When, early in 1847, the Schumanns returned home to Dresden from a concert tour, Robert found himself all fired up with the idea of writing an opera. He chose (surprise! surprise!) a romantic tale of crusades, knights and damsels in distress (with a bit of magic thrown in for good measure). The story centres on […]
Tag Archives: Schumann
Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon, as its title might suggest, isn’t a setting of the standard liturgical text of the mass for the dead. The words come from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister and Mignon is the strange young girl whose poem (much set by composers) Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn (Do you know the land where […]
Pablo Casals speaking of the Schumann Cello Concerto: It is one of the finest works one can hear – from beginning to end the music is sublime. This, the first of the great romantic cello concertos, gives us a chance to compare the playing/interpretive skills of an older generation of cellists (Gendron, Piatigorsky, Fournier, etc.) – […]
Schumann’s 4th Symphony, as you might guess from the title of this post, has a rather checkered history. It’s one of the composer’s most original works – which might go some way toward explaining the rather chilly reception it got when first performed in 1841. The score languished on Schumann’s work desk for ten years; then, […]
Waldszenen, (Forest Scenes) Op. 82 is one of Schumann’s last piano works. It consists of nine short pieces all with (sometimes enigmatic) titles. This is no ordinary leaf-mold-under-foot, dappled-sunlight sort of forest but a magical one out of the fairy stories of Grimm and Perrault and; while many of the pieces are jolly evocations of […]
Liederjahr = the Year of Song. Two years prior to 1842’s splurge of chamber music, Schumann, with the same monomania/single-mindedness that he was to lavish on the string quartet and piano quartet and quintet, spent most of 1840 writing songs. He managed in that one year to produce a grand total of 138 of them! Amongst […]
1842 was Robert Schumann’s chamber music year. Not only did he complete three string quartets but the year also saw the composition of both a piano quartet (violin, viola, cello, piano) and a piano quintet (string quartet, piano). The Quintet is one of Schumann’s best known and, arguably, finest works; it was composed during September […]
It would be very unfair to compare the Schumanns’ piano concertos (both in the same key, a minor) with one another. One (Clara’s) is the – albeit brilliant – work of a teenager, while the other is the product of a 35-year-old, mature composer at the height of his powers. What is indisputable, however, is that Clara’s […]
Robert Schumann wrote four symphonies. The last of them, the third (don′t ask! …well, not yet, anyway) was dubbed – not by Schumann – The Rhenish. With the exception of one movement, it’s a rather jolly work and its nickname seems, for once, almost justified [seeming to conjure the great waterway (of course); jolly peasants; […]
No. 1 No. 2 No. 3 These mysterious groups of notes appear between the eighth (Replique) and ninth (Papillons) of Schumann’s Opus 9 collection of 21 piano pieces, Carnaval. If you remember, the Sphinx was famous for her riddles (What is that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?) And […]
