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Married pianists Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung perform two piano concertos from the “power couple” of the romantic era, Clara and Robert Schumann. However, the night would be incomplete without including music by Schumann’s protegé and close family friend, Johannes Brahms.

 


PROGRAM

BRAHMS: Tragic Overture in D minor, Op. 81 
SCHUMANN, CLARA: Wieck Concerto for Piano in A minor, Op. 7 
SCHUMANN, ROBERt: Manfred Overture
SCHUMANN, ROBERT: Concerto in A minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 54 

 


 

 


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PROGRAM NOTES

Clara (née Wieck) (1819–1896) and Robert Schumann (1810–1856) stand with composer Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears among the most productive partnerships in Western classical music. Granted, their story has its drama and suffering, from her father’s resistance to their marriage (a resistance only overcome after a court battle) to Robert’s syphilis, which led to a suicide attempt in 1854 and his confinement to a sanatorium for the last lonely years of his life. But despite the traumas, Clara and Robert inspired and supported each other. Clara, one of Europe’s foremost pianists, significantly advanced Robert’s fame through ...

Clara (née Wieck) (1819–1896) and Robert Schumann (1810–1856) stand with composer Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears among the most productive partnerships in Western classical music. Granted, their story has its drama and suffering, from her father’s resistance to their marriage (a resistance only overcome after a court battle) to Robert’s syphilis, which led to a suicide attempt in 1854 and his confinement to a sanatorium for the last lonely years of his life. But despite the traumas, Clara and Robert inspired and supported each other. Clara, one of Europe’s foremost pianists, significantly advanced Robert’s fame through her concerts. Robert not only composed music for Clara to perform (including music inspired by works she had written), but also—in contrast to many husbands of the day—supported her own work as a composer. Even before they were married, he provided suggestions for the Piano Concerto we are playing tonight.

That Concerto, which was premiered by the 16-year-old pianist-composer in 1836, actually started out in 1833 as a single-movement piece; the first two movements were added later. It’s an astonishing work, and doubly so for a teenager. As Lucille Chung, the first of tonight’s soloists, points out, it’s improvisatory in outlook, fresh in spirit, adventurous in its harmonies (often shifting keys in unexpected ways), and bursting with elaborate filigree and other opportunities for Clara to flaunt her own virtuosity: “She must have been a helluva pianist!” Melodically engaging, it’s formally remarkable too. So many composers of the day—including Robert himself—were burdened by the weight of Beethoven as a model. Clara broke with conventions and went her own way.

The Concerto is nominally in three movements, but they’re continuous and thematically linked (it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the opening upward flourish unifies the whole piece), looking ahead to the experiments of Liszt. More striking, the central movement is a kind of cadenza. It’s traditional for a concerto to include a cadenza (an opportunity for the soloist to play alone) toward the end of one or more of the movements; this one, however, upends tradition by replacing the entire second movement with a cadenza. (Copland did something similar in his Clarinet Concerto, which we played at the last Casual Concert, and Shostakovich employed the technique, too. But they were writing more than a century later, when formal demands had loosened considerably; and even in the mid-20th century, such cadenzas were unusual). To add to the striking nature of Clara’s musical experiment, the piano is joined by the solo cello, an idea later honored by Brahms in the third movement of his Second Piano Concerto. All in all, this teen was clearly way ahead of her time.

Whatever help Clara got from her future husband when writing the Concerto, it’s clear that she could have done the job without him. In contrast, it would be hard to imagine Robert’s 1845 Concerto without Clara. Clara inspired, encouraged, and premiered the work, and it clearly reflects his passion and appreciation. He even encodes her name into the music (like Bach and Shostakovich, he was fond of musical cyphers): One of the work’s primary motifs (C-B-A-A, or in German notation, C-H-A-A) is a short version of Chiara, the Italian version of her name he often used. As Lucille points out, Robert’s Concerto also copies many of the ideas in Clara’s; and like Clara’s, it began as a single-movement work (in this case, the first movement).

