Schumann's Late Chamber Music

Symposium Saturday, November 1, 2014 Concert Tuesday, November 4, 2014 Master Class Wednesday, November 5, 2014 Cornell University Department of Music SCHUMANN’S LATE CHAMBER MUSIC LATE SCHUMANN’S Titlepage of the first edition of Märchenbilder Op. 113 with Schumann’s dedication From Dusk to Dawn Ji Young Kim and Mike Lee, event organizers In the reception of Robert Schumann’s (1810–1856) late music, the notion of death has unusually and continually seeped backwards in time to encroach on the composer’s productive life. As some commentators infer, signs of his final decline emerged as early as fall 1850, when he was freshly installed as Municipal Music Director of Düsseldorf. This retro- spective consignment of death before actual death finds emotional support not only in the real-life circumstances surrounding his final years, when he effectively left his immediate family for good and was admitted at the Endenich asylum in March 1854, but is no doubt exacerbated by Clara’s own professed doubts about some of Schumann’s compositions from the few years prior to his final breakdown. Yet, ironically, there are few signs in Clara’s diaries up to that point that betray much awareness of his apparent mental deterioration. The events leading up to Schumann’s institutionalization develop suddenly and quickly in her records. It is clear, however, that her attitudes played a marked, if not at times even decisive, role in shaping the subsequent negative reception of his late music. The Geistervariationen (1854), his last work for piano, apparently held so much sentimental value for Clara that its publication was sup- pressed for almost a century. Yet one cannot help but suspect that this too was music about which she harbored doubts as to its artistic merit. Midway through the symposium, Paul Berry’s presentation will provide an opportunity for us to retrace the variations’ complex afterlife and, along the way, to reflect on the complexities of human relations and their impact on subsequent appreciation of artworks. This conference aims to explore some of the processes that set apart Schumann’s creative impulses in the period between 1846 and 1854. We begin by responding to the composer’s explicit wish, voiced in 1846, to wean himself off the keyboard as a tool for composition and “invent and work everything out in my head.” Contrary to the perception that Schumann’s inspiration waned as he moved away from the piano, we believe that this rejection had in fact an enriching effect on his imagination of instrumentality, which in the late works often reaches far beyond immediately available instrumental resources and their requisite techniques. In the opening of the slow movement of the Violin Sonata in D minor Op. 121 (1851), for instance, both pianist and violinist are called upon to realize gestures and timbral ideas (in this case those associated with the lute or harp—the latter was in the composer’s radar as he wrote the last of the Lenau Lieder, Op. 90, and the Hebräische Gesänge, Op. 95) that are foreign to their usual instrumental idioms. We probe this layering and translation of multiple instrumental representations further in three additional performances: Fantasiestuck Op. 73, No. 3 (1849); Romanze Op. 94, No. 1 (1849); and Märchenerzählung Op. 132, No. 1 (1853). Here the distance between the referent (violin) and the referenced (oboe in Op. 94 and clarinet in Op. 73) INTRODUCTION 3 contributes to a vital source of expressive tension, even if such possibilities for substitution were motivated by commercial needs. Despite the self-professed break from his own practices mentioned above, the later works should be heard as part of a continuum in his proclivities. Schumann it seems never rejected the Davidsbündler personae from the 1830s; rather, the derived agencies of Eusebius and Florestan that animated much of the early piano cycles are now given to intricate processes of sublimation, a defining characteristic of his late style that Ji Young Kim’s presentation will seek to explore. In the middle movement of the Violin Sonata in A minor Op. 105 (1851), one can already sense this trait whereby details of voice leading, register, and form complicate the otherwise familiar exchanges between E. and F. Such problematizing of musical agency corroborates a renewed interest in musical nar- rativity, more specifically the boundaries and frames between narrative voices and their temporalities. This issue surfaces in the negotiation between formal repetition and narrative continuation, a relationship that will be the subject of investigation in Lee Dionne’s lecture-demonstration. The two “Märchen” (folk tale) cycles—Märchenbilder Op. 113 (1851) and Märchenerzählungen Op. 132—epitomize his concerns in these areas. In the first half of