The relation between music and madness in [Robert] Schumann is expressed in a unique and singular compositional language: fragmentary, rhapsodic, and built on discontinuity, misalignments, overlaps, and unexpected juxtapositions. It is music that radically departs from the linearity and balance of the great classical narrative, such as that of Beethoven or Schubert, and fits into a historical context in which literature and philosophy – think of Goethe or Hegel – were also beginning to abandon the expressive models of the past. However, this is not just a change of style or a simple shift in aesthetics: in Schumann's music, we can detect a more profound fracture, a transformation of the relation between meaning, subjectivity, and the symbolic order.
If we compare his musical expression with that of Chopin, his great contemporary, a radical difference is evident: Chopin constructs a quasi-hypnotic sound-universe that revolves around a lack, evoking desire, nostalgia, and a veiled melancholy for what has been lost or for what one never had. His music envelops us, leads us, and accompanies us with dolefulness. Schumann's, on the other hand, at least in the piano sections, is more restless and fragmented, non-narrative. He creates a hyper-saturated world, overflowing with presences, internal tensions, and unfamiliar details. It does not revolve around what is missing, but around what overflows, what exceeds, what disorients.
Schumann loved authors such as Hoffmann and Richter, in whom he sensed that demonic and perturbing spark that we also find in his music. His pieces seem to touch the limit where tension is taken to the extreme, bringing out improvised details that destabilize the listener, breaking any equilibrium. The myth of Hero and Leander – evoked in the piece "In der Nacht"1 – becomes emblematic: the light goes out; Leander drowns in the waves. So too with Clara [Schumann], who for years had been the guiding light of Schumann's desire, and when her absence is erased, excess and unbearable plenitude enters. And then the light really goes out: Schumann begins a slow and inexorable descent into darkness, a silent shipwreck into madness, a slipping with no return into the icy waters of the Rhine into which the composer threw himself.
[1] Robert Schumann, "In der Nacht," Fantasiestücke, movement 5. Available online: Spotify.