And yet, for all the ways in which they intertwine, each concerto has its own voice. Robert’s is certainly more mature (no surprise, given that he wrote it mid-career). It is also, our second pianist (and Lucille’s husband) Alessio Bax points out, less improvisatory: “Solidly constructed,” it reveals a strong streak of classicism. Yet at the same time, Robert had “a completely free imagination” and the concerto is consequently “very light on its feet.” Those superficially conflicting qualities make “a very hard balance to strike. It’s one of the trickiest concertos to play, thus one of the most satisfying. So perfect in many ways.” Perfect—and intimate. It is easily the most affectionate of the canonical Romantic concertos.

The Concerto shows us Robert the devoted husband, the composer-poet of the piano; but as we know, there were darker currents to his psyche. Robert himself gave names to what he saw as two main aspects of his personality: Eusebius for his more introspective side; Florestan (after the heroic prisoner in Beethoven’s Fidelio) for his more dramatic, impulsive side. But that was surely a simplification. In any case, Robert’s Manfred (1848) reveals a radically different sensibility from the one we hear in the Concerto. Where the Concerto is an expression of tenderness, Manfred is an explosion of something darker. It’s a set of incidental music intended to accompany Byron’s semi-autobiographical poem Manfred, an overwrought tale of a romantic anti-hero coming to terms with the death of his sister, following their incestuous affair. The complete work—which requires singers, narrators, and chorus as well as orchestra—is rarely heard. But the stormy overture is a concert favorite.

It begins with a striking gesture that throws us off balance: three off-beat chords, followed by a rest and a change of tempo. This sets us up for an impulsive work full of painful dissonances, bold accents, and cries of despair. Eventually, the music burns out, with a heartbreaking passage where brief shards of music float by, like fleeting memories, before the poignant closing. We chose it in part because it casts light on Robert’s wide-ranging spirit, but also because it looks ahead to the final concert of our season, Mahler’s Second Symphony. The Manfred Overture was the very first work Mahler performed as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. By a strange coincidence, it was also the work through which Leonard Bernstein introduced himself to the orchestra.

Just as it’s hard to discuss Robert without discussing Clara (or vice-versa), it’s hard to discuss the couple without mentioning Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), who turned their marriage into a convoluted triangle. The young Brahms met the Schumanns in 1853; and despite his youth, he quickly became a protégé. Robert and Brahms collaborated (with Albert Dietrich) on a violin sonata; and in his role as a music critic, Robert was able to give Brahms’s career an early boost in the press. Brahms got a similar boost from Clara’s performances of his music.

Brahms also become a close family friend. He was indispensable during Robert’s final illness, living in their house, helping care for the children, and visiting Robert in the sanatorium (Clara was not allowed to see him until right before the end). After Robert’s death, Brahms and Clara remained close. Marriage seems to have been out of the question, and there’s no evidence of a physical relationship; but their connection was both passionate and profound, on both the personal and artistic levels. Their devotion to each other did not diminish their devotion to Robert, however, and they both spent considerable energy on editing his scores and assuring that his musical contributions remained before the public.

It thus seems appropriate to open our concert with Brahms’s Tragic Overture, composed in 1880 as a counterweight to his Academic Festival Overture—as stern and dramatic as its sibling is whimsical. It has certain features in common with the Manfred Overture, but it’s more abstract (it doesn’t represent a specific text but rather a general spirit), and on the whole it’s less impulsive, more determined. If Byron’s hero is searching and (until the end) unsure of his fate, Brahms’s looks his demons directly in the eye. The differences are clear from their openings: both works begin with a striking series of chords, but Robert Schumann’s are questing, Brahms’s are decisive. And the final pages reflect those differences, too, Manfred ending in regret, the Tragic defiant to the end.

Peter J. Rabinowitz
Have any comments or questions? Please write to me at prabinowitz@ExperienceSymphoria.org


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