Schumann and Paganini (1)

Paganini's ultra-virtuoso 24 Caprices, Op.1 were published in 1820 - remarkably, the only works he ever published. They've exerted a strong gravitational pull on violinists ever since. A similar pull has also been exerted on composers, ranging from Brahms to Blacher, Lutosławski to Lloyd Webber and Rachmaninov to Ruders - though these have tended to focus on only one of the Caprices, namely the famous 24th Caprice. The early Romantics cast their net a little wider. Keeping with the subject of recent posts, I want to look at an early, underplayed opus by Robert Schumann.

Anyone expecting the colour and high-wire dazzle of Liszt's arrangements of Paganini might be rather disappointed if they are hoping to find the same qualities in Schumann's Six Studies on Caprices of Paganini, Op.3. In comparison with Liszt, Schumann's arrangements sound modest. Being Robert, he was more keen to bring out the poetry of Paganini's pieces, though his arrangements don't deny the importance of virtuosity in the originals. Some at the time - and others since - have seen only shallow flashiness in Paganini's Caprices. Not Schumann though.

Schumann heard Paganini performing on Easter Sunday 1830 and his socks were well and truly knocked off.  A couple of years later, aged 22, came these six studies. 

The first study is based on Paganini's 5th Caprice. It begins and ends with swirling scales and arpeggios but in between comes a fine scurry that, close transcription as it is, shows me that Schumann's developing style drew more on Paganini's influence than I'd suspected, especially in the composer's dizzying allegros. Schumann adds some octave doubling.

The second study - based on Paganini's 9th Caprice, usually known as La chasse, evoking (as it does) flutes and hunting horns - is well known in Liszt's hands. Liszt's large hands sent the tune echoing magically across the keyboard. In Robert's smaller hands, La chasse becomes charming and poetic. He adds some octave doubling and a left-hand accompaniment.

Poetry is a particularly marked feature of the third study, based on Pagagini's 11th Caprice. Schumann cuts  the original down to size and then fills it with intimate feeling. 

The fourth study is based on Paganini's 13th Caprice nicknamed as The Devil's Laughter. You won't miss the laughter in the outer sections and the diabolical eruption at the movement's heart (though Paganini's original sounds far more devilish). There is fair a modicum of attractive piano colour in this study.

Though Robert Schumann isn't a sound painter with incipient Fauvist tendencies, his colouring of the opening of the fifth study, based on the 19th Caprice, is magical. This is a highly capricious number.

So far, these have been arrangements. The final study, however, takes Paganini's sweeping 16th Caprice and overlays it with a confident original tune - a theme with a rather Chopin-like heroic character.

Schumann was to return to the Paganini Caprices in his Op.10, but they will do for another day.

111 Reasons to love Schumann

I love the music of Schumann. I love early Schumann, middle-period Schumann and, yes,  late Schumann. 

The 3 Phantasiestücke, Op.111 are late Schumann. They are truly wonderful pieces, giving the lie (I believe) to the clapped-out old assertion that the composer's mental state sucked the freshness out of his late music. 

The first Fantasy Piece in C minor ('Sehr rasch, mit leidenschaftlichem Vortrag') is one of the most uncanny of all musical storm pieces, full of flashes of lightning and greats swirls of soaking rain. Surely it can be heard no other way? A glorious melody surges through all this dramatic agitation. 

The second Fantasy Piece ('Ziemlich langsam') is the calm after the storm (well, in its outer sections at least). It's in an introspective-sounding A flat major and has a gentle intimacy and a slight air of wistfulness which, added to the hesitancy of its phrases, give it a particularly tender feel. It has a melody of great beauty. The number's middle section is more turbulent - passionate and capricious - but the beauty and restfulness of the opening returns and soothe away this. You would have to have a heart of stone not to hear the warmth of this music. 

The third Fantasy Piece ('Kräftig und sehr markiert') returns us to C minor, this time for one of the composer's extrovert numbers. The secondary section, though capricious, is dreamier. Its material provides the basis for the coda, after we've again been treated to the catchy main tune. 

