollow pretensions was for him a sacred duty. It was not in any merely polemical spirit, it was not for the sake of scoring off others, nor was it in order to advance the interests of his friends that he stepped into the arena. To his mother he wrote:

We are busy planning a new big musical review which Hofmeister will publish. Its programme will be announced next month. … A new enterprise always gives rise to a profusion of hopes. … There's lots to do, to learn as well as to teach. The difficulties are great but we have plenty of talent to meet them with. I think it will be a great success and of great profit to my intellectual development.

He knew very well how rare good musical reviews were at that period in Germany—or indeed anywhere. Ever since the enthusiastic article he had written two years before for the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung on Chopin's “La ci darem” Variations, op. 2, the editor had made no answer to his offers of collaboration. He was reproached for praising “revolutionary” works, and the tone of his praise—its unrestrained enthusiasm—was considered not quite the thing. To maintain the prestige of criticism, praise should be handed out parsimoniously, patronisingly, and always spiced with a certain amount of salutary fault-finding.

This wretched sterile game, in which all too often the envious sought to redeem their own smallness and avenge their own failures, made Schumann's generous blood boil. And it was against these censors particularly that Schumann marshalled his battalions, to denounce their ignorance, their insensibility to beauty, their treacherousness, their fear of everything new and benevolence to everything second-rate, their positive ferocity in the presence of genius. Many of them were not even professionals. There were officers like Rellstab, civil servants like Castelli, clergymen like Fink. Let genius judge genius (though it will often hesitate to): for mediocrity to do so, generally in the name of outworn principles and barren laws, was a thing Schumann and his young friends could not stomach. So amongst the stale and rancid reviews of the day—Iris, Cäcilia, and the A.M.Z.—the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik raised its upstart head, ready to do battle with all comers, to herald the “music of the future” and to “spread the morning dew of a new age.”

It was on 3rd April, 1834, that the first number appeared, and curiously enough the same year saw the birth of the Gazette Musicale in Paris, founded on the same principles and with much the same programme. Nowhere was “modern” music known to the public. How could it be with all the orchestras, the musical reviews, and the publishing houses in the hands of the Philistines? To be known it had to be played, it had to be talked about. The new publication could at least undertake the latter, making known the young musicians whose work looked ahead. It could also clamour for the performance of their works. And it set about the job with joyous ardour and lively pugnacity.

The extent to which Bach, dead less than a century, had been forgotten is proof of the extreme confusion into which German musical opinion had fallen, and the false gods that were being bowed down to. In the preface to the collection of critical essays published in 1853, Schumann paints a gloomy picture of those earlier days.

The state of musical development was far from satisfactory at that period in Germany. On the stage Rossini still reigned. For the piano, it was Herz and Hünten almost exclusively. Yet, only a few years before, Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber, and Schubert were living amongst us. Admittedly a new star was rising over the horizon, Mendelssohn, and a Pole called Chopin was much lauded, but it was only later that these artists exerted a lasting influence.

Happily Schumann was not alone. The café to which he went for his evening glass of beer was a rendezvous for other ardent spirits, musicians, poets, painters, who were only too ready to join in the cry: Down with the Philistines!

Passionate discussions went on in the thick clouds of smoke that almost obscured the picturesque paintings which adorned the walls of the Kaffeebaum. In the centre of a group of young men, over whom he held sway, would be Friedrich Wieck, his face hard and domineering, delivering trenchant judgments, often with brutal sarcasm. They were not always well received. We know that he sometimes quarrelled with the pianist, Julius Knorr, an old Bohemian, gifted and full of fantasy, who went the round of the taverns of Leipzig looking (and easily finding) an adversary on whom to vent his fierce argumentativeness. Another habitué was a painter called Lyser, an extraordinary creature, whom Hoffmann, had he known him, would certainly have made use of in one of his tales. Schumann, who was very fond of him, said: “One could write whole volumes on that young man.” For he had put his hand to many trades, having been at one time or another writer, actor, theatrical producer, scene designer, conductor; and on every subject he had opinions of the utmost originality.

The publisher Hofmeister would listen with benevolence to the discussions till he himself was drawn into a long and very learned one with Dr. Reuter. More occasional frequenters of this café in the Fleischergasse were: Wenzel, an odd man who had long vacillated between theology and music before finally choosing the latter; Stegmayer, an eternal lover who played the Eusebius between two rehearsals at the theatre where he conducted the orchestra; Ortlepp, the poet who always managed to find a literary reason for contradicting a musician; Krögen, who only looked up from his newspaper from time to time to put in a scathing remark. Naturally there were others who hovered round the more formidable personalities, gaping at their outrageous views.

