Schumann

Dear friends of piano music,

I hope he hasn't done it after all. He was 17 years old and, like for all of my students, I felt responsible. It is not uncommon for young people to decide to study law with the well-meaning intention that the world will be a little fairer when they become a lawyer. A pronounced sense of justice, it is then stated, leads to the desire to deal with the legal sciences. In general I don't mind, but this particular young man was extraordinarily imaginative, he thought creatively and wildly, he told the most incredible stories (mostly in my classes ...), and his second characteristic, equally strong, was that of an unbelievable laziness. It will not b of any usel, I thought to myself, and told him how Kafka had struggled with jurisprudence - it was, he said, like eating wood wool spiritually. That convinced the boy at the time, because his father was a professor of German literature and such literary comparisons were well known to him.

Robert Schumann was actually a student at Heidelbergt, namely a law student. He was also advised against it at the time, after having dealt with it for a while - a very clever professor named Thibaut advised him to devote himself to music, so that his stay in Heidelberg was not too long and hardly left any traces. Nevertheless, Schumann lived in various apartments and guest houses, mostly in Hauptstrasse, today's main shopping street. He also lived on Karlsstrasse, as well as on Seminarstrasse, about which he writes very impressively that his apartment is "between the Catholic Church and the madhouse". Only in the main street 160 there is a small plaque in memory of the former famous resident. At that time, Henriette Feuerbach, the painter's mother, lived in Hauptstraße 82 , and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms gave house concerts in her musical salon. Not far from there used to be the piano factory of Johann Trau, where Brahms went in and out, made music, stayed over night - nothing reminds of it, the tables of a small café are here today, people drink coffee, eat ice cream, chat and have no idea where they are to find oneself. You have to search and research to discover the few and inconspicuous traces. Schumann as a law student - he participated in Thibauts Singkreis, he was a guest at a student union, here in Heidelberg, in my city. But who still knows about it? It's getting more and more like everywhere, even if the historical facades are still largely standing and being admired by tourists from all over the world who, like everywhere else, take their selfies, buy souvenirs, eat fast food and then disappear again. Perhaps one should try to make the traces of the past more visible - I find the fact that Schumann and Brahms lived here much more exciting than the tourist monotony, and I am convinced that many others would also be interested.

Kerstin