Schumann, Classic and Romantic
BY PAUL SCHIAVO 

Music is such a compelling phenomenon not only because it delights our ears but, more importantly, because it reflects so strongly the landscape of our inner lives. One way music does this is by giving expression to two contrary sets of impulses we all feel to varying degree: on one hand, a longing for, and delight in, well-conceived, convincingly developed, and elegantly ordered thought (in music’s case, thought rendered in sound); and, on the other hand, for sensual fulfillment, originality, and unbridled expression of feeling. These opposing tendencies are the essence of what we mean when we speak of classical versus romantic ideals in music, and the values of music’s Classical or Romantic periods.

            Just as both these modes of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world exist within all of us, classical and romantic elements co-exist in the work of most composers. It is the dominance of one or the other that distinguishes a classically oriented musician from one who is romantically inclined -- a Bach or Haydn, for example, from a Berlioz or Scriabin. Similarly, we find both classical and romantic tendencies in different historical periods, only in different proportions. The 18th century is generally music’s Classical period, the 19th century the age of Romanticism, though romantic impulses certainly color music of the former and classical practice underlies much composition in the latter.

            But in many ways, the most interesting composers are those in whom both classical and romantic propensities are strongly felt and closely balanced to produce a fertile creative tension. We find this especially with Robert Schumann, who came to maturity with the first great surge of the Romantic tide in music, during the second quarter of the 19th century.

            Especially at the start of his career, Schumann was fired with the spirit of the Romantic movement. His early works, mostly piano solos and songs, were given over to expressions of ardor, fantasy, and formal novelty. In compositions like Carnaval, Kreisleriana, and the Davidsbündlertänze, all for solo piano, Schumann framed remarkably inventive melodies, harmonies, and keyboard textures within certain fantastical poetic conceits -- a parade of imaginary characters, for example. Schumann’s thoughts alternate in these works between passionate outpourings and gentle musing, breathless tumult and song-like lyricism, each following rapidly on the heels of the other. Formal development takes a back seat to seemingly spontaneous expression. In his many songs, Schumann used melody and harmony in an economical and highly original manner to create moods of delight and desolation at the vagaries of love, rapture at the beauties of nature, and that bittersweet longing that was so essentially part of 19th-century Romanticism.

            Yet for all this, Schumann was well aware of music’s classical tradition and deeply respectful of it. He worshiped Beethoven and held Bach in deep reverence also. And so, in addition to romantic piano pieces and songs on verses by poets of the German Romantic school, Schumann wrote fugues, theme-and-variation sets, sonatas, and symphonies, all musical forms associated with classical compositional practice. Increasingly, as he matured, he managed to reconcile his romantic and classical impulses, to combine subjective intensity and formal clarity, in his compositions.

            Schumann’s music was widely admired during the 19th century, when it exerted an important influence on many composers. Even in more recent times, he has retained admirers among his fellow composers. One of these is Robin Holloway, who has paid tribute to his illustrious predecessor in his orchestral piece Scenes from Schumann.

            Holloway, who has been active in his native England since the 1960s, is one of a number of present-day composers who have essentially declared the modernist revolt against 19th-century romanticism over and done with. Indeed, he describes Scenes from Schumann as paying “an affectionate homage to the spirit of German romanticism.” It is worth noting that this was a daring thing for a composer to do in 1970, when Holloway wrote Scenes from Schumann. At that time, high modernism, with its arcane compositional stratagems and general disdain for the 19th century, was still the credo of the musical avant-garde; only a few composers were starting to propose the alternatives that have made new music so much more varied, interesting, and listener-friendly in recent years. Holloway, though he has written and continues sometimes to write in a modernist vein, was one of the earliest proponents of what came to be called “the new Romanticism.”

            The title Scenes from Schumann is a play on the name of one of Schumann’s collections of piano pieces, Kinderszenen, op. 15, usually translated as “Scenes from Childhood.” It is not Schumann’s keyboard music, however, but his songs that Holloway addresses in his work. Each section of the piece takes one of Schumann’s songs and reworks the music in a novel way. “[My] usual procedure,” Holloway wrote, “has been to take one or two striking features in the original, and… develop these particular features in a manner independent of their function and possibilities in Schumann’s treatment.” In some instances, that development led Holloway to add musical quotations from works by Wagner, Debussy, and Schoenberg.

