Fantasy and Romance

Donald Macleod investigates the literary catalysts that fired Schumann's musical imagination. Today, ploughman poet Rabbie Burns and ETA Hoffmann, spinner of fantastic tales.

"Get your head out of that book!" is probably not a reprimand the young Robert Schumann was used to receiving. He grew up in a household that lived and breathed literature. His father was a novelist, bookseller and publisher who made a small fortune from his pocket editions of foreign-language classics in translation. As a teenager Schumann wrote copiously, trying his hand at fiction, poetry and plays, and it took him several years to satisfy himself that he was a composer rather than a writer. But his literary passion persisted, informing not only the texts he set but his whole conception of musical narrative and structure.

Today's programme focuses on the 'ploughman poet' Rabbie Burns and ETA Hoffmann, a spinner of fantastic tales who was himself later transmuted into fiction as the central character in the Offenbach opera that bears his name. Schumann set a number of Burns's poems, but the influence of Hoffmann went deeper; his fictional invention the composer Johannes Kreisler, a crazed genius at odds with conventional society, lies behind one of Schumann's most characteristic piano creations, Kreisleriana, a suite of eight movements that depict Kreisler's fragmented personality. When she heard it for the first time, Schumann's future wife Clara commented: "Sometimes your music actually frightens me, and I wonder, is it really true that the creator of such things is going to be my husband?".