Schumann rarely took part in the debates. Generally, he sat to one side, drinking his beer, smoking his cigar and listening less to the argument under way than to his own inner voices. If he did intervene, it would be with passionate conviction: then once again he would relapse into silence, or chat in an undertone with his best friend, Ludwig Schunke, his favourite companion for country walks, the handsome Schunke whose premature death plunged him into despair.

Schumann has himself described the stupefaction caused by Schunke's first appearance at the Kaffeebaum, whose habitués could only compare him to one of Tilman Riemenschneider's paintings of St. John the Baptist, to the statue of a Roman Emperor recently excavated from the ashes of Pompeii, or to the ardent and majestic young Schiller as sculptured by Thorwaldsen.

When he introduced himself, saying: “Ludwig Schunke from Stuttgart,” I heard an inner voice say: “Here he is, the one for whom we have been waiting.” And I could see from his eyes that he was thinking of us much the same.

Naturally the chief topic was music, good music and bad, how to overcome the Philistines entrenched in their mediocrity, and how to turn an indifferent, suspicious, or even hostile public towards the younger composers and their revolutionary work. And the only way was by frontal attack, by creating a review that was more lively and more interesting than any other. First the younger generation must be won over. The others would follow sooner or later.

The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik was thus born under the shadow, as it were, of a coffee tree, to champion the work of young composers still unknown and that old one, Bach, whose work had fallen into neglect. Schumann, who had taken the initiative, threw himself into the campaign with that chivalrous ardour which always came to the surface of this silent, meditative young man the moment his ideals were at stake. He was conscious of leading a veritable crusade, of playing his part in a magnificent movement in which romantic music, that is to say, music par excellence, would come into its own. Moreover, he saw in the foundation of the review the opportunity of creating a new form of criticism as romantic as the music it was commenting upon. For Schumann had discovered a new language of criticism as new and original as that of his music. No longer was it to confine itself to cold analysis, but to make use of the heart, of the intellect, and of all the senses to reach the inner core of a new work and lay bare its inherent meaning. Instead of contemplating a work externally, the romantic critic would plunge into it, breathe it, commune with it. Instead of a dry, pedantic summary of its points, he would recreate its atmosphere for the reader, kindling in him the same emotions as he had felt himself. Nothing less was needed if the public was to be brought to the point at which it was capable of understanding new work. Feeling, enthusiasm, an ability to project oneself into the music one was listening to—those were the mainsprings of romantic musical criticism, of which there were two great masters, Hoffmann and Schumann.

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann had for six years been writing for the A.M.Z. edited by Rochlitz, who, it will be remembered, had turned his back on Schumann. Rochlitz had published some of Hoffmann's Tales, in particular the famous Ritter Gluck, one of the finest and most typical products of his genius, also some critical studies, reviews of new works, and essays on Beethoven, Gluck, Méhul, Spohr, and Boieldieu. The essay on Beethoven, included in the first volume of the Fantasiestücke, is a perfect example of just that criticism, passionate and subjective, which was Schumann's aim. And in his Kreisleriana this is the way in which Hoffmann compares the instrumental music of Hadyn, Mozart, and Beethoven. What dominates in Haydn's, he says:

… is the expression of childlike serenity. His symphonies take us out onto a plain covered as far as the eye can see with cool thickets and populated by a joyous motley crowd of happy people. Boys and girls dance lightly past, and laughing, teasing children hide behind the trees and rose-bushes, throwing flowers at each other. All is love, happiness and eternal youth, as before the Fall. No suffering, no pain; at most a sweet and melancholy aspiration towards that beloved Image floating far away in the brightness of the setting sun, neither approaching nor disappearing; and so long as it is there night does not fall, for it is itself the red glow of evening, lighting up hills and plain.

It is to the abysses of a mysterious kingdom that Mozart leads us. Fear takes hold of us, but it is a fear bereft of torture, rather a portent of the infinite. Love and melancholy sing in the gracious voices of the spirits; night flies away in a purple conflagration; obeying an ineffable call, we rush towards the apparitions floating in the clouds through the eternally whirling spheres and beckoning us to join them (see the Symphony in E flat known as the Swan Song).