            Despite these additions, Holloway’s treatment of Schumann’s material preserves much of the spirit of the sources. The composer explains that “I have attempted to get, as it were, ‘inside’ the songs, and from the inside send them in directions quite different from those of Schumann. Though plainly there is hardly a bar left that could have been written in the 19th century, the work is nonetheless not intended as a distortion but, rather, as an amplification and intensification of the originals.” The result is a creative meeting of musical minds across a span of more than a century.

            Sergei Rachmaninoff would seem a composer with little in common with Schumann. Born nearly twenty years after Schumann’s death, Rachmaninoff represents the twilight of the Romantic movement in music, a movement that had its bright morning during Schumann’s time. Moreover, Rachmaninoff’s romanticism is a distinctly Russian kind, tinged with melancholy and nostalgia that is quite unlike the fresh sentiments conveyed by Schumann.

            And yet, these composers are not entirely dissimilar. Like Schumann, Rachmaninoff was an excellent pianist and contributed importantly to the keyboard literature. Like Schumann, his compositional impulse was largely lyrical in nature, and he wrote many fine songs. Above all, Rachmaninoff, like Schumann, sought to channel fundamentally romantic musical content -- sweeping melodies, intensely expressive harmonies, lush aural textures -- into classical forms, and to do this with a good deal of intellectual coherence. In his symphonies, concertos, and the famed Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Rachmaninoff used traditional musical architecture and often imparted greater structural unity through thematic recurrences and cross-references.

            Rachmaninoff worked especially hard on his Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor. He completed an initial version of this piece in 1926 but felt dissatisfied with the music after its first performance and withheld the score from publication. Not until the summer of 1941, by which time he had completed his Symphony No. 3 and the enormously successful Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, did Rachmaninoff return to the work, revising its first two movements and entirely rewriting the third.

            The first of the concerto’s three movements juxtaposes energetic, emotionally effusive music with more delicate thoughts, often entrusted to the piano playing alone, or almost so. The ensuing Largo gives us Rachmaninoff the melancholy Russian poet. Indeed, the principal theme on which this central movement is based suggests nothing so much as a Russian folk song, even though there is nothing really folkloric in what Rachmaninoff does with it.

            In contrast to the overall restraint of this central portion of the concerto, the finale, which follows without pause, finds the composer pulling out all the stops. This is a long, multi‑sectioned affair replete with the kind of dazzling keyboard passagework with which Rachmaninoff habitually mesmerized his audiences. In addition to a generous complement of new melodic ideas, it also features the reappearance of themes heard earlier in the concerto.

            In his best works, Robert Schumann achieved impassioned expression within classical molds of composition. Nowhere is that effort more apparent -- nor, arguably, more successful -- than in his First, or “Spring,” Symphony. Schumann did not compose this piece in the season indicated by its title. Rather, he wrote it in the depth of winter -- specifically, in January and February of 1841. He completed a keyboard sketch for the work in just four days and spent most of the following month refining and orchestrating it. “The symphony has given me so many hours of bliss,” Schumann informed his diary. “I thank my guardian angel for letting me finish this large work with such ease.”

            The composer found his initial inspiration for this piece in a poem extolling springtime, and this seems to have provided a programmatic scenario around which the music took shape. Something of that scenario is conveyed in the titles that Schumann originally gave to each of the symphony’s four movements: “Awakening of Spring,” “Evening,” “Merry Playmates,” and “Spring’s Fullness.” In the end, though, he eliminated those designations and any indication of a narrative program. Nor does the music offer any onomatopoetic allusion to the natural world -- as do, for example, the bird songs and storm scene in the “Spring” concerto of Vivaldi’s “The Seasons.” Schumann ultimately clarified the question of the symphony’s specificity when he wrote to the composer Ludwig Spohr that “I was inspired, if I may say so, by the spirit of spring…. The music is not intended to describe or paint anything definite.”

            Schumann’s ability to conjure so vividly “the spirit of spring” may, however, be connected with his wedding to his longtime love, Clara Wieck, only the previous September. The early stage of their marriage proved the most contented period of the composer’s life. He was deeply enamored with Clara, and it seems probable that their conjugal happiness suggested those springtime feelings that in turn inspired the symphony. In any event, the music was first heard at a concert by the famed Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, with Felix Mendelssohn conducting, just 10 days after the vernal equinox in 1841. Schumann probably exaggerated when he recorded in his diary that the work “was received with such enthusiasm as I don’t think has been accorded any symphony since Beethoven,” though reviews of the concert confirm that listeners gave it a warm ovation. Their approval has stood the test of time, and the “Spring” remains the most generally popular of Schumann’s four symphonies.