"I recently searched in an old geography book for notes about Düsseldorf and found noted under curiosities: 3 convents and an insane asylum. I can accept the former; but the latter was quite uncomfortable for me to read." What Robert Schumann, this prototype of the romantically torn composer, noted in 1849 indicates the mixed feelings and premonitions he had when he set out for Düsseldorf a year later. In fact, the manic depressive would spend the last two years of his life in a mental institution – not in Düsseldorf, but in Bonn-Endenich.
With the move to the Rhine, Schumann (1810 – 1856) hoped for a new beginning above all else. After his choral and orchestral works did not bring the desired success and financial fortune at his old places of activity, Leipzig and Dresden. The annual salary of a music director in Düsseldorf was certainly not a fortune. On the other hand, this base salary allowed him to devote himself intensively to composing again. Especially since he had Clara Schumann as a wife, who had temporarily given up her career as a pianist and composer to support him as the mother of their eight children.
The air in Düsseldorf seemed to do Robert Schumann creatively well. In the nearly four years on the Rhine, a third of his total works were created. Among them the three violin sonatas, the cello concerto, as well as the 3rd Symphony, known as the "Rheinische," which was enthusiastically received in Düsseldorf on February 6, 1851.
In the Schumann apartment on Bilker Strasse, new and old friends such as the young Johannes Brahms and the famous violinist Joseph Joachim came and went. Nevertheless, the mood increasingly darkened. In housewife Clara Schumann, it was brewing. She confided in her diary: "My last good years are passing by, my strength too." In the newspapers, increasingly negative reviews about conductor Schumann could be read. Besides the attacks of dizziness and hearing disturbances that had already occurred in 1833, the first signs of mental confusion became apparent in Robert Schumann in 1852/53. Advice is requested from the furniture by pushing the table. With a satisfactory answer, Schumann "rewards" his friend with a new blanket. The climax of this world-abandonment will ultimately be Schumann's suicide attempt.
On February 27, 1854, a Rose Monday, Robert Schumann mingled with the carnival-goers in his morning gown and jumped from the Rhine Bridge. The musician was subsequently committed to the Bonn mental institution, where he composed until almost his last breath. Only a few weeks before his death on July 26, 1856, two choral movements were created.
While Schumann's early piano and song cycles such as "Kinderszenen" and "Dichterliebe" have long become part of the established repertoire canon, his late piano and vocal works still need to be discovered by the public. However, Schumann's sound incarnated soul pain is so visionary in all its harmonic densifications and experiments that contemporary composers still feel challenged by it today. Whether it's Aribert Reimann, Heinz Holliger, or last but not least Wolfgang Rihm, who once aptly summarized Schumann's musical psychograms in the following words: "The juxtaposition of clarity and murky spots, the rapid changes of density and states of mind, the agonizing trench warfare of musical thoughts, the circling without goal and will." By the way, immediately after Schumann's death, Clara Schumann moved out of the Düsseldorf apartment and to Berlin – and subsequently made a second career as a pianist across Europe.
