Robert Schumann
Jun. 8th, 2010 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI should have posted earlier today, but I had more urgent matters to take care of. On the other hand, this topic has waited 200 years for today: the 200th anniversary of the birth of Robert Schumann. Schumann only lived to 46, but he managed to leave some of my favorite music behind. He was one of the canonical Romantic composers, yet there is a classical restraint and order in most of his music that I find satisfying.
Like his contemporary Chopin, Schumann started out as a composer exclusively for the solo piano. During his first professional decade, the 1830s, he published nothing else. Such experiments as he made in other musical media at this time remained unpublished and mostly unfinished. One would have thought it would be Chopin, who at least had issued two juvenile piano concertos, who would have blossomed into other media, but he stuck with what he knew. It was Schumann who, on his marriage in 1840, suddenly branched out. He spent an entire year writing songs, then another year writing symphonies, then another writing chamber music. His overall output is well-balanced among the genres.
Schumann's larger works are sometimes dismissed as poorly structured. That's totally an unfair charge; his symphonies and chamber works show the same command of large-scale musical time structures as Beethoven or anyone else. He had developed this sense in his years of piano miniatures. Unlike Chopin, who published collections of separate pieces in the same genre, Schumann organized his tiny miniatures into large suites that have coherent form of their own.
And of those early suites, none is better-known, and deservedly so, than Carnaval. Claudio Arrau is the pianist whose recordings taught me the Schumann piano music, and here's a link to Part 1 of 4 of Arrau playing Carnaval; the other parts may be found in the sidebar. After the opening Préambule, each movement is introduced with a glimpse of its score, so you know where you are.
For maximum contrast, here's three movements from one of his last orchestral works, his grand and glorious Rhenish Symphony - the first Schumann symphony I learned - conducted by Paavo Järvi. 2nd movement. 4th movement, depicting a solemn ceremony in Cologne Cathedral. 5th movement, the finale.
And here are four different ensembles giving different interpretative (and different acoustical, that's for sure) visions of the four movements of Schumann's wonderful Quintet for Piano and Strings. First movement. Second movement (a slow march: Schumann was superb at these). Scherzo (second half only; this is Martha Argerich on piano: she's always fiery, but this is really incredible). Finale.
Besides being a great composer, Schumann was also a great critic and a keen appreciator of the finest work of his time. I've always been touched by the image of the young Schumann, still nominally a law student, sobbing in despair on hearing of the death of Franz Schubert, not just for the tremendous loss to music, but also - and this is what makes it so touchingly personal - because he hadn't gotten around to writing Schubert a fan letter.
Few others would have even thought about it. Schubert was very obscure outside his own circles until some years after his death. But Schumann knew who he was. And Schumann is one reason we all now know who Schubert was, because a few years later he made the trip to Vienna for the express purpose of looking up Schubert's friends and family and seeing what they had. One of the things they had was the Great C Major Symphony, which Schumann took away and arranged for the first performance of. Schumann knew he wasn't a very good conductor, so he handed it over to a friend of his who was better at that, a fellow named Felix Mendelssohn.
For many years Schumann was a working critic who reviewed all sort of music, famous and obscure. It was kind of funny when he got Mendelssohn's Scotch and Italian symphonies mixed up with each other, but he genuinely had a keen ear. A couple of times he really went overboard in praising some young, newly-hatched composer he'd just discovered, and people rolled their eyes at his enthusiasms, but since the recipients of his praise were Frédéric Chopin and Johannes Brahms, I think his batting average was pretty good.
If you want to read about Schumann, and not just listen to his music, the generally recommended biography is Robert Schumann, Herald of a "New Poetic Age" by John Daverio (OUP, 1997). But I got a lot out of Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius by Peter Ostwald (Northeastern UP, 1985), one of the few psychological biographies to show any insight into its subject.
Like his contemporary Chopin, Schumann started out as a composer exclusively for the solo piano. During his first professional decade, the 1830s, he published nothing else. Such experiments as he made in other musical media at this time remained unpublished and mostly unfinished. One would have thought it would be Chopin, who at least had issued two juvenile piano concertos, who would have blossomed into other media, but he stuck with what he knew. It was Schumann who, on his marriage in 1840, suddenly branched out. He spent an entire year writing songs, then another year writing symphonies, then another writing chamber music. His overall output is well-balanced among the genres.
Schumann's larger works are sometimes dismissed as poorly structured. That's totally an unfair charge; his symphonies and chamber works show the same command of large-scale musical time structures as Beethoven or anyone else. He had developed this sense in his years of piano miniatures. Unlike Chopin, who published collections of separate pieces in the same genre, Schumann organized his tiny miniatures into large suites that have coherent form of their own.
And of those early suites, none is better-known, and deservedly so, than Carnaval. Claudio Arrau is the pianist whose recordings taught me the Schumann piano music, and here's a link to Part 1 of 4 of Arrau playing Carnaval; the other parts may be found in the sidebar. After the opening Préambule, each movement is introduced with a glimpse of its score, so you know where you are.
For maximum contrast, here's three movements from one of his last orchestral works, his grand and glorious Rhenish Symphony - the first Schumann symphony I learned - conducted by Paavo Järvi. 2nd movement. 4th movement, depicting a solemn ceremony in Cologne Cathedral. 5th movement, the finale.
And here are four different ensembles giving different interpretative (and different acoustical, that's for sure) visions of the four movements of Schumann's wonderful Quintet for Piano and Strings. First movement. Second movement (a slow march: Schumann was superb at these). Scherzo (second half only; this is Martha Argerich on piano: she's always fiery, but this is really incredible). Finale.
Besides being a great composer, Schumann was also a great critic and a keen appreciator of the finest work of his time. I've always been touched by the image of the young Schumann, still nominally a law student, sobbing in despair on hearing of the death of Franz Schubert, not just for the tremendous loss to music, but also - and this is what makes it so touchingly personal - because he hadn't gotten around to writing Schubert a fan letter.
Few others would have even thought about it. Schubert was very obscure outside his own circles until some years after his death. But Schumann knew who he was. And Schumann is one reason we all now know who Schubert was, because a few years later he made the trip to Vienna for the express purpose of looking up Schubert's friends and family and seeing what they had. One of the things they had was the Great C Major Symphony, which Schumann took away and arranged for the first performance of. Schumann knew he wasn't a very good conductor, so he handed it over to a friend of his who was better at that, a fellow named Felix Mendelssohn.
For many years Schumann was a working critic who reviewed all sort of music, famous and obscure. It was kind of funny when he got Mendelssohn's Scotch and Italian symphonies mixed up with each other, but he genuinely had a keen ear. A couple of times he really went overboard in praising some young, newly-hatched composer he'd just discovered, and people rolled their eyes at his enthusiasms, but since the recipients of his praise were Frédéric Chopin and Johannes Brahms, I think his batting average was pretty good.
If you want to read about Schumann, and not just listen to his music, the generally recommended biography is Robert Schumann, Herald of a "New Poetic Age" by John Daverio (OUP, 1997). But I got a lot out of Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius by Peter Ostwald (Northeastern UP, 1985), one of the few psychological biographies to show any insight into its subject.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 08:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 12:57 am (UTC)Carnaval is my second-favorite Schumann piano epic. My first favorite is his symphonic etudes. I keep looking for more Schumann I like as well as those. His toccata is pretty nifty, the canonic etudes are nice.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 04:18 pm (UTC)