A Day with Clara and Robert Schumann out of an Andersen Fairy-Tale

In this lyrical essay, Emre Aracı follows Hans Christian Andersen’s sketch of a pine tree and a curious domed pavilion into the hills of Saxon Switzerland, where art, music, and fairy-tale intertwine. At Schloss Maxen he evokes the circle of the Schumanns, the Javanese painter Raden Saleh, and Andersen himself, whose poems Robert set to music and whose presence Clara once recorded with frank fascination. Weaving together landscapes, letters, and song, Aracı conjures a realm where past and present meet in enchanted harmony, and where the spirits of Andersen and the Schumanns still seem to linger among trees, pavilions, and remembered melodies.

When, one morning, I alighted quite alone at the deserted station of Mühlbach from my two-carriage train that had wound its way along the banks of the Müglitz, through the green pine-clad mountains and high plateaux of that region known in Germany as Saxon Switzerland, I was perfectly aware that it was Hans Christian Andersen who had led me hither. Since childhood I had read, and never ceased to delight in, his fairy tales; but here it was a sketch of his that had first arrested me. In it he had drawn, with his own hand, a tree planted on the summit of the very forest I was now about to climb, commanding a prospect over the valley. And in that same sketch, for reasons I could scarcely explain, I had discerned the outline of a modest structure which, with its dome and crescent, bore a curious resemblance to a diminutive Turkish kiosk. It was this vision that had so strangely attracted me.

The Pine Tree and the Blue House at Maxen, sketched by Hans Christian Andersen, 12 August 1851

Yet that drawing was destined to unfold into a larger story, one that would reach as far as Clara and Robert Schumann. For it was at Schloss Maxen—my goal, once I had crossed the forest—that Andersen’s world and that of the Schumanns had once converged in a singular concert. Leaving the murmur of the stream behind me, I followed a narrow, worn path, the dry leaves rustling beneath a warm September sun. In my inner ear Schumann’s first piano sonata in F sharp minor, Opus 11, was sounding—the youthful work he dedicated to Clara, in which the voices of Florestan and Eusebius seem to hold converse with one another.

After a laborious climb of forty minutes, I emerged upon a plateau at the crest of the mountain terrain. Passing through a company of startled wild goats, I at last beheld, glimmering above the trees, the crescent crowning that little domed pavilion which Andersen had once sketched and which had beckoned me across time and imagination to this enchanted place.

Das Blaue Häusel; the Blue House on the hills of Maxen, (photograph by Emre Aracı)

Known in German as Das Blaue Häusel—the Blue House—this curious pavilion was erected in 1848 for the painter Prince Raden Saleh. Saleh had come to Europe from the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies, as that colonial possession was then styled, now part of modern Indonesia. With his Romantic manner he swiftly attracted attention in European artistic circles; and in Dresden and its environs, in particular, his exotic origins provoked fascination, while his landscape paintings won him admiration.

Prince Raden Saleh, 1842,
(Johann Karl Bähr, Riga Art Museum, Latvia)

Schloss Maxen, owned by Major Friedrich Anton Serre and his wife Friederike, was celebrated as a gathering place for the artistic and literary world, for the Serres were notable patrons of the creative spirit of their time. Saleh, drawn into this circle, resolved before returning to his native land to leave a memorial of his friendship with the Serre family. Thus, upon their estate, and to his own design, he had the Blue House erected. Above its door, in Gothic lettering, appeared the inscription: Ehre Gott und liebe die Menschen—“Glorify God and love mankind”. To read that single sentence would have been reason enough to make the climb.

Its simple, exotic form led many visitors—Andersen among them—to refer to the pavilion as a “mosque”. Today, alas, the little building lies within private grounds, so that I could neither enter it nor stroll in its garden. Yet to reach the gate and there behold a signboard bearing the words Andersen’s Tree was, for me, a thrill beyond telling. Soon afterwards the great panorama opened before my eyes, stretching from the summit of the forest down into the valley, and in front of a solitary bench stood a delicate larch—known also as the tamarack—keeping silent watch, as if it harboured the spirit of the Danish storyteller in these parts.

