The Mentor: Famous Composers, Vol. 1, Num. 41, Serial No. 41

ROBERT SCHUMANN

Monograph Number Four in The Mentor Reading Course

Although Schumann had begun to take a hand at composition before he was seven years old, he did not begin a real study of music until he was twenty. He was born at Zwickau, June 8, 1810, and lived there until 1826, when he began the study of law at the University of Leipsic. He wrote verse when at the university, and read more poetry and literature than law. In 1830, he took up the study of music under two masters. Herr Wieck was his teacher of pianoforte, and Heinrich Donn of composition.

Although he had already composed a great deal, it was not until after 1840 that he studied harmony. Friends calling on him and his wife one evening said that they found the master and his wife “studying Cherubini’s counterpoint for the first time.”

His opportunity to become a virtuoso was lost when he lamed the fourth finger of his right hand while trying a stunt in practising. Schumann believed that he could train himself to reach beyond an octave by the use of his fourth finger, and it was in an attempt to do this that he disabled his hand.

With his pianoforte master Wieck, he founded a music journal, which he edited alone from 1835 to 1844. He attempted concerts in Vienna in 1838; but failed and returned to Leipsic. In 1840 he received the degree of Ph. D. from the University of Jena. He married Clara Wieck in the same year; although her father objected strongly to the match. His wife, under the name of Clara Schumann, became one of the most famous pianists and teachers in Europe. So the musician’s fame went to his wife; while Schumann made fame for himself as a composer. He became teacher of score reading in the college that Mendelssohn founded at Leipsic in 1843, and in 1847 conducted the Liedertafel. In 1850 he succeeded Ferdinand Hiller as general music director of Düsseldorf.

Owing to insanity, which threatened him as early as 1833, he had to resign in 1853, and in 1854 he jumped into the Rhine. He was committed to an asylum at Endenish, where he died July 29, 1856. He was buried in Bonn. A simple headstone marks his grave.

FRÉDÉRIC FRANÇOIS CHOPIN

Monograph Number Five in The Mentor Reading Course

“Imagine a delicate man of extreme refinement of mien and manner, sitting at the piano and playing with no sway of body and scarcely any movement of the arms, depending entirely upon his narrow, feminine hands and slender fingers!”

This is the picture of Chopin as seen by an amateur pupil. This great pianist, the inspiration of Liszt and the expounder of Polish dance music and national songs, was born at Zela Zowa Wola, near Warsaw, March 1, 1809. He was supported at college at Warsaw by an annuity of one hundred and twenty dollars, the gift of Prince Antoine Radziwill, who had written music for Goethe’s “Faust.”

The friendship of the prince is what brought Chopin into the circle of the most graceful and refined society of the early nineteenth century, that of Poland.

At nineteen Chopin made his début as a pianist in Vienna. Robert Schumann heard him play his first piece, “Don Giovanni Fantasie,” which led him to remark that the pianist was “the boldest and proudest spirit of the times.” Just after this same concert the leading German musical journal said, “M. Chopin has placed himself in the first rank of pianists,” and praised “his delicacy of touch, his rare mechanical dexterity, and the splendid clearness of his phrasing.”

In 1831 he stopped at Paris when on his way for an intended tour in England. He stayed there and made that city his permanent home. It was at this time that he met Madame Dudevant, better known by her literary pseudonym, George Sand, who was destined to have a great influence on his life.

Six years later, in failing health, he went to Majorca, where he recovered for a time, due to the constant attention and tender care of George Sand. However, in 1840 the pulmonary disease attacked him again, and the last years of his life were a constant struggle against ill health.

Chopin brought a new spirit into music, a new feeling and a new technic into piano playing. He was regarded with admiration not unmixed with awe. As his life drew near its end the music world watched and worshiped him as it might a divine spirit. He died October 17, 1849.

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Monograph Number Six in The Mentor Reading Course

The life of Johannes Brahms was an unsettled and wandering one. It was not until his later years that he chose a definite city for his home.

He was born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833, the son of a double-bass player in a theater, who was his first teacher. His life was uneventful until the age of twenty, when he began his public career with a concert tour in company with Remenyi, the Hungarian violinist.

Joachim, the famous student of Mendelssohn, attended the concert at Göttingen, where Brahms was to play the “Kreutzer” sonata of Beethoven. The piano turned out to be a semitone below the required pitch. Brahms played the piece from memory, transposing it from A to B flat. Joachim discerned what the feat implied, and after the concert introduced himself to the pianist, laying the foundation of a lifelong friendship, through which Brahms met Liszt and Schumann. The latter, after hearing but a few of his compositions, pronounced him “the master of the music of the future.”

The Prince of Lippe-Detmold engaged him as choir director and music master in 1854. He kept the position a few years and then resigned. He then wandered about, giving occasional concerts at Hamburg and Zurich. In 1863 he was appointed director of the Singakademie; but resigned within a year.

He seems to have had no public activity or settled work for the next four years, when he went on a concert tour with Joachim, and later with Stockhausen. In 1871 he began to direct the concerts of the “Gesellschaft der Musik-freunde,” which he continued to do until 1874. He spent the remainder of his life in Vienna, whence he took journeys to Italy in the spring and Switzerland in the summer.

He refused to go to England to take an honorary degree, Doctor of Music, offered by Cambridge University. In 1881 the University of Breslau conferred an honorary Ph. D. on him. Before his death he was granted two more honors. He was created a knight of the Prussian order, “Pour le Mérité,” in 1886, and he gained the freedom of his town in 1889. He died at Vienna, April 3, 1897.