Robert Schumann by Martin Geck

Author:Martin Geck [Geck, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-11-01T02:00:00+00:00

Schumann’s pen drawing of the Kremlin, April or May 1844. (Photograph courtesy of the Robert Schumann Museum, Zwickau.)

Intermezzo V

The Magic of Allusions

A brief tutti chord in the full orchestra serves as the starting pistol for three bars of cascading quarter- and eighth-notes in the piano. As such, this passage harkens back to the traditional opening gesture of a baroque overture, while the interval of a minor second around which the passage is centered has always been associated with the idea of a sigh. Eight bars of a lyrical first subject are entrusted to the woodwinds and horns, after which the piano adds a further eight bars of its own to produce a sixteen-bar period. Far from pausing to rest, the composer then continues to spin out the musical argument in a passage in which the piano’s baritone register assumes the lead, while accompanied by filigree quintuplets in the right hand. But this is not just Fortspinnung in the sense defined by Wilhelm Fischer: it is also an “answer” with its own thematic significance. The “answer” expands to the accompaniment of a growing involvement of the orchestra to which the piano briefly abandons the melodic line, itself assuming the function of a bass. And so the musical argument proceeds, intricately interwoven, until a liberating six-four chord on G provides the first subject with a platform on which to build in the key of C major: the heavens appear to stand open before us.

It is impossible within the space available to describe all the musical and metrical subtleties that make this movement what it is: a piano-symphonic miracle occupying a position between Beethoven and Brahms. And if their concertos are more solid in form and character, then Schumann’s undoubtedly possesses a greater sense of poetry. In any discussion of nineteenth-century works still indebted to the earlier tradition, the use of terms such as “opening ritornello,” “solo exposition,” “first subject-group,” “bridge passage,” “second subject-group,” “exposition,” “development section,” and “recapitulation” is already problematical, but in Schumann’s case it amounts to an insult. The miracle of the Piano Fantasy in A Minor—only later turned into the opening movement of Piano Concerto op. 54—is that it manages to escape from the rules that inform such works and does so, moreover, with sovereign ease. While avoiding impressionist diffuseness, this fantasy refuses to be pinned down to any of the usual categories of musical form but demands to be judged in terms of its narrative qualities.

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