Wayne Alpern
While more conservative composers of the Romantic era retained a classical outlook, and radical ones forged more daringly ahead, Robert Schumann kept a foot in both worlds. Invoking what he called a "logic of discontinuities," the composer steered a middle course between convention and innovation by pitting classical clarity and logic against romantic ambiguity and discontinuity. He kept the classical molds, but fractured them. This paradox of a "discontinuous logic" reflects a deeper cleavage between Apollonian objectivity and Dionysian subjectivity at the heart of Schumann's music. His aesthetics of contradiction, the opposition of intellect versus intuition, contributes to his image as the archetypal Romantic composer in comparison to others more closely allied with either extreme.
The Adagio of his Second Symphony is a model of Schumann's "logic
of discontinuities." Its allure lies neither in its logic
nor its discontinuity, but rather in their opposition. Formally,
harmonically, and melodically, Schumann pits the norms of classical
tonality against their romanticized distortion, and extracts drama
from their conflict. This music has roots in two soils - or perhaps
none at all. It struggles like Schumann in the gap between music
as art and as law, between emotion and reason, and between freedom
and restraint. Its turmoil is his, and its resolution a sublime
manifesto of his aesthetics of contradiction, a fractured fairy
tale capturing the spirit of his age.