Beethoven's instrumental music also opens up to us the empire of the prodigious and the incommensurable. Brilliant rays strike through the deep night of these realms: gigantic shadows come and go gripping us more and more forcibly, finally crushing us—ourselves but not the anguish and infinite longing in which the jubilant flashes of notes fall and drown. On the bosom of this suffering which absorbs, without destroying them, love, hope, and joy, we expect to burst asunder under the assembled voices of all passions—but we go on living, as ecstatic visionaries.

These last words are characteristic. The romantic listener is an ecstatic visionary, and the critic must express his ecstasy and his vision, rather than discourse scientifically, didactically, on the work that has inspired them. Hoffmann, it may be objected, was really a poet, but he was also a musician and a most severe and exacting one, and for all his poetry, his profession was law. Indeed it is interesting to note that of the three great champions of romantic music, Hoffmann, Wackenroder, and Schumann, two were lawyers, while the third had gone a long way towards becoming one. As advocates they were passionate in defence, virulent in indictment.

In Schumann's view, musical criticism should ideally be a sort of prose poem æsthetically equivalent to the work it was discussing. It should be music in literary garb. This was exactly the same as Goethe's view on the criticism of the plastic arts. His famous essay on the St. Rochus zu Bingen is as perfect an example of subjective criticism as the passage of Hoffmann's I have just quoted.

Schumann's first critical article, which had appeared in 1831 (on Chopin's “La ci darem” Variations) was nothing else than a cry of ecstasy. “Hats off, Gentlemen! a genius!” he began, and he went on to extol in the most lyrical terms the work of this young Pole, who was then just beginning, but in whom he saw at once all the originality that was later to be accorded him.

It must, however, be stressed that in Schumann's critical work, which fills several volumes, there is a great deal more than passionate outpourings. He discussed at the same time, and in great detail, the quality of the composition, pointing out both its beauties and its weaknesses. Indeed he was as precise and informative on the technical side as he was suggestive and poetical on the other.

Under one of his pseudonyms, Meister Raro he wrote:

A rosy light is dawning in the sky; whence it cometh I know not; but in any case, O youth, make for the light.

It was to reach out towards the light that was the dominant urge in Schumann and his friends, the will to bring clarity to all that was obscure in the romantic soul. It is a great mistake to imagine, as many do, that German Romantics deliberately cherished obscurity. The exact opposite is the truth: with one accord they demanded of art that it should dissipate the murky clouds within them, liberate them from their anguish, and give them the poise and harmony they longed for. Their plight was often just that—a struggle between their genius and their anguish, a struggle for light. Hölderlin's Greece was simply a version of this ideal light. It had nothing to do with historic Greece. Like Orplid, Mörike's magic island, it remained always a country of the mind, a promised land of the spirit.

Nor were they any more enamoured of their ambiguity. Their inner rifts and conflicts caused them such unutterable suffering that many sought escape—by suicide like Kleist, by fantasy like Hoffmann, by madness like Hölderlin, by resignation like Goethe. Even for Novalis who sang his hymns to the Night, that night was only a road towards the light comparable to the noche oscura of the mystics. Far from wallowing in their tribulations, as the French are inclined to accuse them of doing, the German Romantics groped desperately one and all for any sort of inward harmony and health which could be procured without the sacrifice of their essential personalities. Schumann offers us perhaps the best example of this struggle.

With all their exuberant creativeness, the Romantics were excellent critics, lucid and penetrating. Dahms does not overshoot the mark when he maintains that it was they who created musical criticism.

It had come to be realised that it was impossible to discover the soul of music by arid philosophic speculation or by the use of abstract intellectual faculties. It was through instinct that the Romantics found their way, through character, through feeling, through Sehnsucht and passion.

They realised the value of poetic description when commenting on and trying to do justice to a work of art, whether plastic or musical. Rochlitz had already to some extent pointed the way, though timidly, fearing the Philistines. It was left to the genius of Hoffmann and Schumann to give to poetic criticism—make no mistake: poetic not “literary”—its true value both objective and subjective.

Lastly, it was given to the Romantics to recognise and exalt all that was divine in genius. At the same time they took the grace which genius endows as the hall-mark, not of the Superman (a later invention of Nietzsche's) but of man himself, man enhanced to his highest power, sublimating himself till he takes his place at the right hand of God.

