Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 54
Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony, on June 8, 1810, and died in an asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, on July 29, 1856. Between May 4 and 20 of 1841, he composed a “Concert Fantasy” in A minor for piano and orchestra, and on August 8 that year, Clara Schumann played it through twice at a closed rehearsal of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra with Felix Mendelssohn conducting. Four years later, beginning in late May 1845, he reworked the Fantasy into the first movement of his Piano Concerto, completing the second movement on July 16 and the finale on July 31 that same year. Clara Schumann was soloist for the first performance of the concerto on December 4, 1845, in Dresden, with Ferdinand Hiller, to whom the work is dedicated, conducting.
In addition to the solo piano, the score of Schumann’s Piano Concerto calls for 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Clara Schumann, née Wieck, was a celebrated keyboard artist from her youth, and she was renowned through her long life (1819-96) for her musical intelligence, taste, sensibility, warm communicativeness, and truly uncommon ear for pianistic euphony. She was a gifted and skilled composer, and Brahms, who was profoundly attached to her when he was in his early 20s and she in her middle 30s—and indeed all his life, though eventually at a less dangerous temperature—never ceased to value her musical judgment.
Robert and Clara’s marriage, though in most ways extraordinarily happy, was difficult, what with his psychic fragility and her demanding and conflicting roles as an artist, an artist’s wife, and a mother who bore eight children in fourteen years. They met when Clara was 9 and Robert—then an unwilling and easily distracted, moody, piano-playing law student at the University of Leipzig—came to her father, the celebrated piano pedagogue Friedrich Wieck, for lessons. It was in 1840, after various familial, legal, psychological, and financial obstacles, that they married. Most of Schumann’s greatest piano works come from the difficult time preceding their marriage. 1840 became his great year of song.
Clara Schumann was ambitious for her 30-year-old husband and urged him to conquer the world of orchestral music as well. He had actually ventured into that territory a few times, making starts on four piano concertos and writing a rather jejune symphony in G minor, but he had not yet met with success. He now went ahead and produced a superb Concert Fantasy with Orchestra for Clara, as well as writing two symphonies: the Spring (No. 1), and the first version of the D minor (now known almost exclusively in its revised form of 1851 and listed as No. 4). He could interest neither publishers nor orchestras in the one-movement Concert Fantasy, and so he expanded it into a full-length three-movement concerto. In doing so he revised the original Fantasy, making choices, as almost always he was apt to do whenever he had second thoughts, in the direction of safety and conventionality. (One can only guess whether the revisions reflect Schumann’s own musical convictions or responses to the urgings of the more conservative Clara.) The full-dress, three-movement concerto was introduced by Clara in Dresden in December 1845.
(The Fantasy in its original form was apparently not heard again until the summer of 1967, when the pianist Malcolm Frager played it at a reading rehearsal with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf conducting. The following summer, also at Tanglewood but with the Boston Symphony, Frager and Leinsdorf gave the Fantasy its first public performance, this time using it as the first movement of the piano concerto. Frager was a fervent champion of the original version of the first movement, playing it whenever he could persuade a conductor to let him do so.)
In 1839, Robert had written to Clara: “Concerning concertos, I’ve already said to you they are hybrids of symphony, concerto, and big sonata. I see that I can’t write a concerto for virtuosi and have to think of something else.” He did. Now, in June 1845, while the metamorphosis of the Concert Fantasy was in progress, Clara Schumann noted in her diary how delighted she was at last to be getting “a big bravura piece” out of Robert (she meant one with orchestra), and to us, even if it is not dazzling by Liszt-Tchaikovsky-Rachmaninoff standards, the Schumann concerto is a satisfying occasion for pianistic display, while of course being also very much more than that. (On the other hand, versus the concertos by Thalberg, Pixis, and Herz that Clara had played as a young prodigy, Schumann’s concerto, considered strictly as bravura stuff, is tame by comparison.)
Schumann’s “something else” was noticed. Most of the chroniclers of the first public performances, along with noticing how effective an advocate Clara was for the concerto, were also attuned to the idea that something new—and very pleasing—was happening in this work. Many of them noted as well that the concerto needs an exceptionally attentive and sensitive conductor. F.W.M., who reviewed the first performance in Leipzig on New Year’s Day 1846 for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, wrote that the many interchanges between solo and orchestra made the first movement harder to grasp at first hearing than the other two. One thing that strikes us about this first movement—but perhaps only in a very good performance—is how mercurial it is, how frequent, rapid, and sometimes radical its mood-swings are. Or, to put it another way, how Schumannesque it is.
The opening is as dramatic as can be. The orchestra fires the starting gun, a single eighth-note E, and the piano moves out of the blocks with a powerful cascade of fully voiced chords. Not only is the cascade itself dramatic, so is the contrast between it and the wistful oboe tune it introduces, and which the piano immediately repeats. Schumann, like many composers before him and quite a few since (as, for example, Alban Berg in his Violin Concerto), was fond of encoding names in musical notation. Bearing in mind that what we call B-natural the Germans call H, you can see that the first four notes of oboe theme could be taken to spell “Chiara,” or “CHiArA,” using those letters that have musical counterparts (C/B-natural/A/A) in this Italian version of Clara’s name, a version that occurs in Schumann’s fanciful prose writings and, in its affectionate diminutive of “Chiarina,” in his great solo piano work Carnaval of 1834-35. Whether or not Schumann intended it as “Chiara,” this oboe theme dominates the entire movement, and reappears also to effect the transition into the finale.
(Composers who wrote themselves (as it were) into their music include J.S. Bach (B-flat/A/C/B-natural, our B-flat being the Germans’ B and our B-natural the Germans’ H) and Dmitri Shostakovich (as DSCH, D/E-flat/C/B-natural, using the German transliteration SCHostakovich for the composer’s last name, and with our E-flat being the Germans’ S).—Ed.)
Clara Schumann noted in her diary the delicacy of the way the piano and orchestra are interwoven, and among the pianist’s tasks is sometimes to be an accompanist—the lyric clarinet solo in the first movement is the most prominent example. And to be a good accompanist means to be a superlative musician: intuitive, alert, ever listening. The pianist gets a grand, wonderfully sonorous cadenza at the end of the first movement, but above all the Schumann concerto is a work of conversation both intimate and playful—whether in the almost whimsically varied first movement, the confidences exchanged in the brief middle movement, or in the splendidly energized finale.
Michael Steinberg
Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after that of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic. Oxford University Press has published three compilation volumes of his program notes, devoted to symphonies, concertos, and the great works for chorus and orchestra.
The first American performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto was given by the Philharmonic Society of New York on March 26, 1859, at Niblo’s Garden, with Sebastian Bach Mills as soloist under the direction of Carl Bergmann. The first Boston performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto took place on November 23, 1866, in a Harvard Musical Association concert, with soloist Otto Dresel and Carl Zerrahn conducting at the Boston Music Hall.
The first Boston Symphony performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto was given on October 7, 1882, at the start of the orchestra’s second season, by conductor Georg Henschel with soloist Carl Baermann.