our Tuesday evening concert program, we have created our own “Märchen cycle,” with a narrative arch framed by the first and last of theGesänge der Frühe Op. 133 (1853), two pieces where a speaking voice emerges. Our cycle then plunges into “narrative” or “story” (as opposed to “discourse”) time with the first Märchenerzählung and the second Märchenbild. It features the first movement of thePiano Trio in G minor Op. 110 (1851), a work marked by a development section reminiscent of the most terrify- ing moments in Schubert’s late music, as our cycle’s emotional center. The proclivity to complicate musical agencies and narrative frames in the late style are bal- anced, and perhaps even facilitated, by what Dana Gooley identifies as Schumann’s later inclination towards a “discourse of economy,” a perceived virtue of mid-19th century Ger- man culture that encouraged a rejection of excess. In addition to the D-minor Violin Sonata and the Märchenbilder, which Gooley will discuss, we also discern an economy of means in the monothematic tendencies and Bachian subject-answer rhetoric of the first movement of the G-minor Piano Trio (incidentally, a companion work of sorts to the A-minor Violin Sonata owing to their close dates of composition and the first movements’ shared thematic, rhythmic, and expressive profiles, as well as the subject-answer rhetoric just mentioned). Yet such economy, in Schumann’s case, is often accompanied by an obsessive strain, and this is the case with both of these works. Obsession need not always be destructive, however. When funneled productively into the study of counterpoint, his exertion proved time and again to be of therapeutic value while infusing his musical expression with renewed energy. Joel Lester’s closing presentation on the changing performance traditions around the String Quartet in A major Op. 41, No. 3 brings us back to reflect on both performance and 4 INTRODUCTION the (perhaps for many) more familiar world of the 1842 chamber works. Two additional compositions from this “chamber music year”—the Piano Quintet Op. 44 and Piano Quartet Op. 47—will be featured respectively in the concert and master class, the latter led by Michael Friedmann, whose commitment to the relation between performance and analysis provides a lens for understanding how Schumann’s intensive study of Viennese classicism in the early 1840s relates to the personalized renderings of the later chamber music. It is with these connections in mind that we present the Piano Quintet in the second half of our concert. Even though it remains a concert favorite, this is not to say that it too has not been susceptible to what Lester calls “mannerisms and attitudes” that accrue in a repertoire’s performance history and that could “alter [its] very essence.” As a way to test Lester’s thesis that performance could fundamentally reshape one’s perception of a familiar work, we join forces with the Formosa Quartet (winners of the 2006 London International String Quartet Competition) to mount a renewed challenge to the myriad issues posed by this music, drawing on Cornell’s renowned collection of early keyboards in conjunction with wound gut strings. The hardware provides us with the kinds of expressive options that we believe can shed new light on this well-known composition. There have been many notable efforts in recent years to rehabilitate Schumann’s late music. Writers such as John Daverio, Harald Krebs, Peter Smith, and Laura Tunbridge, to name a few Anglo-American scholars, have each argued for the quality of this repertoire from different perspectives. There is a sense that the heavy veil long cast over its reception is finally beginning to be lifted, and we owe in no small part to their pioneering efforts that this conference can pick up the dialogue at a more productive junction that already ac- cepts this music as worthy of close introspection. Buoyed by this sense of confidence, our concert begins on a note of optimism with the first Gesang der Frühe, a late work in which we perhaps find Schumann at his most hopeful. With this gesture, we entreat you in our three-part event to inhabit the sounds of this extraordinary body of music and engage with its creative and affective forces. Even a modest event like this is not possible without generous support of all kinds. We gratefully acknowledge sponsorship by the Central New York Humanities Corridor, from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Cornell Department of Music. We warmly thank our guest speakers and artists for sharing our passion and desire to further understand this repertoire, Professor James Webster for overseeing the project from start to finish, Professor Phillip Ying of the Eastman School of Music for helping coordinate

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