ROBERT SCHUMANN, PIANIST OF NINE FINGERS.

Author: Roman Galimany Soler

The name Robert Schumann is an antinomy. On the one hand, his work full of relevant romanticism, on the other his life subjected to unpredictable mood swings, captive of the psychopathy he feared so much for which he died in an asylum.
The son of a publisher and bookseller married to a pianist of a wealthy class, Schumann began studying piano at the age of eight; a gifted and advanced child who also wrote novels, stories and poems.
At the age of fifteen his plans were altered when he suffered his first depressive crisis, the result of a failed love affair, the death of his father and the suicide of his sister.
The drastic change in his life occurred when he became involved with the piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, who encouraged him to study piano. Thus, Schumann rejected his future as a law graduate and ended up settling in his teacher’s house, where he met Clara Wieck, the eleven-year-old daughter who would later become a pianist and his wife.

Following Wieck’s bad technical advice, he caused a permanent injury to his right hand that prevented him from being a pianist.
He wanted to be a piano virtuoso. He tried to find a way to improve his technique by strengthening and lengthening his fingers. To do this, he resorted to a mechanical device that ended up disabling two fingers on his right hand, preventing him from playing the piano as a professional concert pianist. The device that damaged his fingers had been designed to improve the elasticity when lifting the ring finger. If you do the test, you will see that the elasticity of this finger when lifting it back is much lower than that of the rest of the fingers.
However, despite a resounding failure, he led a story of perseverance and success. He did not give up and managed to enter music as a composer. His piano works are an essential part of any classical music repertoire.
Although the accident interrupted his promising career as a pianist, he overcame it and achieved his goal in another area of ​​music.

Robert Schumann went through this ordeal when he was still very young. The setback that life put in his way did not lead him to change his path and, despite everything, he wrote his name in the history of music.

At the age of 22, Schumann was unable to work as a concert pianist, so he turned completely to composition. To this were added severe paranoid depressions and phobia attacks, leading to his first suicide attempt.

It would be a year before Schumann regained control of his life, now in the literary world. Together with the piano teacher’s daughter, Clara Wieck, aged fifteen, he founded the magazine Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Music Magazine), a publication that would become a national benchmark both in criticism and in the dissemination of 19th-century music, and a real shock to the conservative composers of the time.

“My whole life has been a struggle between music and literature”, Schumann would write in his personal diary in 1849. It is very difficult to differentiate Schumann’s artistic life from his sentimental one; all aspects of his existence were dominated – to a large extent – ​​by his union with the virtuoso composer Clara Wieck.
A relationship that was not at all easy, with tensions, disagreements in the editorial office of the magazine, the death of his mother. All of this led him to an episode of alcoholism. Schumann took refuge in music and devoted himself obsessively to composition, managing to compose, from that moment on, more than 160 pieces of the 175 he composed throughout his life. He had the ability to transfer his problematic inner world to music, transmitting feelings and emotions in notes.
The age difference between Schumann and Clara was not a minor issue; he had to face a four-year legal process due to Clara’s minority in order to be able to marry.
Clara interpreted her husband’s compositions with great success, while he – under the guidance of his wife – oriented his composition towards the form of the lied, intimate music inspired by poetry that would lead to perfection. But, professionally, he felt uncomfortable not being able to place himself in the musical space led by Wagner, Rossini and Liszt. Thus began a period of decline.
During this year he produced his best work, the Manfred Overture, but the failures of some works caused him a new depression with a series of auditory hallucinations, insomnia, paralysis and fever. In 1852 he resigned from the position of musical director of the Düsseldorf Conservatory. He was increasingly irritable, irritable and irritable.
In a letter to Joseph Joachim, the composer told the violinist: “Now the music has fallen silent”. Shortly afterwards he felt that the angels were revealing a truth to him in the form of a melody, which he wrote down and composed some variations while hiding in his room.

During these years he composed in all musical genres until exhaustion.

On February 26, he told his wife: “I am not worthy of your love. But I will soon return cured”. Clara and the doctors searched for him throughout the city without success, due to the tumult of people who filled the streets because it was carnival time. Some fishermen rescued Schumann from the Rhine just before he drowned in a suicide attempt.
Five days after this event, Schumann asked to be admitted to the Endenich asylum, on the outskirts of Bonn. In this place, the composer lived two years of great suffering and only allowed his friend and composer Johannes Brahms to visit him.
Clara was forbidden to visit him because, according to her doctor, the meetings caused him too much agitation. She only saw her husband dead in bed again.
Robert Schumann’s psychiatric personality was of particular concern to the doctors. On the contrary, his orthopedic alteration of his right hand seems to have been very neglected by some physicians.

In a study by the Department of Neurology, Jiménez Diaz Foundation, Madrid, based on some consolidated facts and the digitized study of certain musical works, the authors propose a plausible diagnosis and offer a treatment that would have allowed a functional rehabilitation of the great musician and pianist with nine fingers.
Occupational dystonia is a frequent clinical symptom in musicians and has been described as muscle spasms and hand cramps in pianists. Robert Schumann had a neurological alteration of his right hand that was not clinically diagnosed during his lifetime and that affected his career as a pianist from the age of 20. This alteration was characterized by pain and stiffness of the fingers, which extended to other segments of the right upper limb while he was performing and which increased with stress and improved with muscle relaxation. This disorder produced a progressive deterioration in his writing. In this study they hypothesize that Schumann’s neurological problem was consistent with dystonia.

Schumann’s medical history was made public in 1988 and indicated that the cause of death was tertiary syphilis that manifested itself through dementia paralyticus.

Basic bibliography

• Robert Schumann on Wikipedia
• Clara Schumann on Wikipedia
• Progressive General Paralysis (Wikipedia)
• Robert Schumann – Encyclopaedia Britannica

About the author

Dr. Romàn Galimany Dr. Romà Galimany , a doctor with a passion for classical music and the history of medicine, is part of the Can Ruti Retired Doctors Association. With a sensitive yet rigorous perspective, he offers us this biographical and clinical approach to one of the great composers of Romanticism.

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