But if Schumann was to interpret by means of poetry the new voice of German music, it was not to be to the exclusion of foreigners, for he paid generous tribute to the Pole, Chopin, the Frenchman, Berlioz, and the Englishmen, Sterndale Bennett and John Field. All the same, his aim was primarily to discover and translate into words the music of his day and of his own country, not from any narrow nationalistic feeling, but from a conviction that the genius of an individual, however personal it might be, belonged none-the-less to a period and a place. Thus he attacked the Italians, the “canaries” as he called them, because of the inner spirit of bel canto, which he considered profoundly inimical to the development of German music. He attacked the futile flourishes of Rossini as vigorously as the “empty oratory” of Meyerbeer, and although in his first works he gave way to the prevailing fashion of using French titles, he dreamt of creating a musical terminology emancipated from the Italian language.

It was not merely a part of himself which Schumann devoted to criticism. He plunged into it whole-heartedly and with every side of his character—to be more precise with three sides. For he created three critics, each one himself, but a different self, Florestan, Eusebius, and Raro.

No sooner had the new review shown its vitality and its combativeness than contributors came running from every hand. One of them, Karl Banck, was a song-writer, who had studied church music in Italy, and who was to play not only an important part on the review but also in Schumann's private life. Another, Ludwig Böhner, had been a friend of Hoffmann's. The latter had in fact borrowed many a trait of this “old lion with a thorn in his paw” when creating his character, Johannes Kreisler, that legendary figure in whom so many romantic musicians saw a mirror of themselves, including Brahms, who in his young days sometimes signed himself “Johannes Kreisler, junior.” And then there was a young musician who had been Musikdirektor at the Magdeburg theatre and had written a curious opera, Die Feen. He sent in contributions in which he crossed swords with Rellstab, written with a rough violence which was quite different to the usual tone of the review. This was Richard Wagner.

The three pseudonyms with which Schumann signed his articles (and sometimes his compositions) were not the only ones to figure in the Zeitschrift. In fact there were many others—Jonathan, Juvenalis, Meritis, Fritz Friedrich, Maestro, Serpentinus, Julius, Walt. The Paris correspondent (really Stephen Heller) called himself “Jeanquirit” and the London one (Zuccalmaglio) signed himself “St. Diamond.” Moreover, there were references to women whose identity was similarly concealed—Livia (Henriette Graban), Estrella (Ernestine von Fricken), and three, Clara, Chiarina, and Zilai, all of whom were Clara Wieck.

Why all these pseudonyms? To intrigue people. The review was to come out with a bang and take the public by storm. It also pleased the playful, whimsical side of Schumann's character to dabble in a little mystery. Obviously, everyone would try to guess which of the musicians they knew stood behind the mask. Would it be Schunke, Luhe, Lyser, Knorr, Banck or Mendelssohn? They would certainly have had to be clever to guess the three disguises of Robert Schumann, true as each was to one side of his nature.

Sometimes all three would give their verdict in turn upon a single work. Eusebius, always gentle, would be indulgent “even to the weaknesses of the composition.” Florestan, quick to prick bubbles, would at once find the right word to show up its emptiness and insipidity. Raro the Meister, who had something of Wieck in him, was the stern technician and disciplinarian. Florestan was the personification of poetic fire and impetuousness, Eusebius of dreamy melancholy, Raro of reason and system. Three masks equally true to the person they were masking. The student who ignored one would fail to understand his man.

With curiosity aroused but not satisfied, it soon got around that these mysterious critics were members of a secret society. They were, it was whispered, the Davidsbündler. In 1810, Weber had created a somewhat similar society, the Harmonische Verein, nor were Hoffmann's Serapionsbrüder altogether different, a sort of sect, half real, half fictional. That Schumann's group should have put themselves under the ægis of David was doubly suitable. Were they not marching against the Philistines? And had not David been the musician King, playing, with the house of Israel, on “all manner of instruments” and “leaping and dancing before the Lord”?

A lot has been written about the “riddle” of the Davidsbund, in particular by Jansen who has produced a very interesting book on the subject entitled Die Davidsbündler. According to Schumann it was purely fictive.

… a society that was more than secret, having never existed except in the mind of its founder. … To present in turn different points of view on artistic questions it seemed to me not a bad idea to invent artistic personages of opposing characters, of which Florestan and Eusebius are the most striking, with Raro as a sort of hyphen between them.

And he adds, in his preface to the Gesammelte Schriften:

This league of the Companions of David runs like a red thread through the pages of the review, humorously interweaving Poetry and Truth.

In the mind of its creator this league was composed of all those, young or old, who were ready to fight to the death the Philistines of music, but was also intended to bring together under a common name the “blood brothers” of all lands and all ages. When it had first appeared in an article on Clara in Der Komet, the Davidsbund had been just a joke. Gradually it took shape and acquired a deep meaning to its author until it resembled the Orden in Hermann Hesse's Morgenlandfahrt. In it, actual people, past and present, mingled with fictional characters, weaving a strange tapestry of the real and the imaginary. Of his own pseudonyms, Schumann says:

Florestan and Eusebius represent my double nature, which, as a man, I should dearly like to merge in Raro.

