Ruth Slenczynska•SCHUMANN Ruth Slenczynska ... - Ivory Classics

made no secret of his affections, and published them in the dedications of his music, in thinly
disguised musical acrostics, and in his letters. He examined and recorded the fluctuating
states of his passion with cool detachment despite the depth of emotion. It seems that he
lived in the third person singular, so analytical are his epistolary descriptions of his own feelings.
He confided his loves to his mother, to whom he was deeply devoted. He often wrote
to one of his feminine friends confessing admiration for another. And once he wrote to a perfect
stranger, declaring in a curt sentence: “Clara Wieck loves, and is loved.” At that time he
was going through the torturing battle of sentiment with Clara’s father who opposed
Schumann’s marriage to Clara to the bitter end.
Two other women besides Clara occupied Schumann’s mind during this early period of
his life. One was Ernestine von Fricken, his first romantic love, the other, Henriette Voigt
who played the role of a confidante. Ernestine was Estrella, the starlet of Schumann’s imaginary
anti-Philistine Society of David. She was immortalized in the “dancing letters” of
Carnaval, which spell the name of her native town. She was a pupilboarder at the house of
Clara’s father, who never suspected that she and Schumann kept clandestine rendezvous at
the house of Henriette Voigt, the confidante. The attitude of Captain von Fricken towards
Ernestine was peculiar. He wrote her: “Play duets with Schumann, but be careful not to do
anything that might disturb your peace of mind or harm your good name.” But when
Schumann went to Asch, ready to sanction his relations by marriage, he found out to his dismay
that Ernestine was an illegitimate child adopted by the Captain, and not an heir to his
fortune. But the romance was already on the wane. Clara, although only sixteen, now occupied
Schumann’s full attention. To make sure of the indivisibility of that attention, Clara
wrote to Ernestine asking her whether she had any claims on Schumann, and received an
admirably unselfish reply that she had none. Much later, analyzing his mental state in retrospect,
Schumann wrote to Clara: “I feel strongly that Ernestine has been wronged. She was
the victim of circumstances, and I know well that I was at fault.” But he found an explanation
that mitigated his consciousness of guilt: Ernestine drove Clara from Schumann’s heart
without being aware of it, and thus the priority of love was merely re-established when
Schumann returned to Clara. Ernestine herself, strangely self-denying creature that she must
have been, wrote to Schumann and told him she had always believed that he could love no
one but Clara. Ernestine married an old aristocrat even before Schumann’s marriage to
Clara; her husband soon died, and she followed him, a victim of a typhoid epidemic.
Robert Schumann dedicated the Piano Sonata No.2 in G Minor, Opus 22 to Henriette
– 8 –