For the Love of Clara Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Clara Schumann

(1819–1896)

Romanze

(from the Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7)

Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto is one of the most breathtakingly precocious things in the whole classical repertoire, rivaling even the productions of Felix Mendelssohn’s prodigious early teens and arguably eclipsing anything composed by Mozart before the ripe old age of 18. Clara – at this time still Clara Wieck – was just 13 when she began work on her only piano concerto, and she’d finished it the following year. By this stage, she already knew her future husband, Robert Schumann, who was studying piano with her father, Friedrich Wieck. In February 1834, she showed the first movement to Robert, who helped her with the orchestration, and she was then able to perform it as a single-movement Konzertstück(‘Concert Piece’) in several concerts, where both it and she were sensationally successful.

Inspired by this, Clara added two more movements, which in the Concerto follow without a break. The central Romanzecan however be separated quite easily and played as a concert piece in its own right. The only other instrumental contribution to this movement, apart from at the very end, is a solo cello. But, as this part mostly lies quite high up on the instrument, it can easily be adapted for solo violin, as in this concert. It is very much a ‘song without words’, or rather a duet without words, as the string soloist takes over the lyricism later on. If it recalls the ‘Father of the Nocturne’, John Field, or the younger Chopin, it certainly matches both in its sensitive elegance and lucid pianistic poetry.

So, what happened to Clara the composer? While she did go on to write some fine pieces later, her marriage to Robert Schumann in 1840, the day before her twenty-first birthday, brought strains and distractions of its own. Having to support an alarmingly unstable husband, as well as giving birth to and caring for eight children, didn’t leave much time or energy for composing, though she did just about manage to keep up her career as a concert pianist, developing it considerably after Robert’s death in 1856. It’s clear, however, that the couple loved each other intensely – Robert’s own music, from their stormy courtship and right up to his death, is full of ‘Clara’ codes which attest movingly to his adoration of her[SH1] . His Piano Concerto, completed in 1845, is also in A minor and, like Clara’s, its central slow movement features a tender, intimate dialogue between the soloist and the cello voice (in his case the whole orchestral cello section). Clearly the memory of her remarkable youthful achievement went very deep indeed.

Robert Schumann

(1810–1856)

Violin Sonata No. 3 in A minor, Op. posth.

Ziemlich langsam – Lebhaft [Rather slow – Lively]

Lebhaft [Lively]

Intermezzo: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell [Animated, but not too fast]

Finale: Markiertes, ziemlich lebhaftes Tempo [Clearly articulate, rather lively tempo]

In the autumn of 1853, the Schumanns’ household in the Rhineland city of Düsseldorf welcomed a fair number of impressive musical guests. Amongst them was the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms, whose career as a composer was about to take off thanks to Robert Schumann’s near-ecstatic advocacy. Soon afterwards came the violinist Joseph Joachim, one the starriest names on the international concert virtuoso circuit, and a more than accomplished composer in his own right. There was also the young composer and conductor Albert Dietrich, based in Düsseldorf and a regular visitor to the Schumanns’ home. Together, the three composers decided to come up with a surprise for Joachim: a ‘composite’ violin sonata, with a movement or movements by each of the three, and based on the musical motif F–A–E after the initials of Joachim’s personal motto, Frei aber einsam – ‘Free, but solitary.’ In the event, Dietrich provided the first movement, Brahms the third-movement scherzo (later a popular concert piece in its own right), and Robert Schumann the second-movement Intermezzo and the Finale.

Schumann was evidently very pleased with his contribution but, understandably, he was soon thinking it might be better if he added another two movements of his own and thus completely ‘Schumannized’ the music. Unfortunately, only manuscript copies of these two new movements have survived – and a pretty daunting tangle of notes they can be (featuring what is almost certainly a missing bar). Some work was needed to make sense of them, and even then the order wasn’t absolutely clear – was the Lebhaft scherzo to come second? That is the option settled for by most performers today, and it does work well. One would never think, listening to this sonata complete, that half of it had started out somewhere else, but then that sort of thing happens in classical music more often than one might think.

Schumann’s arrival in Düsseldorf in 1850, to take up the post of musical director of the city's orchestra, had initially been a big success. At first his mood soared, and his creativity with it. But, after a brief honeymoon period with the orchestra, his shortcomings as a conductor had become all too clear. At the same time, he was increasingly worried about his mental stability. The memory of a catastrophic breakdown in 1844 was still painfully fresh. Unfortunately, his fears were well grounded. By February 1854 he had started to have hallucinations; at first they were ‘heavenly’, but before long the angel voices had become harsh demonic cries. On 27 February, Schumann threw himself into the Rhine, and he was only rescued thanks to the prompt action of the bridge-keeper. He was pronounced clinically insane and transferred to an asylum, where he died just two years later.