Wandering among the masked figures are others undisguised, Mozart and Berlioz, both doughty Davidsbündler, though only honorary members. With all this mystery and disguise, it was only natural that Schumann should put his capricious marionettes of the Zeitschrift into a ballet, and this he did in Carnaval, op. 9. There is a fantastic description of a Roman carnival full of marvels in Hoffmann's Prinzessin Brambilla which gives some idea of the inner world which takes the stage in this work of Schumann's, but only a partial one. For Carnaval, which is poetry through and through, is a poetry that is beyond the realm of speech, a contact with the supernatural, whether inward or outward, which only music can make.

In this work we see clearer than in the others the duality of the composer. That we have in Carnaval a sort of “portrait gallery” of the Davidsbund is obvious. We meet Florestan and Eusebius and their doubles of the commedia dell'arte, Harlequin and Pierrot. Chiarina evokes Clara Wieck's pianistic talent, Estrella the fresh and simple grace of Ernestine von Fricken. The dancing letters play with the name of her birthplace, Asch. Then there is the March of the Davidsbündler, a sturdy declaration of war against the Philistines. That is all we have of the Davidsbund, though on the same level is the piece called Chopin, a clever pastiche, successfully catching the spirit Schumann greatly admired in that composer's work, which he aptly described as “a cannon hidden under flowers.” The valse too has a documentary value as a period piece. As for the Sphinxes with their slow, heavy notes, full of all that is enigmatic, they are the guardians of the gate of that Fairyland to which we are invited. But here, as in Papillons, the titles of the pieces give us the superficial side of the picture: they do not lead us into Schumann's real universe which is truly undefinable and ineffable.

The secret soul of every age is reflected in the mirror of its carnival. The Baroque age regarded it as a screen on which to project in gigantic silhouettes, as in Plato's Cave, the dramatic flounderings of its unconscious. The eighteenth century sought to exercise its aching anxieties by submerging them in a joyous masquerade. For the Romantics, heirs alike of the Baroque and the Rococo, the carnival became the prophetic voice of tortured humanity, seeking behind the mask its own essential nature. With its delight in doubles, the carnival is the supreme fête in which the harassed personality alienated or disintegrated, transforms and transfigures itself by the tricks of disguise. It arises from the profound uneasiness by which the Romantic is assailed when he attempts to take stock of himself. The degree to which the mask conceals or, on the contrary, reveals his identity and the mysterious links which bind him to others in a sort of supernatural communion and solidarity is what Hoffmann is showing us in the strange story of the poor actor Giglio, wretched mummer or prince incognito, in the tale of Princess Brambilla; and it is so Schumannesque in character that Carnaval could be taken for a musical illustration of it.

Like all Hoffmann's tales this one is imbued with an initiating quality. Here, inspired by Callot's engravings, full of dancing fanfarons and gipsy princesses, he has given us one of his most enlightening lessons, and it is precisely in the spirit of these “caprices” that Schumann wrote the solemn and ironical piece called Reconnaissance in Carnaval. Again, it is to a carnival, sumptuous, voluptuous, yet full of a satanic sadness, that Eichendorff invites the heroes of his Marmorbild, one of the most beautiful of all romantic Märchen, one of the richest in secret meaning. In this dangerous game with shadows, in this labyrinth of reflections and phantoms, the individual, bereft of all certainty of his own reality, gropes and flounders in his own pursuit.

Schumann was twenty-five when he composed Carnaval. Four years later in Vienna he returned to the theme in his Faschingschwank aus Wien, op. 26. In these two works the diabolic (to which so many Romantics succumbed) was kept at bay by all that was angelic in Schumann's character. The first was originally intended to be dedicated to the girl he was in love with, Ernestine von Fricken, though in the end it was in fact dedicated to Karl Lipinski, the Viennese violinist and conductor. What matters is that it was written by a young man in love, full of fantasy, gay and melancholy by turns, who played with his various masks, taking pleasure in disguising his own inner self, in order to give rein to the superabundance of vitality simmering within him.

The extraordinary resourcefulness displayed, the freshness of the melodies, the joy of the effortless song which ripples with such marvellous happiness through this work, makes it perhaps the most typical of all Schumann's achievements, so much so that, if we had to keep one solitary example of it, we might well choose this as representing him most completely, with all the lights and shadows, in the totality of his character and his genius.

