Program notes by J. Michael Allsen

This program presents music by three great 19th-century composers whose lives were closely intertwined, both professionally and romantically. Robert Schumann’s stormy Manfred Overture was inspired by one of the great romantic literary heroes of the day. His wife Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, her largest work, written when she was just a teenager, reflects her status as one of the great piano virtuosos of the 19th century. Pianist Wynona Wang joins us as sunoist for this work. Finally, we present the long-awaited first symphony of Johannes Brahms, who viewed Robert as a mentor, and who loved Clara.

Love Triange

On our first Masterworks program this season, we explored music by a love triangle of composers. Alexander Zemlinsky and his composition student, Alma Schindler, carried on a fairly stormy relationship until Zemlinsky found himself to be a “third wheel” in the burgeoning affair between Alma and Gustav Mahler. In this program, we explore another musical trio: Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms.

Robert and Clara Schumann were the middle 19th century’s musical “power couple.” They met in Leipzig when Clara was still a child and Robert was studying piano with her father, Friedrich Wieck. They fell in love when she was 15, though it took a two-year court battle to overcome her father’s objection to their marriage—Robert and Clara were married on September 12, 1840, one day before her 21st birthday. They each brought formidable talent to this partnership: Robert was widely recognized as the editor of an influential music journal and as an increasingly important composer; Clara had a reputation throughout Europe as a piano virtuoso and was a fine composer in her own right. Though Robert’s career seems to have taken precedence, this was in fact a true artistic partnership: they worked together to select poetry for songs, criticized and praised one another’s musical works, and each of them frequently worked quotations of the other’s music into their own compositions. Brahms came into the picture in 1853, when he came to the attention of the Schumanns, and both of them hailed him as a genius. However, Robert, who had been increasingly unstable, attempted suicide in early 1854, and spent the last two years of his life confined to a sanatorium.

Brahms lived with Clara and her children for a time after Robert’s death and offered sensitive emotional support. He had a long romantic attachment to Clara and may have felt a certain amount of guilt over his love for the widow of his mentor. For her part Clara does not seem to have felt quite the same way towards Brahms. It may have been in part, that, after her husband’s death, she was a single mother to eight children, who was managing a phenomenally busy career as a soloist. (She had always been the family’s principal breadwinner.) Their relationship eventually mellowed into a warm, lifelong friendship. There is a romantic footnote to their relationship: in 1869, just as he was finishing off the first set of his Liebeslieder (love song) Waltzes, Brahms, then 36, fell deeply in love with Clara’s third daughter, 24-year-old Julie. It is doubtful that Julie actually knew anything about this, and he was privately crushed when he found out that she had become engaged to an Italian count. The melancholy and almost operatic Alto Rhapsody Brahms wrote in late 1869 seems to have been an expression of his disappointment.

Byron’s tragedy Manfred was among Robert Schumann’s favorite pieces of literature, and in 1848, he composed a series of incidental pieces designed to complement the poem. The fine Manfred Overture is clearly the most popular piece of this set.

Robert Schumann

Born: June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Germany.

Died: July 29, 1856, Bonn, Germany.

Overture to Manfred, Op. 115

Composed: Schumann’s incidental music to Byron’s poem Manfred was composed in 1848.

Premiere: March 1852, in Leipzig,

Duration: 12:00.

Background

1848 was a year of revolutions across Europe—with insurrections in France, Austria, Germany, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, and while most of these actions were unsuccessful, political feelings ran high all through Europe. Schumann’s reaction to this upheaval was thoroughly romantic and personal: he began work on a series of fifteen short pieces based upon Byron’s mystical and dramatic poem Manfred. Byron’s hero, a freedom-fighter who is tortured by guilt and melancholy, is perfectly suited to the time. However, Schumann also related on a very personal level with Manfred’s eventual descent into madness—at this point in his life, the composer was himself battling severe depression. Manfred was apparently one of Schumann’s favorite poems, and he loved reading it aloud at gatherings of friends. On one occasion, he was apparently so overcome with emotion that his voice faltered, and he had to stop reading.

Though he conducted a concert performance of Manfred’s overture in Leipzig in March 1852, Schumann’s conception of the work seems to have been a staged reading of the poem with musical interludes. Franz Liszt directed a complete version of Manfred, with sets, costumes, choreography, and all of Schumann’s incidental music in Weimar later that same year. In an 1851 letter to Liszt about Manfred, Schumann wrote: “Of the musical numbers, dear friend, I commend especially the Overture to your heart. If I may say so, I feel that it is one of the strongest of my artistic children, and I hope that you will agree with me.” While the complete Manfred music is rarely heard today, the overture—Schumann’s “strongest child”—is among his most popular orchestral works.

