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Updated: May 4, 2025
The musicians knew Schumann's work, and he rejoiced at finding friends of his art in a far-away country. "But," says Reissman, "this was destined to be his last happiness." For the dread affliction which throws a spell of horror across his life and his wife's devotion, did not long delay in seizing upon him after his marriage.
He went with her on many of her tours. They even planned an American trip. Once they were received with a public banquet; these two whom Reissman calls "the marvellous couple." In his letters there are always loving allusions to "my Clara," and though he could not himself play because of his lame finger, she was to him his "right hand."
His Opus 5, written in 1833, was based on a theme by Clara, and, according to Reissman, showed a feeling of "reverence for her genius rather than of love." He began also to publish most enthusiastic criticisms of her concerts, calling her "the wonder-child," and "the first German artist," one who "already stands on the topmost peak of our time." He even printed verses upon her genius.
It was appropriate that they should have chosen the love affairs of the first musician Orpheus and the coy Daphne, seeing what a vast amount of love-making, pretended and real, the school of opera has handed down upon the world. Reissman has reckoned it out that twenty thousand lovers are joined or are parted every night in the world's theatres.
On the 14th of August, Clara and her friend Henrietta Reissman left Paris. Meanwhile Schumann had sunk into another awesome abyss of melancholia. The humiliation of having to go to law for his wife, and airing the family scandal in public, crushed him to the dust. He wrote his friend Becker: "I hardly think I shall live to hear the decision of the court."
It seems actually and beautifully true, as Reissman says, that "Schumann's devotions were as chaste and devout as those of the soul of a pure woman." Such a love, such a courtship, and such a wedlock as that of Robert and Clara Schumann ennoble not only the art and history of music, but those as well of humanity. "Et le cortège chantait quelque chose de triste des oh! et des ah!"
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