- Born September 13, 1819, in Leipzig
- Died May 20, 1896, in Frankfurt
- Composed in 1853
- First CMS performance on April 27, 2014, by violinist Ani Kavafian and pianist Inon Barnatan
- Duration: 9 minutes
The 1850s were a difficult time for the Schumanns. They had moved to Düsseldorf in September of 1850 so that Robert could take up his new position as Director of Music for the city. They received a warm reception and Clara gave a number of well-received solo performances there, but their relationship with the musical institutions of the city quickly soured. According to Clara, the choir he directed was consistently underprepared, and Robert was reportedly a highly ineffectual conductor. His mental and physical health were also in a decline that would result in a suicide attempt and hospitalization in 1854 and ultimately his death in 1856. This left Clara with enormous administrative and financial responsibilities for both her increasingly frail and resentful husband and their large family.
In the fall of 1852, they moved into a spacious new home on Bilker Street. To stay musically fulfilled during this trying period, they would host house concerts and reading sessions with skilled local musicians and friends from further away. They frequently saw the violinist Joseph Joachim, and they had a particularly exciting encounter with the young Johannes Brahms, with whom Clara would maintain a relationship for the rest of her life. This social and living situation led to a particularly productive period for Clara’s work as a composer; in 1853, she wrote 6 songs on texts by Hermann Rollett (Op. 23), variations on a theme written by Robert (Op. 20), three solo piano romances (Op. 21) and a parallel set of romances for violin and piano (Op. 22), which she dedicated to Joachim.
The first of these violin-piano romances opens with a dialogue between the two instruments. The piano asks a question, and the violin answers in the minor key. The piano rebuts in the minor, and the violin turns to something sweeter. All the while, the instruments engage in intricate rhythmic play: sometimes the beat is felt in two, sometimes in three, and sometimes the beats are stretched outside of steady time altogether to accommodate elaborate figuration. The second piece in the set alternates two tunes, one in minor and one in major, but never quite allows one to resolve before diving into the contrasting mode. In the last romance of the group, the piano’s accompanimental arpeggios recall the textures of Felix Mendelssohn’s chamber music, while the violin’s melody captures the instrument’s most vocal qualities.
The Op. 22 Romances were well received when she and Joachim took them on tour in Germany and England, and Joachim later wrote to her that the king of Hannover wanted to hear more of her music. Robert, in one of his more sober diary entries, also expressed a wish that she had more time to write, mourning the musical ideas that were lost because she had to devote energy to caring for their family and for a “husband who is always living in the realm of imagination.” Sadly, these works from 1853 wound up being the last major compositions that Schumann completed and published in her lifetime; she dedicated the rest of her musical life to editing Robert’s music and to a highly successful career as a performer and concert curator.