What You’ll Hear

The slow introduction begins with three abrupt chords and continues through a sequence of sliding harmonies that some writers have connected to the conflicting passions of Byron’s hero. A gradual increase in intensity and military fanfares lead into the main Allegro theme, highly syncopated and chromatic. The second group of themes, more lyrical but no less tense, provides a rich source of material for Schumann to explore in the lengthy development section. The recapitulation of his main themes is conventional, but the work closes with a lengthy and emotional coda. One of the most striking figures of the ending is a dour trumpet fanfare, which is cut short by the rest of the orchestra, just as Manfred himself dies prematurely. The overture closes in the same hazy character as the opening.

This impassioned piece by a teenaged Clara Wieck was written with an eye towards furthering her solo career.

Clara Wieck Schumann

Born: September 13, 1819, Leipzig, Germany.

Died: May 20, 1896, Frankfurt, Germany.

Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7

• Composed: 1833-35.
• Premiere: November 9, 1835, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, with the composer of the piano, and Felix Mendelssohn conducting.
• Duration: 21:00.

Background

Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father, was her teacher, but was also her principal promoter, and by the time she was in her teens, he had helped to engineer a fine reputation for his daughter as a virtuoso, viewed as the equal of any of the men currently touring as piano soloists. Young soloists were expected to play their own original concertos, and composing one was a solid career move for the young Clara Wieck. She started work on what became the third movement in 1833, leaving the orchestration to Robert. She completed the opening movement and the Romanza in 1835, now apparently doing most of the orchestration herself. The premiere in November 1835, played by the 16-year-old composer at Leipzig’s famed Gewandhaus, was a triumph, and a slightly revised version played in Vienna a few months later was even more successful. Clara performed the piano concerto often on her tours over the next few years, but there is no evidence that she ever played it again in public after her marriage to Robert in 1840. Instead, she seems to have taken on Robert’s own Piano Concerto in A minor, composed in1845, as her signature piece.

What You’ll Hear

The Piano Concerto in a minor is the largest piece by Clara, and her only surviving orchestral work. The first movement (Allegro maestoso) opens with an orchestral exposition, laying out a stern main theme. After a short solo interlude—a sample of what a fiery soloist Clara Wieck must have been—the piano picks up the main theme, played in a passionate variation, that moves seamlessly into a long section of development led by the piano. In place of a formal recapitulation, there is a single thundering statement of the main theme by the orchestra near the very end of the movement. Clara reportedly like to hold the attention of her audience throughout the performance, so she ended the movement with a brief and rather mysterious transition into the Romanza (Andante non troppo, con grazia). Clara was a great songwriter, and the opening sections of this movement, played by solo piano, clearly show her gift for writing a great melody. These present a pair of lovely tunes, one limpid and graceful, in the second more pensive, that are clearly cut from the same cloth. These melodies are then picked up by a solo cello, freeing the piano to weave elaborate variations around them. At the end, a series of rolled chords from the piano and foreboding rolls from the timpani link directly into the finale. The sizeable third movement (Allegro non troppo) opens with a trumpet flourish, and a main theme from the piano played in forceful octaves. It continues as a broad rondo, with several contrasting sections along the way, always returning to this bold main idea in varied forms. At the end, she ratchets up the tempo (Allegro molto) for a passionate and exciting coda.

By the 1870s, all of his musical supporters were impatiently waiting for Brahms to write a symphony. His Symphony No. 1 of 1876 was a long time in coming, but it was worth the wait: a symphonic masterpiece.

Johannes Brahms

Born: May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Germany.

Died: April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria.

Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68

• Composed: Completed in 1876.
• Premiere: November 4, 1876, in Karlsruhe, Germany, with Otto Dessoff conducting.
• Duration: 45:00.

“Writing a symphony is no laughing matter.”

– Johannes Brahms

Background

When Brahms was only twenty, he met the composer and critic Robert Schumann for the first time. Schumann hailed Brahms’s appearance on the musical scene in an editorial in the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, suggesting that Brahms was the long-awaited standard-bearer for one side in an ongoing aesthetic battle. Schumann saw the classical lines of Brahms’s music as an antidote to the more radical ideas of the “New German School” headed by Franz Liszt. Brahms was held up as the successor to Beethoven, and Schumann suggested that “if [Brahms] directs his magic wand where the massed power in chorus and orchestra might lend him their strength, we can look forward to even more wondrous glimpses into the secret world of the spirits.” The young composer had, up until then, composed only smaller works, and this challenge to write symphonies and other large works weighed heavily on Brahms’s mind. He imposed a long musical apprenticeship upon himself before he would bring out a symphony—the first symphony was not completed until 1876, when Brahms was 43.

In listening to the large works he completed prior to 1876, there is a steadily increasing skill and self-confidence in the way in which Brahms composed for orchestra. He abandoned his first attempt at symphonic writing, a D minor symphony sketched out in 1856 (although he did recycle some of its music in later works). For his first published orchestral works, the Op.11 and Op.16 serenades (1857-59), Brahms chose a fairly simple form to practice orchestral writing, and he limited his performing forces to a relatively small chamber orchestra. The German Requiem of 1869 shows a much more confident control of orchestration, and the Variations on a Theme by Haydn of 1873 is an even more adventuresome work, featuring some striking orchestral effects.

