Many composers’ public images are intensely bound up with their biographies. The image of “Heroic” Beethoven stems from the story of his personal defiance in the face of impending deafness. By contrast, Grieg’s reputation as a “Miniaturist” is largely based on his diminutive stature, and his own physical frailties have been read into his music, leading to the belief that he was unable to manage large compositional forms.
Robert Schumann’s mental health has defined narratives about his composition. He spent the final two years of his life in an asylum after attempting suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine, and throughout these years he experienced mood swings and auditory hallucinations. This has given rise to the perception that the music he wrote late in his life is in some way problematic, depicted as the outpourings of a creative spirit in decline.
Unlocking Late Schumann set out to challenge this perception. ‘In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a huge social stigma about mental illness’, Laura Tunbridge explains. ‘You can see that in the way the first biographers write about him - they assume that mental illness is going to have a detrimental effect.’
Laura’s project encouraged an engagement with Schumann’s music that thought about his later works in terms of experimentation and artistic innovation, rather than perpetuating nineteenth century assumptions about mental health. Laura released a podcast series on Schumann’s late music, interviewing a number of critics and performers who regularly interpret these pieces. T
his was combined with a study day at the Oxford Lieder Festival, which in 2016 focused primarily on Schumann and his works. The public study day involved two concert performances of Schumann’s late music, contextualised with talks by Laura and other academics and composers. These reassessed the assumption that Schumann’s later years represent ‘a failing of his creative powers’, giving audiences a new framework with which to approach the pieces they heard in concert.
Laura says that ‘audiences were excited to engage with and re-evaluate his “problematic” late works’, and were open to hearing his music in a new way. The Fellowship has led to an Oxford-based conference on Schumann’s wife, Clara, and to Laura providing a script framing a performance of Schumann’s Maria Stuart Lieder which will be given by Dame Sarah Connolly at the Wigmore Hall.
Knowledge Exchange Fellowships Brochure