Andersen's tree on the Maxen hills, (photograph by Emre Aracı)

The tree Andersen himself had planted in 1844 had been felled, sadly, in the 1950s; but to preserve the memory, this slender larch had been set in its stead. Upon the bench lay a box filled with illustrated editions of Andersen’s tales. There, as though smiling in silence, they welcomed the passer-by into the enchanted world of fairy-tale—among them my childhood favourite, The Steadfast Tin Soldier. And with the resinous breath of pine carried on the breeze, the very air seemed to whisper an invitation into that world of wonder.

"Upon the bench lay a box filled with illustrated editions of Andersen’s tales"

Andersen, in the course of his various journeys, visited Maxen and the Serre family on many occasions. In his diary of 12 August 1851 he noted that he had sketched both his tree and the “mosque”. A week later, on 19 August, he composed at Maxen his poem The Rose:

What dream is yours?—the dream knows no pain,

Beloved, your life, your soul is fragrance pure;

Your being resembles the blessed poet’s heart:

It sees heaven where others see but air.

With sentiments not unlike these I, too, lingered for an hour upon that bench before continuing my way through the fields towards the village of Maxen, following in the footsteps of those romantic spirits who, where others saw but empty sky, discerned the vision of heaven. Presently, the sharp spire of a church appeared in the distance, heralding my approach to the village; and before long I found myself standing at the gates of Schloss Maxen.

"Before long I found myself standing at the gates of Schloss Maxen"

How many had passed through those very gates—Hans Christian Andersen, Clara and Robert Schumann, and many more besides. Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, had in fact lodged his daughter there in the summer of 1837, in the hope of keeping her from Robert. Yet fate, through the agency of another guest at the schloss, Ernst Adolf Becker, contrived to bring the two lovers together once more—and the rest, as we say, is history. Thus Maxen came to leave an indelible imprint upon Clara and Robert’s memories, becoming, as it were, part of their shared legend. Clara even expressed the wish that their wedding ceremony might take place in that “very quiet and rustic” village.

Clara and Robert Schumann
 (Ernst Rietschel, Kügelgenhaus, Dresden)

The following summer, in 1838, she returned to Maxen and there composed her Opus 10, Scherzo. Robert, too, called at Maxen that year, on 28 September, during his journey to Vienna, and was received at the schloss with warm hospitality. After their marriage the Schumanns continued to revisit Maxen; indeed, in the summer of 1846 they rented the house now known as the Doktorhaus. It was there that Robert composed his songs Auf dem Rhein and Jägerlied. Three years later, in 1849, when the Dresden uprising—of which Wagner was among the leaders—compelled the family to flee, they sought refuge at Maxen, though their stay lasted but five days.

Although Hans Christian Andersen’s visits to Schloss Maxen did not in fact coincide with those of Clara and Robert Schumann, there nonetheless existed both a cordial acquaintance and an artistic bond between the Danish writer and the Schumanns. In the celebrated “year of song”, 1840, Robert set four of Andersen’s poems to music. Entitled respectively Märzveilchen (March Violet), Muttertraum (A Mother’s Dream), Der Soldat (The Soldier), and Der Spielmann (The Fiddler), these formed the first four numbers of his Opus 40 cycle of five songs, which he dedicated to the great spinner of fairy-tales.

"In the celebrated “year of song”, 1840, Robert set four of Andersen’s poems to music"

Clara, for her part, met Andersen in person during her concert tour to Copenhagen in the spring of 1842. In her diary she recorded a few lines about him, at once reserved and intrigued, remarking with some astonishment that the old proverb—“a prophet is not without honour save in his own country”—seemed peculiarly apt in Andersen’s case. She attributed this neglect, curiously enough, to his outward appearance, noting: “Andersen has a poetic, childlike nature. He is still quite young, but very ugly”. In a letter to Robert she was yet franker: “Andersen is the ugliest man imaginable, and yet he has a certain interest about him… One can only get used to him gradually… and yet, taking him all in all, there is an intellectual air about him”. (Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: An Artist’s Life, Leipzig, 1913, p. 343).

The years that followed were to show that this bond was no mere casual acquaintance. Robert Schumann, having newly published his songs, sent them directly to Andersen, who in turn had them performed to him by his friend Niels Gade, that he might share his impressions. Their correspondence reveals a mutual interest and esteem.