I find it inexplicable that anyone could find these wonderful pieces cold and laboured. Some people, however, do feel like that about them. You must make your own minds up, though I'd much prefer it if you ended up agreeing with me!

Siren Songs

You may already know and love Robert Schumann's dramatic song Waldesgespräch ('Conversation in the Woods') from the Eichendorff Liederkreis, Op.39, telling of a woodland encounter between a huntsman and a pale but beautiful woman. We hear from the huntsman first. A confident rhythm, a bright major key and horn-imitations in the piano part establish his presence. He offers to lead the lost bride home. Then the key suddenly changes to that of the mediant (the third note of the tonic scale) and the masculine rhythms in the piano part liquify into harp-like mystery. The woman is speaking, and she quietly warns the man to flee. The key and the music swing back and the man continues as before until, to suddenly declamatory phrases, the huntsman realises (in terror) who the beautiful woman is - the witch Loreley. The key stays the same (as we aren't in the age of Nielsen's 'extended tonality' yet!) but the harp-like music returns again and Loreley quietly tells the man he will never leaves the woods. (You can read Eichendorff's poem here).

Loreley was rather out of her usual habitat there. She is to be more usually found seated on a rock on the Rhine, combing her hair and singing, luring sailors to the deaths in the hope of gaining revenge on an unfaithful lover.

Such a scene inspired a famous poem by Heine which Robert's wife Clara was to set to music in Die Lorelei - a highly dramatic minor-key song with an agitated accompaniment that generates both tension and excitement as the inevitable denouement approaches. (The poem can be read here). It's a fine song which, intriguingly, sounds more like Schubert than it does her husband. You may be surprised to hear, given its quality, that Clara's songs was never heard until 1992. Much of her music lay buried in that way.

Robert Schumann was the sort of songwriter who set out to add lustre to already-lustrous poetry. Not always though. His other, hardly-ever-heard Loreley-based song, Loreley, Op.53/2, sets a poem by Wilhelmine Lorenz which most certainly isn't great poetry. (Please have a read of it yourself here). That said, I've long had a soft spot for this short, lyrical song with its gentle, watery accompaniment and tune of radiant simplicity. If you are unfamiliar with it I urge you to give it a try. (Just don't listen to it whilst sailing down the Rhine.)

The Waltz VI: Love-Song Waltzes

As the Strauss Family reached its peak of fame in the 1860s, Johannes Brahms took to writing waltzes. Brahms adored the music of Johann Strauss II, famously writing "unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms" over a quotation of the theme from The Blue Danube. His own waltzes, however, don't owe very much to the Strauss Family, (like Ravel) following much more the example of Schubert. Yes, young Franz's Valses nobles and Valses sentimentales are the obvious progenitors of Brahms's Waltzes, Op.39 (Nos.9-16 here), though the spirit of Schumann and his inward-looking piano cycles are also discernible. 

These 16 short pieces (all in simple binary form) were originally composed as four-hand duets but the composer subsequently arranged them twice for solo piano - one set for "clever hands" and the other "perhaps for more beautiful hands", as he put it so charmingly. I think they are truly wonderful. I'd go so far as to say that they are my favourite waltzes of all, a collection of magical miniatures, so varied in character and mood as to make the continuous hearing of the whole set a joy from start to finish. They are 'popular' in style yet also full of intimate feeling and deep craftsmanship. 

One thing that has always puzzled me is the relationship between the penultimate waltz from the set, No.15, and "Brahms's Lullaby" - his world-famous Op.49/4 song Wiegenlied: Guten Abend, gute Nacht. Op.39/15 is also called 'Wiegenlied' and shares quite a bit of its material with the song  that so many mothers have sung to their babies over the last 150 years, though there are marked differences of direction taken by each piece once we've passed the opening phrase. Which one was based on the other? Or, to put it another way, which came first? Seemingly, the songs were written in 1867-8 while the piano waltz was composed by 1865, which seems to make the piano piece the ur-lullaby (as it were). Fascinating! (OK, probably not). 

