Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856)
Arabeske, Op. 18
Kinderszenen, Op. 15
Fantasiestücke, Op. 12
Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)
Klavierstücke, Op. 118
Robert Schumann must seem in many ways typical of the age in which he lived,
combining a number of the principal characteristics of Romanticism in his music
and in his life. Born in Zwickau in 1810, the son of a bookseller, publisher and
writer, he showed an early interest in literature, and was to make a name for
himself in later years as a writer and editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für
Musik, a journal launched in 1834. After a period at university, to satisfy
the ambitions of his widowed mother but still showing the wide interests of a
dilettante, he turned more fully to music under the tuition of Friedrich Wieck,
a famous teacher whose energies had been largely directed towards the training
of his daughter Clara, a pianist of prodigious early talent.
Schumann's own ambitions as a pianist were to be frustrated by a weakness of
the fingers, the result, it is supposed, of mercury treatment for syphilis,
which he had contracted from a servant-girl in Wieck's employment. Nevertheless
in the 1830s he was to write a great deal of music for the piano, much of it in
the form of shorter, genre pieces, often enough with some extra-musical,
literary or autobiographical association.
In health Schumann had long been subject to sudden depressions and had on one
occasion attempted to take his own life. This nervous instability had shown
itself in other members of his family, in his father and in his sister, and
accentuated, perhaps, by venereal disease, it was to bring him finally to
insanity and death in an asylum. Friedrich Wieck, an anxious father, was
possibly aware of Schumann's weaknesses when he made every effort to prevent a
proposed marriage between his daughter Clara and his former pupil. Clara was
nine years younger than Schumann and represented for her father a considerable
investment of time and hope.
At first, when he lodged in Wieck's house in Leipzig, Schumann had shown
little interest in Clara, and in 1834 he became secretly engaged to Ernestine
von Fricken, a pupil of Wieck and illegitimate daughter of Baron von Fricken, a
Bohemian nobleman. It was for her that Schumann wrote his Fasching: Schwänke
auf vier Noten, a set of pieces based on the four musical notes of his name,
S C H A, which, by a lucky chance, also formed the name of the von Fricken's
home- town, Asch. It was this work that was later given the title Carnaval:
scenes mignonnes sur quatre notes. By the following summer Schumann had
discovered the secret of Ernestine's illegitimacy and begun to transfer his
affections to the fifteen-year-old Clara Wieck.
Wieck was to do his utmost to prevent a marriage that can have brought Clara
little happiness, but after considerable litigation the marriage took place and
the couple were married in the autumn of 1840, a year in which Schumann was to
write an incredibly large number of songs, before turning his attention, at his
wife's prompting to the larger forms of orchestral music. His subsequent career
took him and his wife first to Dresden and in 1850 to Düsseldorf, where he
briefly held his first official position as director of music for the city, an
office in which he proved increasingly inadequate. In February, 1854, he
attempted to drown himself, and was to spend the remaining years of his life in
a private asylum at Endenich, near Bonn. He died there on 29th July, 1856.
Schumann wrote his Arabeske in 1839, dedicating it to Frau Majorin
Friederike Serre auf Maxen, to whom he also dedicated his Blumenstück. Major
Serre and his wife were originally friends of Wieck and in 1837 he had taken his
daughter to stay on their country estate at Maxen to avoid Schumann's attentions
to Clara, which the Serres in fact encouraged. In the autumn of 1838 Robert
Schumann left Leipzig for Vienna. His relationship with Clara Wieck had reached
a point of some intensity, but her father's entrenched opposition to anything
that might interfere with his daughter's career as a pianist and his very
reasonable disapproval of Schumann as a possible son-in-law, had led to a great
deal of subterfuge, with a clandestine correspondence between the lovers,
carried on as best they could. Wieck had, in any case, insisted that, if the
couple were to marry, they should not remain in Leipzig, where Schumann was
editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. At Clara's suggestion it was
proposed that the journal be moved to Vienna, if sponsors could be found there,
and this was the principal object of Schumann's journey, hard as it was to be
separated from his beloved at a time of some anxiety in their relationship.
In Vienna Schumann was to busy himself with a number of new Compositions,
including the Arabeske, Opus 18, written towards the end of the year and
designed for women, as opposed to the robuster Humoreske to be written in
the following year. The composer claimed that his aim was to capture the
feminine market for piano music in Vienna, a remark that need not be taken too
seriously. At the same time he continued to be influenced by Christian
Schuburt's book on musical aesthetics, in which C major, the key of the Arabeske,
was identified with the childish and simple, leaving intenser passions to
the sharp keys. The Arabeske is well enough known. Couched in rondo form,
its gently lyrical principal theme frames two slower, minor key episodes.
Schumann wrote his Kinderszenen in 1838. As he told Clara, he had
composed thirty little pieces, and from these he selected a baker's dozen, all
of them designed to express an adult's reminiscence of childhood, or, as he said
in a letter to Clara, a reflection of her comment that he sometimes seemed to
her as a child. The music is technically undemanding, of ingenuous simplicity,
the titles self- explanatory, without the cryptic implications of Papillons and
Carnaval, an outstanding example of what Schumann was able to achieve in
forms as limited as this.
The Fantasiestücke of 1837, like the Davidsbündlertänze in
two volumes, came at a time of estrangement between Schumann and Clara Wieck.
Anna Robena Laidlaw was born at Bretton in Yorkshire in 1819 and educated at her
aunt's school in Edinburgh, moving with her family to Konigsberg in 1830. She
won a considerable reputation and on 2nd July 1837 played at a Gewandhaus
Concert in Leipzig, when Schumann made her acquaintance, later dedicating the Fantasy
Pieces, Opus 12, to her. She married and retired from the concert platform
in 1855 and died in London in 1901.
