Robert Schumann: Piano Concerto in A, Op. 54

Robert Schumann: Piano Concerto in A, Op. 54

I. Allegro affettuoso

II. Intermezzo: Andantino grazioso

III. Allegro vivace

I have provided a recording of the first movement (Allegro affettuoso) as performed by Arthur Rubinstein. I was fortunate enough to attend a piano master class by Maestro Rubinstein in 1975 at the Manhattan School of Music. As he was one of the most important pianists of the 20th century, it was a powerful, emotionally charged, standing-room-only event. 

   

Although work on this Concerto was begun in Leipzig in May, 1841, it was not till July 31,1845, in Dresden, that Clara Schumann was able to record in her diary: “Robert has finished his Concerto and given it to the copyists.” The intervening period was one of hectic activity for Schumann. During those three years he composed endlessly, in every form. Despite frail health, he traveled widely and even accompanied his wife on a Russian tour. A professorship in composition came to him from the newly founded Leipzig Conservatory. Until June, 1844, he was still editor of the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik. Twice his health broke under the strain, and once the overwork and feverish pace brought him to the verge of insanity, though it was not till a decade later that his mind finally snapped beyond repair. He tossed himself into the Rhine river prompting Clara to have him committed to the Richarz sanatorium where he was to remain until his death in 1856.

   On the other hand, they were years of great personal happiness. After ceaseless, at times slanderous (claimed that Robert was a drunkard), opposition from her father, Clara Wieck had become his wife. To the end it remained an ideal marriage, with unbounded love and devotion on both sides. Perhaps this new-found happiness was the incentive behind Schumann’s extended efforts during those first three years as composer, editor, and teacher.

   Certainly his wife’s alert understanding and encouragement were an unfailing stimulus to artistic activity. And in those first years of their marriage Clara had borne him two daughters, Marie and Elise.

   Much of the Piano Concerto’s romantic glow and exuberance are doubtless directly traceable to this happy home life. The same is true of Grieg’s Piano Concerto, also written in the first years of his marriage. It is doubtful that either composer believed in art as self-concealment, but the Concerto boasts a firmness of structure, a melodic inventiveness, a disciplined rhythmic force and richness of color geared to high expressive purpose indicating that Schumann’s technical and artistic faculties were all at their prime during this period. Some critics regard it as Schumann’s highest achievement, alike for form as for poetic content.

       Yet the Concerto came into shape piecemeal, and all three movements in time were to have as many titles as a royal family. When the first movement was completed during the summer of 1841, Schumann had no thought of incorporating it into a Concerto. It bore the title “Phantasie in A minor” when Clara Schumann played it, rather informally, at a “private rehearsal” in the Gewandhaus, in Leipzig, on Aug. 13, 1841, held chiefly for revisions in her husband’s first symphony. Two years later Schumann made several attempts to publish the piece separately, first as an “Allegro affettuoso,” then as a “Concert Allegro,” with the opus number “48.” Nobody wanted it. The other two movements were finished in Dresden during the early summer months of 1845. They were then apparently labeled “Intermezzo” and “Finale.” The three movements were listed as “Allegro affettuoso,” “Andantino,” and “Rondo” at the world premiere occurring in the Hall of the Hotel de Saxe in Dresden, on Dec. 4,1845, when Clara Schumann was the soloist, and their devoted friend, Ferdinand Hiller, to whom the Concerto is dedicated, the conductor.  The work was played from manuscript. (The orchestral parts were not published until July, 1846, while the full score had to wait another sixteen years for publication.)

      Clara was again the soloist when Felix Mendelssohn directed a second performance, in Leipzig, where the first movement had been composed. Schumann himself conducted the first Viennese performance on Jan. 1, 1847, with his wife at the keyboard for the third time. On that occasion the movements were listed as “Allegro affettuoso,” “Intermezzo,” and “Rondo vivace.” S. B. Mills was the piano soloist when the Concerto was brought into the repertory of the New York Philharmonic Society on Mar. 26, 1859. Three years earlier Clara Schumann, on her first visit to England, had introduced the work to London at a concert of the New Philharmonic Society. That was on May 14. On the following June 30 she gave a recital that inspired the critic of the Musical World to write: “The reception accorded to this accomplished lady on her first coming to England will no doubt encourage her to repeat her visit. Need we say, to make use of a homely phrase, that she will be as ‘welcome as the flowers in May’?”

   Speaking of this Concerto, in his volume on the romantic composers, Daniel Gregory Mason observes:

   The sincerity, tenderness, grace, and impetuous enthusiasm of the youthful romanticist are not in the least abated. What could be more contagious than the exuberant first movement, in which one hardly knows what to admire the more, the felicity of such details as the clarinet cantabile, the Andante espressivo for solo piano, and the nobly polyphonic cadenza, or the broadly climactic plan of the whole? What could appeal more simply and directly to the heart than the delicate and yet ecstatic Andante grazioso, with its winding intermeshed melodies, clustering about the violoncello phrases as a grapevine festoons itself upon a tree? Yet perfectly wedded with all this feminine suavity and grace is a more masculine quality, a fine poise, restraint, reservation of force, which counteracts all tendency to feverishness, and gives the work a sort of impersonal dignity and beauty....

   One feels that the composer, no longer the victim of his moods, is shaping his work with the serene detachment of the artist. Particularly manifest is this new mastery in the rhythmical treatment of the finale. The rhythms here are as salient, as seizing, as ever, but they are far more various.

   The orchestral part of the concerto calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets in pairs, kettledrums, and the usual strings.

    “While the first movement (Allegro affettuoso, A minor, 4/4) shows, naturally enough, the characteristics rather of a fantasia for piano and orchestra than of the authentic first movement of a concerto, it nevertheless demands through its own bigness supplementary movements. If the orchestra does not play here the orthodox role of a concerto’s orchestra, it still is employed with more than Schumann’s ordinary feeling for orchestral tone. This movement abounds in thematic material and changes of time and key. The principal theme, familiar as a household word, is first given out by wind instruments. From it is derived the second theme.

   “For the second movement (Intermezzo: Andantino grazioso, F major, 2/4) Schumann has provided a romanze in at once his tenderest and most playful  vein. It begins with a dialogue between piano and orchestra. A broadly lyrical second theme is introduced by the cellos. The first part of the movement is heard again. The principal theme of the first movement is hinted at before the Intermezzo passes without pause into the final Allegro vivace (A major, 4/4).

    “Here again is a wealth of thematic material. The form of the movement is the sonata, and the development is elaborate and often brilliant. The coda runs to great length.

   Conspicuous in this movement are the chief subject, given out by the solo instrument, and the syncopated second subject, which the orchestra announces in E major.”