Lighting up the shadows

BiographySchumann was always the shadowy one. When I was a music student, we learned about Chopin the socialite and Liszt the womaniser and Brahms the bearded bear. Schumann, though, was a composer we glimpsed as if through a rain-streaked window, blurred and uncertain.

Of course we knew him to be the composer of piano pieces even the most modest performer among us could attempt - the 13 miniatures of Kinderszenen, mostly - but the life of Robert Schumann was presented to us largely as a cautionary tale in three movements. He was a virtuoso pianist who ruined his playing career by inventing a fiendish exercise contraption that wrecked his fingers; he was a Hopeless Romantic; he went mad and died young.

Instead of endearing him to the pop culture mainstream, this quasi-apocalyptic lens seems to have relegated Schumann to the musical sidelines. The 150th anniversary of his death took place in 2006, which was also the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. You'll no doubt recall the hoo-ha over Mozart; when it came to Schumann, though, it was more a case of "who he?" The composer who strides through the pages of Life and Death of a Musician, however, is no dishevelled shrinking violet but a confident, capable kind of guy. Well organised, highly motivated and hugely determined, he comes across as an astute critic and loyal friend as well as a devoted husband and kindly father.

HOW DID JOHN Worthen take the "facts" of Schumann's life and add them up to produce such a result? Well, his is a biography with attitude. To begin with, he argues that Schumann was neither manic depressive nor schizophrenic; rather, his illness was physical: the result of a bout of syphilis he contracted when he was 21. In the 1830s, Worthen explains, the nature of sexually transmitted disease was poorly understood. When the initial syphilitic "wound" healed up, doctors and patients alike believed that was the end of the matter - and for many sufferers, it was. Some, however, were struck - after a remission of 20 years or more - by tertiary syphilis, a terrible disease that brought creaking joints, lesions and sores and, eventually, madness and death.

Given the horror of Schumann's own death, one might retort that it's a moot point whether the disease that killed him was physical or psychological. Worthen, however, says it matters a great deal, because it determines our view of the composer's life - and, crucially, his music.

While most biographers rely heavily on Schumann's diaries, Worthen points out that this material is, in its way, misleading, since he kept journals only when he was feeling "quiet and deadly"; they are "a record of his unhappier times". Also, as Worthen perceptively notes, while they contain plenty of information about whatever music he was writing at the time, "they do not describe it nor his feelings about it".

IT'S ALMOST AS if the diaries represent another kind of creativity altogether. Schumann, after all, was a music journalist for many years, producing much of the newspaper he founded, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, single-handed. If he hadn't been a composer he might well have been a novelist or a poet. This is how Worthen deals with the tricky business of Schumann's alter egos. If he wasn't mad, why did he sometimes refer to himself as an impulsive person called "Florestan", or a dreamy chap called "Eusebius"? Because, Worthen suggests, "the early diaries do not offer truths about his experience; they offer versions of the self he is interested in being." One by one, Worthen knocks down the sacred cows of Schumann biography.

That troublesome finger began as a repetitive strain injury, worsened by the use of the practice machine - another example, he says, of the way in which physical problems in Schumann's life have been subsumed under an all-encompassing psychological interpretation. Likewise the bouts of drinking; Schumann, Worthen wryly observes, wouldn't be the first creative artist who fled to the pub after a lonely day of creativity.

Life and Death of a Musicianavoids the pitfalls which often beset large, detailed musical biographies, largely because it's so beautifully written. Worthen's insistence on Schumann's determination to become a composer in the face of almost insurmountable odds is persuasive and appealing, as is his portrait of a man who had to produce music on a regular basis to earn a living - and who did so, without fail.

Add in the central love story between Schumann and his wife Clara, a celebrity pianist and composer in her own right - and the horrors of Schumann's final illness and death, and there's no shortage of drama.

ALL OF WHICH, needless to say, is of no interest at all unless it relates to Schumann the composer. Once again, Worthen takes issue with the conventional view of Schumann as a poet of the piano but a duffer at orchestration; he had, Worthen insists, an instantly recognisable orchestral sound that replicated, in orchestral form, his heavy use of the legato pedal, recreating the kind of "waves of sound" central to his famous keyboard improvisations.

He concludes that Schumann's habit of mastering one musical form at a time, rather than hurling himself at them all at once, coupled with his early death, have left us with a somewhat lopsided view. A shadow, one might say, of the composer he might have become.

Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician By John Worthen Yale University Press, 496pp. £25

Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist