Robert Schumann
Born: June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Saxony
Died: July 29, 1856, Bonn, Germany
Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 38, Spring
- Composed: January–March 1841
- Premiere: March 31, 1841, Felix Mendelssohn conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
- Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, strings
- CSO notable performances: First: February 1896, Frank Van der Stucken conducting. Most Recent: January 2009, Paavo Järvi conducting.
- Duration: approx. 30 minutes
It took Robert Schumann just four days in January 1841 to draft his Symphony No. 1. Over the following weeks, the composer translated his sketches to a full orchestral score, and on March 31, 1841, famed composer-conductor and Schumann’s personal friend, Felix Mendelssohn, brought the piece to the Leipzig public with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. Audiences received the performance warmly, and Schumann recorded his pride in the joint diary he and his pianist-composer wife, Clara, kept, declaring that the day was one of the most important of his life. The piece signaled a turning point for its composer, bringing him the notoriety he craved as an emerging artist; orchestras presented the work at least three more times that year and more than 40 times over the ensuing decade. Beyond its personal significance, the work’s early popularity forecast its eventual position as a repertorial mainstay.
Yet writing such a piece did not invariably come easy for Schumann, and sometimes his endeavors ran parallel to life changes. Schumann’s first attempt at a symphony came in 1832, roughly marking an intended pivot from an aspiring pianist-who-composes to a composer-with-piano-training, a shift compelled by an inhibiting hand injury. Schumann produced only a set of fragments for a symphony in G minor before abandoning the project, but the seeds for a complete symphony had begun to germinate. He spent the remainder of the 1830s composing some of his most popular piano pieces and other smaller-scale works—the type of music he later advised young composers to write as preparation for larger forms. In this way, it’s likely that Schumann was retracing his steps to gain the technical momentum he himself needed for larger projects. By 1839, Clara (to whom Robert was still only betrothed) sensed his skill exceeded the limitations of smaller compositions and that his piano pieces were becoming exceedingly symphonic. At the end of September of that year, she confided in her diary, “My highest wish is that he should compose for orchestra—that is his field! May I succeed in persuading him to enter it.” Just over two months later, Schumann penned one of his most famous turns of phrase, raving in a December letter to Clara that Franz Schubert’s “Great” C major symphony contained a wealth of ideas, comprising what Robert described as its “heavenly lengths.” As biographer John Daverio noted, the experience of hearing Schubert’s work caused Robert to link the fulfillment he drew from his and Clara’s courtship to his own symphonic aspirations: “I was totally happy, and wished only that you should be my wife and that I also could write such symphonies.” His longing to compose a large work paralleled his yearning to marry Clara—after a tumultuous legal struggle with Friedrich Wieck (Clara’s father) over the marriage, Robert and Clara wed on September 12, 1840, and a few months later Robert worked in earnest to compose his Symphony No. 1.
Writers have retroactively segmented the years 1840–43 by the respective genre on which Robert concentrated, dubbing 1841 the “Symphonic Year.” During that year, he completed the spry Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Op. 52; wrote the first movement of his famed Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54; and sketched another incomplete symphony (this one in C minor). He also composed his next completed symphony, though he shelved it—its one-movement form possibly too adventurous for its time—until revising it in 1851 for publication as Symphony No. 4, Op. 120. The protracted process recalls the slow move from Robert’s 1832 symphonic attempt to the completion of Symphony No. 1. The varied experiences of 1841 parallel the production of Symphony No. 1, work that caused him turmoil, despite its quick composition. Clara commented in the marriage diary that the piece kept Robert from sleeping, and Robert equated the arduous task to giving birth—a prescient metaphor, as the couple’s first daughter, Marie, would be born in September of the same year. Creative and life transitions entwined.
In the same diary entry as her observation of insomnia, Clara recorded Robert’s inspiration for the symphony, a poem by Adolf Böttger, the author a collaborator and acquaintance of Robert’s and with whom he considered an opera project. While the symphony’s nickname took a specific point of reference, Robert was deeply skeptical of forcing an audience to hear a piece in a singular way, and he used titles as evocations, not pictorial or narrative analogs. As such, he withheld the symphony’s “Spring” title from audiences, and movement titles he penciled in the sketches were kept from performance and publication.
Entertaining Robert’s instincts urges one to hear the work in a certain way. Böttger’s poem is, for the first 10 of its 12 lines, rather bleak, a lyric address to dreary clouds that obscure the speaker’s view of the heavens. The final couplet, entreating concession from the clouds (“Oh, turn, change your course / In the valley, spring blooms forth!”), seems to be where the symphony begins. Allowing some creative interpretation, we might read the poem as evoking biographical connotations from Robert’s life transitions, new beginnings begotten by struggle, a more deeply-rooted feeling of emergence more meaningful than a simple programmatic evocation of the seasons. Although Robert deferred on programmatic imagery, Clara, for one, did hear more specific programmatic images, writing in the marriage diary, “I would never finish talking about the tiny buds, the scent of the violets, the fresh green leaves, the birds in the air…. [The] poetic breath of this work has deeply penetrated my innermost being.” Perhaps we might do well to find a middle ground between Clara and Robert and hear her imagery in his evocations.
Much as Symphony No. 1 coincided with a burst through a creative block, its music begins with a shattering fanfare from the trumpets and horns. The remainder of the first movement’s slow introduction presents a variety of musical characters: trembling and sweeping strings, a soaring and tumbling solo flute, more halting brass. The dramatic Sturm und Drang opening gives way to regular, discrete musical ideas that fit into fairly neat four-square boxes. At first, these phrases sound like an Alpine dance built on melodies similar to the brass fanfare, part of a largely conventional first-movement (sonata) form. The first section includes the movement’s primary ideas (including the Alpine dance), followed by a middle section that crosses wandering paths built from snippets of those ideas. Finally, the movement’s first-section material returns, signaled by a terror-stricken resounding of the opening fanfare that threatens to tear apart the symphony’s fabric.
Numerous critics have described the second and third movements as a pair, respectively conjuring nighttime (“Nachtstück”) and daytime (“Tagstück”). The duality conveys their strikingly dissimilar but complementary characters. Movement two’s triple-time larghetto invokes a certain antiquity one might hear in an opera by G.F. Handel, the stuff of regal courtly maneuvers, or maybe a sentimental evening romanza by W.A. Mozart. Throughout, its tenderly staid first musical theme moves across the orchestra, heard first in the violins, then in the cellos, and finally played by the oboe and horn amid violin decoration. The movement closes with a trombone chorale, recalling the instrument’s ecclesiastical uses from the 18th century and earlier.
Having settled into a nocturnal slow movement, the rousing beginning of movement three’s daytime scherzo is an abrupt change. Its triple-time waltz vacillates between the brusque and the airy, but soon gives way to a contrasting duple-time light trio section before a return of the opening music. This cannot last, and an unconventional second trio (this one in triple-time) intervenes before the opening music has its last say. A fragmented coda closes with evanescent hints of the movement’s musical ideas, though all stop short of closing their thought, an open question answered only by the finale.
The final movement mirrors the first in its roughly similar sonata form. Like in the first movement, dance-like music emerges after a blustery opening; this time the strings carry on lightly before booming brass interrupt—a country affair interrupted by a militaristic band. Some critics have maligned the movement for its lack of Beethovenian profundity, but others have seen it as a self-assured final dance (“Kehraus”), not searching for gravity or a weighty culmination. Unlike the first movement’s terrifying fanfare, the return of opening music in the final movement is called in by a flute’s cadenza filigree. The movement and the symphony end as they began, with emphatic insistence, as the whole ensemble joins together with decisive alacrity. The entirety of the symphony thus comprises something of a container with outer movements, providing the scaffolding for the inner movements’ duality.
Throughout, the symphony leaps between characters, sometimes jarringly. Its heterogeneous nature encapsulates everything from folk-like music to popular marches demarcated by a fleeting triangle. Its Beethovenian drama throws Schubertian lyricism and Mendelssohnian elfin lightness into relief against transitory Baroque momentum. The periodic recall of these musical styles generates a kind of intra-musical memory bank that resembles an artist’s mosaic, in which an artist distributes tiles of like color to create a larger image. Schumann was well-prepared to deploy this kind of world-encapsulating variety, having practiced it in his 1830s piano character pieces as a musico-literary send-up of early Romantic novels, reflecting notions that the novel reflects life. If we seek some innovative impulse in the symphony, it might be that Schumann felt beholden to none of his symphonic predecessors while at once building on their precedents, as classical forms are present but ever fading. Schumann thus compels us as listeners to ask, “What is here?” rather than “How is this done?” Each listener will have a different answer, but, considering the circumstances under which Symphony No. 1 was composed, perhaps “what is here” is the many facets of life itself, bumping into one another and changing shape, as we turn the kaleidoscope for a new view.
—Jacques Dupuis