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Indeed, I am at present so full of musical ideas that I often feel as if I should explode." This was in 1838, two years before his marriage. "Schumann himself admits," as Professor Spitta remarks, "that his compositions for the piano written during the period of his courtship reveal much of his personal experiences and feelings, and his creative work of 1840 is of a very striking character.
He wandered here and there, for about three years, and his biographer, Spitta, thus portrays him: "Roving restlessly from place to place, winning all hearts by his sweet, insinuating, lively melodies, his eccentricities making him an imposing figure to the young of both sexes, and an annoyance to the old, exciting the attention of everybody, and then suddenly disappearing, his person uniting in the most seductive manner aristocratic bearing and tone with indolent dissipation, his moods alternating between uproarious spirits and deep depression, in all ways he resembled a figure from some romantic poem, wholly unlike anything seen before in the history of German art."
In 1720 he went to Carlsbad with his prince. When he returned to the bosom of his family, he found that his wife was not only dead, but buried. Spitta imagines his grief as he stood over the grave of the woman who had followed him from humility to success and had not been able to wish him a last Godspeed.
An old chorale of his was, as Spitta says, "floating in his soul, and he wanted to complete and perfect it." The preacher said he had "fallen calmly and blessedly asleep in God," and he was buried in St. Thomas' churchyard; but later the grave was lost sight of, and his bones are now as unhonoured as his memory is revered.
But the critic who, like Spitta, sees in it only a successful attempt at what was attempted unsuccessfully in the "John," seems to me to mistake the aim both of the "John" and the "Matthew."
In Greece and Albania, however, the viol would seem not to be used. Women are the chief reciters. Von Hahn, vol. i. p. ix. Spitta Bey, p. viii. Steere, pp. v., vii. Rink, p. 85; Grimm, "Märchen," p. vii.
Spitta indeed explains it thus: "The much discussed and romantically treated 'moon walking' is a legend which stands in contradiction to hitherto observed facts. That the phantasy of the German folk mind drew to itself the pale ghostly light of the moon and could reckon from it all sorts of wonderful things, proves nothing to us."
As Spitta, his biographer, writes: "As far as anything human can be imagined, the marriage was perfectly happy. Besides their genius both husband and wife had simple domestic tastes and were strong enough to bear the admiration of the world, without becoming egotistical. They lived for one another and for their children.
In the older church-cantata women did not sing: in the newer form they occasionally did. She might have been a professional from the Brunswick opera. But Spitta decides that it must have been Maria Barbara Bach, his cousin from a neighbouring town. She is known to have had relatives and friends in Arnstadt, and Bach married her a year later.
Then they remonstrated with him mildly again, adding, that they "furthermore remonstrate with him on his having latterly allowed the stranger maiden to show herself and to make music in the choir." His answer to this was simply that he had spoken about it to the parson. Further explanation we have none. Spitta speculates on the identity of this "stranger maiden."
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