The gentle D flat major Des Abends (In the Evening) is followed by the
well known F minor Aufschwung (Soaring). Warum? (Why ?), again in
D flat major, is gently brief, to be followed by the capricious Grillen (Whims)
in the same key. The second book opens with Schumann's own favourite In der
Nacht (In the Night), in F minor with a major central section. Fabel (Story),
in C major, is suitably varied in mood as the narrative unfolds, followed by the
rapid F major Traumes Wirren (Troubled Dreams). The book ends with an F
major piece, Ende vom Lied (End of the Song), marked Mit gutem Humor and
moving to a livelier B flat section before the return of the first material and
key and a hushed chordal coda.
In 1853 Brahms embarked on a concert tour with the Hungarian violinist Eduard
Remenyi, during the course of which he visited Liszt in Weimar, to no effect,
and struck up a friendship with the violinist Joseph Joachim, through whose
agency he met the schumanns then established in Düsseldorf. The connection was
an important one. Schumann was impressed enough by the music Brahms played him
to hail him as the long-awaited successor to Beethoven, and his subsequent
break-down in February 1854 and ensuing insanity brought Brahms back to
Düsseldorf to help his wife Clara Schumann and her young family. The
relationship with Clara Schumann, one of the most distinguished pianists of the
time, lasted until her death in 1896.
In the music of the second half of the nineteenth century Brahms came to
occupy a position in direct antithesis to Wagner. The latter had seen in
Beethoven's great Choral Symphony the last word in symphonic music. The
music of the future lay, he claimed, in the new form of music-drama of which he
was the sole proponent. His father-in-law Liszt similarly found the way forward
in the symphonic poem, an alloy formed from the musical and extra- musical.
Brahms, largely through the advocacy of Hanslick, found himself the champion of
pure or abstract music combined neither with drama nor any other medium. The
distinction was in some ways an artificial one. Nevertheless Brahms, whose
background, like Beethoven's, was less literary than that of Wagner or of Liszt,
did significantly extend the range of the symphony and was hailed by many
contemporaries as the successor to Beethoven, a future Schumann had prophesied
for him twenty-three years before the first symphony was written.
The last compositions Brahms wrote for piano were those published as Opus
117, 118 and 119, principally the work of 1892, when he apparently
wrote a number of other piano pieces that were never published.
Opus 118 bears the simpler title Klavierstücke and includes four Intermezzi,
a Ballade and a Romanze. The opening Intermezzo in A
minor is marked Allegro non assai, ma molto appassionato, a mood
expressed in a texture of great clarity. The second Intermezzo, in A
major, provides a relaxation of mood into a tender valedictory melancholy. The G
minor Ballade, with a B major central section, is vigorous in its
principal theme but tranquil enough in its conclusion. There follows an F minor Intermezzo,
marked Allegretto un poco agitato, an instruction that epitomises the
feeling of the music, which leads to the F major Romanze, with its
lilting D major central section. The sixth piece is an E flat minor Intermezzo
making greater technical demands in a work where the chief demands are
musical.
Jeno Jandó
The Hungarian pianist Jeno Jandó has won a number of piano competitions in
Hungary and abroad, including first prize in the 1973 Hungarian Piano Concours
and a first prize in the chamber music category at the Sydney International
Piano Competition in 1977. He has recorded for Naxos all the piano concertos and
sonatas of Mozart. Other recordings for the Naxos label include the concertos of
Grieg and Schumann as well as Rachmaninov's Second Concerto and Paganini
Rhapsody and Beethoven's complete piano sonatas.
Benjamin Frith
The young British pianist Benjamin Frith has had a distinguished career. A
pupil of Fanny Waterman, he won, at the age of fourteen, the British National
Concerto Competition, followed by the award of the Mozart Memorial Prize and
joint top prize in 1986 in the Italian Busoni International Piano Competition
and in 1989 a Gold Medal and First prize in the Arthur Rubinstein Piano Master
Competition. Benjamin Frith enjoys a busy international career, with engagements
in the United States and throughout Europe as a soloist and recitalist, with
festival appearances at Sheffield, Aldeburgh, Harrogate, Kuhmo, Bolzano,
Savannah, Pasadena and Hong Kong and an Edinburgh Festival debut in 1992. His
recordings include a highly praised performance of Beethoven's Diabelli
Variations on the ASV label and for Naxos a release of piano music by
Schumann and the two Mendelssohn Piano Concertos.
Idil Biret
Born in Ankara, Idil Biret started to learn the piano at the age of three and
later studied at the Paris Conservatoire under the guidance of Nadia Boulanger,
graduating at the age of fifteen with three first prizes. A pupil of Alfred
Cortot and of Wilhelm Kempff, she embarked on her career as a soloist at the age
of sixteen, appearing with major orchestras in the principal musical centres of
the world, in collaboration with conductors of the greatest distinction. To many
festival appearances may be added membership of juries for international piano
competitions, including the Van Cliburn, Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians and
Busoni Competitions. She has received the Lili Boulanger Memorial Award in
Boston, the Harriet Cohen / Dinu Lipatti Gold Medal in London, the Polish
Artistic Merit Award and the French Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mente. Her
more than sixty records include the first recording of Liszt's transcription of
the symphonies of Beethoven, and for Naxos the complete piano works of Chopin,
Brahms and Rachmaninov, with a Marco Polo disc of the piano compositions and
transcriptions of her mentor Wilhelm Kempff.