With such a pure effusion, I cannot believe we should take too seriously the titles of these twenty-one pieces, endeavouring to nail them down to precise subjects. It is the musical invention which counts, the spontaneity of the song. The rest matters as little as the picturesque themes from the Flegeljahre mattered to Papillons. In fact it is safe to say that the music came to him first, and only as it took form was a carnivalesque picture suggested to his mind. If the music could be said to spring from anything it was direct from emotion itself.

The emotions may well have had a contemporary content, for that memorable year 1835 was for him a stirring one. Its three capital events were the creation, more or less imaginary, of the Davidsbund, the foundation of the Neue Zeitschrift for the promotion of the “music of the future” and the short-lived engagement to Ernestine von Fricken, who, as things turned out, merely paved the way for Schumann's great love—for Clara Wieck.

And, if we must not look for any serious anecdotic value in the titles of Carnaval, neither must we give too much importance to the inspiration derived from Ernestine. I know very well that in many of the pieces, a play is made with the notes A, E flat, C and B, which, in the German musical notation gives A, S, C, and H, Asch, which Schumann tells us was a “very musical town,” was his fiancée's home, her father having an estate there. She was quite a good musician, with an agreeable voice. Coming to Leipzig in April, 1834, she took lessons with Wieck and lodged in his house. According to contemporary accounts, she was neither very pretty nor even very charming. But Robert had a heart which could not be unoccupied for long, and he was taken by her cool, distant purity. And no sooner was his affection awakened than he found in her calm regular features the grace of a madonna and attributed to her all the merits he wished to find. By dint of love, a decidedly ordinary girl was found to be a marvel. Ernestine responded, and they became secretly engaged, though he prepared his mother for an announcement.

If fate were now to put the question: which would you choose? I would unhesitatingly answer: her. But that is a long way off. For the present I brush aside the idea of a closer bond, however inclined I feel towards it.

Of the girl herself, he says that she is:

… of a noble character, pure, childlike, and sensible, very much in love with me, passionately keen on every form of art, and herself extremely musical … in a word, just what I should wish my wife to be.

But was Ernestine, who dances through Carnaval in the guise of Estrella, really such a “precious stone”? Was her worth “beyond all estimate”? The engagement did not last long. Robert's love did not stand up to the separation when she stayed for a while at Asch with her father. As a matter of fact she was not really his daughter but an illegitimate child he had adopted.

Schumann was the more easily consoled for this disillusionment by being at the same time almost in love with Henriette Voigt, a “soul in A minor” as he called her. A married woman, she played for a time a somewhat similar part in his life to that which Agnes Carus had played—a maternal one. She was loved undoubtedly, but with the love that is given to the inaccessible. Moreover, there was another factor tending to efface Ernestine's memory—his growing feeling, perhaps unknown to himself, for Clara Wieck.

The promptings of his heart were extremely complex, and, just because he felt so keenly, he was little concerned to analyse his feelings. That we can do, however, by comparing the graceful appearance of Estrella (Ernestine) which is marked con affetto with, on the other hand, the appassionata “con molta anima” which ushers Chiarina onto the stage. Estrella could never have been the messenger of sovereign mysteries: she was simply the harbinger who announces the coming of another who was to fill his heart completely. Of that the song of the mage Celionato at the end of Prinzessin Brambilla gives the most perfect version.

In the pure celestial light the pair become conscious of their identity and in faithful union the profound truth of life shines upon the two that have become one.

In Carnaval two beings, eternally destined for one another, meet and recognise each other. Schumann's mother guessed the meaning correctly. The hapless Estrella has in the end only to efface herself before the apparition of the ideal woman, whose beauty, intelligence and talent had from the first singled her out to be the perfect companion for Robert. Let there be no doubt about this—it was Clara who really inspired Carnaval, dedicated as the work originally was to Ernestine in the blindness of a groping and tender heart, reluctant to wound.

And from now on it was Clara whose presence was to light up the life and work of Robert Schumann. To quote again from Prinzessin Brambilla:

Listen! Already they are starting, the sweet strains of the music, and all is hushed to hear them; a brilliant blue glows low on the horizon and from distant streams and forests comes a murmur and a rustling. Open magic country full of a thousand felicities! Open and make desire follow upon desire, as he contemplates his image in the fountains of love! The flood swells. Forward! Plunge into the waves; strike out lustily. Soon the shore will be reached. And supreme delight glitters in cascades of fire.