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28 ROBERT SCHUMANN
So, finally, let’s talk about the
Davidsbündlertänze
. These dances ‘are quite
different from [
Carnaval
], and are to it as faces are to masks’: what do you
think of this remark from Schumann to Clara in a letter of 18 March 1838?
It’s an extremely important comment. It comes during an exchange between
Schumann and a girl who tells him she thinks there are too many resemblances
between the
Davidsbündlertänze
and
Carnaval
, and that she prefers the latter. Clara
was only nineteen years old then. After Robert’s death, she told Brahms one day
that she was rediscovering all the beauty and profundity of her husband’s op.6.
Two years after his op.9, the
Davidsbündlertänze
is another carnival, but an
‘internalised carnival’. Now there are no titles: all the musical theatre, all the
‘staging’ to be found in the
Papillons
already, and above all in
Carnaval
, have
disappeared. Schumann removes all masks, lays himself bare and truly goes to the
heart of things. Now only two characters are left, Eusebius and Florestan, as if the
composerwanted–at least this is howI see it – to take
Carnaval
as his startingpoint
and go further and deeper into his introspection; to go further, too, into a certain
compositional freedom, which is already great in his op.9. The
Davidsbündlertänze
contains extraordinary things, incredibly inventive and original, and now it’s on
that terrain that the
Davidsbündler
fight the Philistines, not in a noisy march any
more.