Robert Schumann: Life and death of a musician by John Worthen

Author:John Worthen [Worthen, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2014-08-11T03:00:00+00:00

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The city immediately felt very different from St Petersburg; nothing like as grand and far more sprawling, with huge distances to be travelled between its various parts. It also felt a good deal more alien. In St Petersburg, western dress had been commonplace, but Clara would add to the journal, when she wrote it up, lengthy descriptions of the exotic clothes they now saw in the streets – on for example the female serfs, with their ‘silk Cossack jackets trimmed with the most beautiful fur and underneath . . . an ordinary calico dress’.43 But on arrival she felt dreadful and went straight to bed in their enormously expensive and horribly heated Hotel Shevaltischeff. Schumann made the initial explorations on his own and was ‘completely enchanted’ by the sight of the Kremlin, with its golden cupolas, bell tower and new palace. But then he came home and went to bed too. The two of them would subsequently go to the Kremlin almost every day, passing St Basil’s cathedral with its ‘nine towers and each one different, one looks like a tulip, the next like a pineapple, yet another like many beautifully bordered ribbons, etc.’44

They soon changed hotels to one that was cheaper and less hot. Their new room had a corner window with a lovely view of the city and they acquired an old German servant (Friedrich), who had – astonishingly – arrived in Moscow with Napoleon forty years earlier. He now specialised in looking after German travellers. They quickly got down to the business of trying to arrange concerts and initiating the social calls they had been advised to make though, without a central contact of the kind that Henselt had been in St Petersburg, social life in Moscow was nothing like so complex. As Clara noted, ‘the season for soirées was already over here’,45 and they regularly spent evenings quietly at home. When they went out to call on people to whom they had been recommended, things did not always work out. They specially hired a carriage (which cost them a thaler) to go and call on Count Serge Golitsyn – only to find that their visit consisted of saying ‘good day’ to him and being wished the same in return. And Clara lost her gloves. Something went wrong, too, during an evening visit to the distinguished German scientist Professor Fischer von Waldheim. They had first encountered him a couple of days earlier, when Clara had noted that he was a ‘good old man but makes terrible passes at women’. On their own visit, Schumann noted ‘insults hardly to be borne and Clara’s behaviour there’ – behaviour about which she, writing up her diary, could recall nothing.46 But presumably the old scientist had made one pass too many.

Fairly early on in Moscow, too, Schumann had another of his dizzy attacks – one so serious, this time, that for a while he was unable to see properly – and he never completely recovered the whole time they were there.

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