Schumann and Counterpoint

“The Well Tempered Clavier should be your daily bread”

-Robert Schumann, Advice to Young Musicians, 1848

“A few months ago I finished my theoretical course with Dorn, having got as far as canons, which I have
been studying by myself after Marpurg, who is a capital theorist. Otherwise Sebastian Bach’s Well-
Tempered Clavier is my grammar, and is certainly the best. I have taken the fugues one by one, and
dissected them down to their minutest parts. The advantage of this is great, and seems to have a
strengthening moral effect upon one’s whole system; for Bach was a thorough man, all over, there is
nothing sickly or stunted about him, and his works seem written for eternity.”

-Robert Schumann, 1832 letter

“We have started with the Fugues of Bach [from The Well-Tempered Clavier—MR]; Robert marks those
places where the theme always returns—studying these fugues is really quite interesting and gives me
more pleasure each day. Robert reprimanded me very strongly; I had doubled one place in octaves, and
thus impermissibly added a fifth voice to the four-voice texture. He was right to denounce this, but it
pained me not to have sensed it myself.”

-Clara Schumann, September 1840 diary entry

“I lost every melody as soon as I conceived it.”

-Robert Schumann, 1845 letter

“The fugue as we now know it, is, so to speak, the keystone of counterpoint. . . . [Cherubini calls the
fugue the] veritable archetype of all musical composition. And in truth, to the extent that they proceed
from the very deepest understanding of the art form, practically all masterpieces—including those in a
somewhat freer mode—may be traced back to the Fugue form.”

-Robert Schumann, 1848 “A Textbook for Composing Fugues”

“[I] have learned more counterpoint from Jean Paul than from my music teacher.”

-Robert Schumann, unspecified