Early in 1873, when he sent a few small works to his publisher Simrock, the publisher sent a cranky reply: “Aren’t you going to do anything more? Am I not to have a symphony from you in 1873 either?” Indeed, it seems like everyone who knew Brahms was impatient for him to complete a symphony. In reviewing the first Vienna performance of Brahms’s Symphony No.1, Eduard Hanslick wrote that: “seldom, if ever, has the entire musical world awaited a composer’s first symphony with such tense anticipation.” By 1873, Brahms had, in fact, already been working on the first symphony for a long time. The earliest sketches for this work date from the 1850s, and he had completed a draft of the first movement by 1862.

He finally completed the Symphony No.1 in 1876, and it was first performed at Karlsruhe in November of that year. Those who had waited for so long for Brahms to continue the symphonic tradition of Beethoven were apparently well satisfied. The conductor Hans von Bülow declared that Schumann’s prophecy had been fulfilled and dubbed Brahms’s symphony “The Tenth” (that is, the symphony Beethoven would have written after his ninth). Clearly, Brahms had this image in mind in composing the Symphony No.1—there are too many subtle and overt references to Beethoven to deny. However, the style, conception, and spirit are Brahms’s own: his first symphonic masterpiece.

What You’ll Hear

The Symphony No.1 begins with a lengthy slow introduction marked Un poco sostenuto, which provides musical raw material for this entire work: from the stormy opening movement to the triumphant finale. Tension builds towards the end of the introduction, and Brahms abruptly begins the exposition of his movement (Allegro), which is set in sonata form. The main theme, first heard in the violins, quickly gives way to a long transitional section, in which Brahms begins to explore the material outlined in his introduction. He reserves the second main theme—a powerful triplet melody—for the very end of the exposition. After a repeat of the exposition, there is another abrupt change of character, and the development begins with the first theme played above a hazy background. [James: do you plan to take the repeat? If not, delete “a repeat of” in the previous sentence.] Gradually, the focus shifts to the triplet theme, which is combined and recombined with other material. A long pedal point in the timpani and a chromatic horn passage lead into the recapitulation. At the very end, just when it seems that the movement is concluding, Brahms inserts a rather mysterious minor-key passage. The texture quickly thickens again, however, and the movement comes to a close with bright C Major chords.

Between the large opening and closing movements of the symphony, Brahms places two relatively quiet inner movements. The second movement (Andante sostenuto) begins as a conversation among the strings and solo woodwinds, singing a succession of lyrical melodies and countermelodies. The calm of this movement is threatened by a minor key passage in the center of the movement, and eventually by a brief reference to the stormy main theme of the first movement. This character subsides, however, and Brahms returns to the placid mood of the opening. In closing, the main themes are overlaid by a lovely violin and horn duet. The brief third movement (Un poco allegretto e grazioso) is also in a three-part form. The opening alternates two flowing melodies, presenting them in both strings and woodwinds. The more agitated middle section is set in 6/8, and moves from a major key to minor, and back again. At the end, Brahms presents decorated versions of his opening melodies.

The immense finale is Brahms’s clearest homage to Beethoven in this symphony—its length, complexity, and even its musical form have precedents in Beethoven’s longest symphonic movement, the finale of his ninth symphony. As in Beethoven’s masterpiece, Brahms’s finale begins with a vast introduction which gradually builds from tangled themes towards a climax, leading inevitably towards the main section of the movement. There is a succession of intertwined string and woodwind melodies, which suddenly gives way to a stately melody played by solo horn. Brahms brings this theme to an emotional peak and breaks the texture with a solemn trombone chorale (the trombones’ first appearance in this score). Then follows what is, for this writer, the most profoundly moving passage in the symphonic repertoire: the introduction of this movement’s dignified main theme in the strings. This broad melody bears a clear family resemblance to the famous “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Symphony No.9. (When one unfortunate concertgoer remarked on this resemblance to Brahms, the composer acidly replied, “Any ass could see that.”) It is presented a second time by the woodwinds and is then developed in a turbulent transitional passage. The second main theme, a more playful offbeat melody in the strings is touched upon briefly before Brahms brings the exposition to a close in a Beethovenian storm. The development begins with a clear statement of the main theme, but this quickly spirals off into a minor key. The development section moves towards a contrapuntal climax, and the horn theme from the introduction appears to usher in the recapitulation. Here, Brahms focuses on the playful second theme, allowing it a much more extensive treatment than in the exposition. For the coda, there is a shift to a fast duple rhythm, which reaches its peak with a fortissimo reappearance of the chorale, and a brilliant conclusion.

_____
Program notes ©2025 by J. Michael Allsen