How Shen Congwen became a “Believer in Music”

On February 27, 1854, the composer Robert Schumann fell into a depressive state and attempted to drown himself in the Rhine River, but was helped out by some boatmen. After that, he came home and completed his last piano work, Geistervariationen (Ghost variations), which was published only posthumously. The work is full of calm motifs and does not let the listener feel the madness of the composer at all. ³ After dedicating this work to his wife Clara, Schumann was admitted to the mental hospital in Endenich, in Bonn, and finished the last year and a half of his life there, dying on July 29, 1856. Marcel Brion, in his masterpiece Schumann et l’ame romantique (Schumann and the romantic age) (1954), comments on the last years of Schumann in this way:

What makes Schumann’s case so extremely tragic is that the approach of madness seemed to increase his creative impulse, for he was composing music without respite, some of it of the utmost beauty; and the greatest of his inflictions must have been to feel himself unable to retain and record those sublimities “the like of which had never been heard on earth before.” He could listen to this music of infinity, but, when he tried to write it down it escaped him. ⁴

The pains that an artist feels when he cannot catch supreme melodies that flit through his ear… these were the same pains that the Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, the famous character that E.T.A. Hoffmann created, expressed in Kreisleriana (1810–1814), a series of works that have a style of musical reviews. ⁵