Hans Christian Andersen

At length, in the summer of 1844, their paths crossed at a dinner in Leipzig given in Andersen’s honour by the soprano Livia Frege. That evening, with Clara at the piano and Frau Frege lending her voice, Andersen’s verses came to life in Schumann’s music. Andersen himself, in his autobiography The True Story of My Life, would recall the occasion thus: “From Weimar I travelled to Leipzig; there I awaited an evening truly poetical with Robert Schumann. This great composer, who a year earlier had honoured me by dedicating to me four songs upon my poems, had invited me. Dr Frege’s wife, that lady whose soul-filled singing had enchanted tens of thousands, sang while Clara Schumann accompanied her; there was present only a select company of hearers—the composer and the poet among them. A little banquet and an exchange of thoughts—too short an evening altogether”.

After that meeting Schumann conceived the idea of an opera based on one of Andersen’s tales, Die Blume des Glücks (The Flower of Happiness). From Copenhagen Andersen wrote him several times: “The Flower of Happiness fascinates me—I see in it the making of a most beautiful fairy-tale opera. I shall devote all my strength to it.” In another letter he confessed: “I have not been able to work, but I have thought much—among other things of our Flower of Happiness. From Berlin you wrote me most kindly, promising to send me a sketch; may I remind you of it?”. Andersen, for his part, pledged to send the scenes one by one as soon as he was back in Copenhagen, yet insisted that the title must clearly state its derivation from his own drama, lest the Danes suppose that “the idea had been borrowed from the Germans”. He even offered to prepare the entire libretto himself. But the scheme, for all its excitement, came to nothing; and so the Flower of Happiness, never having blossomed upon the stage, withered before it bloomed.

The Flower of Happiness may have withered before it ever came into bloom, yet that Saturday in the village of Maxen there were flowers enough to gladden the heart—indeed, a whole bouquet of them was offered to us at the schloss itself in the form of Schumann’s Opus 40, the so-called “Andersen Songs”. The special concert, given by students and graduates of the Carl Maria von Weber Academy of Music, was more than a commemoration of the 220th anniversary of Andersen’s birth and the 150th of his death; it was a magical encounter in which the spirits of the writer and the composers seemed once more to draw together. Maxen became again that meeting-place of shadows, where past and present mingled in dreamlike harmony. And as the poster for the occasion so aptly declared: “Where words end, music speaks”.

“Where words end, music speaks”

But before the music, there was for me another pilgrimage that lent the day its deeper meaning: a walk of two kilometres from Maxen to the neighbouring village of Schmorsdorf, where there stands a magnificent lime tree, between four and eight centuries old and rising to a height of twenty-four metres. Known as “Clara Schumann’s Tree”, and sheltering beside it Germany’s smallest museum, this venerable linden was for Clara not merely a marvel of nature but, as her letters reveal, a kind of living monument. In one to Robert, dated 25 November 1838, she recounted a walk to that tree on a snowy day, writing: “You asked me whether I felt the beauty of nature; I owe it to you, to my love for you. Strange though it may be, I have loved nature only since I began to love you”.

Clara Schumann’s lime tree in the village of Schmorsdorf, (photograph by Emre Aracı)

Perhaps I, too, had walked those miles for the sake of hearing those words once more, as though spoken in Clara’s own voice. And when, later that very day, I told the friends at the schloss of my walk, only to learn that it was in fact Clara’s birthday itself, the knowledge came to me like a sign sent by fate—an invisible token that no artist who believes in the presence of spirits could have wished more brightly confirmed.

At sunset, after the concert at Maxen, I was driven back to Dresden by Mrs Jutta Tronicke, whom I had met only that afternoon and in whose conversation I first learned, to my astonishment, that she had once been the owner of the Blue House for twenty-five years. It was she who, together with her late husband Georg, had restored its oriental dome to its rightful place and replanted Andersen’s tree. To hear this directly from her lips, at the close of so richly woven hours, seemed nothing short of miraculous. And thus my sojourn with Clara and Robert Schumann—like something out of an Andersen fairy-tale—drew to its end in a fashion more enchanted than I could ever have imagined.

Emre Aracı’s article was originally published in Turkish in the November 2025 issue (No. 229) of Andante.

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