To what extent does the music of the Third Violin Sonata – Schumann’s last completed large-scale work – reflect his own painfully disordered state of mind at the time he wrote it, or at least some of it? The associations were clearly too much for Clara, who almost certainly destroyed the fair copy of the first two movements (the third and fourth were already published), along with several other pieces from Schumann’s last ‘sane’ days. Admittedly, there is some bizarre, fantastical music here – the first movement in particular is full of borderline crazy arabesques and flourishes; but the virtuosic arpeggio (spread chord) writing in the Finale is also pretty manic, and at that stage Schumann had still apparently been in good mental health. In any case, he had often written extravagant, demonic, dizzyingly ‘lateral’ music before, sometimes when he was at his happiest and most stable. But critics and performers remained prejudiced for decades afterwards, some of them claiming to find evidence of mental ‘decay’ in the music. It’s only in recent years that this sonata has at last begun to be taken seriously and to be granted its deserved place on the concert platform. As the British cellist Steven Isserlis puts it, the Third Sonata is ‘an extraordinary piece – strange, certainly, but fascinating (and addictive!)’. Wild passion and tender, intimate lyricism alternate in the first movement, while the brilliant second plays confusing mind games with musicians who like to label music in terms of conventional forms. (Which parts are ‘scherzo’, which ‘trio’?) Then the touching, half-sweet, half-painful lyricism of the Intermezzo is followed by a Finale that finally explodes into alarming virtuosic fireworks, which Joachim apparently sight-read at the first performance – more proof of what an astonishingly accomplished player he was!

Johannes Brahms

(1833–1897)

Piano Trio No. 1 in B major, Op. 8

Allegro con brio

Scherzo: Allegro molto

Adagio

Allegro

In public, Johannes Brahms liked to present himself as a gruff, occasionally peppery patrician. But behind the mask and that splendid Biblical prophet beard he was shy, prone to painful self-doubt and profoundly melancholic. He was also a great one for covering his own creative tracks. In this respect he’s at the other end of the scale from Beethoven, whose sketchbooks offer so many fascinating insights into the working of an outstanding musical mind. Brahms took great pains to ensure that the public only saw his final, fully polished thoughts. The sole exception is the First Piano Trio, which comes down to us in two versions. The first was finished in 1854, when Brahms was just twenty and still very much buoyed up by the stunningly enthusiastic welcome he’d received from his musical idol Robert Schumann. At the same time, however, he was struggling with his mountingly intense feelings for Schumann’s wife (and soon to be widow) Clara, a brilliant composer and performer in her own right. The two were to remain close confidants – artistically and personally – right up to Clara’s death in 1896, the year before Brahms himself died, from cancer. But although the feelings appear to have been strong on both sides (perhaps more so on Brahms’s), the general consensus today is that the relationship was never physically consummated, for reasons that can only be guessed. Was Brahms in the end simply too self-protective?

The first version of Trio No. 1 probably wouldn’t have survived at all if Brahms hadn’t made the decision to publish it almost immediately after completing the score, a decision he soon came to regret. One reason for that change of heart appears to have been Clara’s reaction to the Trio when its cautious young composer played it to her: ‘I only wish’ she wrote in her diary, ‘that he had written a different first movement, as I’m not happy with the existing one, though the beginning of it is splendid! The second, third and fourth movements are entirely worthy of this brilliant artist.’ Strikingly, when Brahms came to revise the First Trio, in 1889 (the version we’re hearing in this concert), he preserved that ‘splendid’ opening more or less unchanged, but the rest of the movement was radically reworked, and – despite Clara’s approval – major changes were also made to the third and fourth movements. On one level, the revised Trio is structurally tighter and more elegantly proportioned than the original: a wild, loose-limbed romantic outpouring becomes a contained, classical-romantic statement, far more typical of the mature Brahms.

But there also seems to have been an element of personal concealment in Brahms’s revision. As Schubert often did in his instrumental works, Brahms planted clues to meanings beyond the music in the initial version of the Trio, in the form of references to songs. The finale’s original second theme was a quotation from Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (‘To the distant beloved’), which Robert Schumann had used as a coded message of love to Clara during their painfully protracted courtship: ‘Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder, / Die ich dir, Geliebte, sang’ – ‘Take then these songs / that once I sang to you, beloved[SH2] ’. And now here was Schumann’s young protégé making the same musical offering to her… In the later version this was replaced by a far more resolute-sounding melody of Brahms’s own invention. Still more telling is the reference to the desolate Am Meer (‘By the sea’) from Schubert’s song collection Schwanengesang(‘Swansong’), which Brahms later removed from the slow third movement. At the song’s conclusion we find this confession of private agony:

‘Since that hour my body has languished,

my soul has pined away with yearning;

the unhappy woman

has poisoned me with her tears.’

Clara was indeed an ‘unhappy woman’ in 1854, having lived through her husband’s suicide attempt and final collapse into insanity, followed by his incarceration in a lunatic asylum, from which he would never return.

The familiar revised Trio may present a more classical façade, the tell-tale references may have been expunged, but the intensity of the feelings behind the mask can still be sensed, most of all in the work’s overall progression. From what Clara called that ‘splendid’, warmly expressive B major opening, the music moves through darker, more troubled regions in the first movement, through haunted territory in the Scherzo, and through what is still evidently an ardent song confession in the Adagio, to the agitated, onward-rushing drama of the finale. Unusually for a multi-movement work in the nineteenth century, this initially major-key Trio ends firmly in a very dark minor key. However much Brahms may have tried to ‘objectify’ his First Piano Trio, its tragic trajectory is unmistakable – a memorial to a long, vitally important, but (for Brahms at least) never quite fulfilled relationship.

For the love of clara: schumann & brahms

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