Robert Schumann and Jean Paul

Abstract

The research is devoted to the issue of the intermedial inter-connection between music and literature based on the example of R. Schumann’s and J. P. Richter’s works. The music composed by Robert Schumann was closely connected with literature, and the connections were diverse. Schumann authored a number of musical cycles on verses by J. W. Goethe, H. Heine, E. Th. A. Hofmann, A. Von Chamisso, musically adapted Lord Byron’s dramatic poem “Manfred”, composed the opera “Genoveva”, etc. He also made a great contribution to musical criticism, and composed many romantic musical pieces. The paper emphasises the literary nature of Chopin’s music — its figurativeness, portraiture, and psychologism.

Among his favourite writers Schumann gave pride of place to Jean Paul Richter, based on whose writing he created the cycle titled “Butterflies”. The poetically gifted Schumann felt consonance with Jean Paul’s sweeping, highly emotional, imaginative prose. The author analyses the common features of Schumann’s and Richter’s artistic worlds: the sense of life they shared — a combination of a tragic view of life and languishing affection, sincerity, humour and sarcasm, a sharp rejection of philistinism and empty forms of life and art produced by it.

Jean Paul made a major contribution to the emergence of Schumann’s poetic language, giving musical voice to his impressions, where the composer’s musical and aesthetic thinking is captured. The works of Jean Paul and Hoffmann channelled their dualism into Schumann’s musical aesthetics. The author emphasises that the dual structure of the characters in Jean Paul’s novels indirectly reflects the premises of Schumann’s artistic program. On the other hand, Jean Paul’s contemporaries noticed “the musicality of his work”, and, particularly, Novalis noted that Richter poeticises musical fantasies.