Just after writing the Waltzes, Op.39 Brahms began writing his Liebeslieder Waltzes, Op.52 for vocal quartet and piano (four-hands), following them (given their great success with the public) in the mid 1870s with the Neue Liebeslieder Walzer, Op.65. These love-songs in waltz form (all but one based on frivolous, amorous poetry) are another of the treasures of Brahms's art. The Op.52 ones have always been closer to my heart than their successors, full of delightful things as the second round of songs are. They bear no relationship (beyond their title) to the Liebeslieder Waltz, Op.114 of Johann Strauss II. If you were wondering.

Alas, Brahms's friend and mentor Robert Schumann was more the sort of composer to slip into the spirit of a waltz during the course of a piece rather than doing a Schubert, Chopin or Brahms and explicitly writing waltzes. The nearest he came to writing a collection of waltzes was his fanciful Papillons, Op.2 - one of the pieces which seems to me to show the direct influence of Schubert's waltzes on Schumann's style. Most of the thirteen movements of Papillons take waltz form (with a couple of polonaises chucked in for good measure) and the final movement sees phrases from the opening waltz alternating poetically with phrases from the old Grossvaterlied (which Schumann associates with philistinism). 

There is said to be a very direct link between Schubert's waltzes and Schumann's masterpiece, Carnaval, Op.9. It's claimed that the opening Préambule makes reference to Schubert's Trauerwalzer, D365/2. I've listened a few times now to both pieces and I can't say that I can hear any connection whatsoever between the two. Am I missing something? There are, regardless, two explicit waltzes in Carnaval - the first of which bears a Schubertian name, Valse noble. The second is the Valse allemande. I love them both. 

Brahms's friend Antonin Dvorak, a master at translating popular dances into popular classical music, wrote quite a few waltzes. I made the mistake of listening to his own set of Waltzes, Op.54 straight after listening to the Brahms Op.39 set. The Brahms pieces are so subtle that the open brilliance of Dvorak's waltzes then came as a shock. Listening to them again on their own terms - and they were designed to be something different from either Chopin or Brahms - reveals their own genius, marrying as they do Slavonic melodies with the demands of the Austro-German waltz. They are valses brillantes, designed to delight audiences (as his wonderful Slavonic Dances had already delighted audiences. There are all those little shift of mode and mood that you expect from the composer and tunes galore. I was new to these ingenious piano pieces, but the orchestral Prague Waltzes, composed in the immediate wake of the Op.54 pieces, were familiar to me. They are a likeable mixture of Strauss Family-style populism and Dvorak-style Slavonic melodic traits. 

The waltz was spreading its wings and heading east.

Schumann's 'Humoreske'

Robert Schumann's Humoreske, Op.20 is a fantastic work in both senses of the word. It swings from section to section and from mood to mood and is as much a carnival as the famous Schumann piano piece which bears that name. 

The first section has a palindromic structure, beginning and ending with a beautiful melody set amidst a golden drizzle of figuration. The fast, teasing second idea encloses an even faster third idea - both modulating enjoyably, though the central passage's modulations are particularly magical (and exciting).

The second movement ('Hastig') has a mystery at its heart - a hidden melody that may be glimpsed by the ear in a strange variation of the shimmering main theme (a dazzling duet between the hands). There's an out-of-phase passage that climaxes sonorously (a stellar moment) and a glittering transition (another star moment) that leads to a march. The ending, however, is unexpectedly tender and suggestive.

The third movement ('Einfach und zart') has as its lead section a lyrical passage which may be called (after Mendelssohn) a 'song without words'. It's a favourite of mine. Of course Schumann's love of contrast means the spell must be broken and an extraordinary torrent bursts forth - an exultation of bells, as I hear it. The song returns though.

What does Robert do next? He re-imagines this movement's structure with fresh material. Significantly marked 'Innig' (inward), his new melody is also a beauty - and another favourite of mine. The rushing interruption this time is startling in its brevity (a gush of enthusiasm from Schumann to his Clara?) and the song resumes, going rich new places in the process - especially in the coda.

Enthusiasm erupts again in the next section - a virtuoso tour-de-force culminating in a veritable whirlwind. Exciting!

A swaggering march barges in, like a bull-fighter (or is its Spanish feel just in my imagination?). This enjoyable section disappeared back into its dressing room and leaves the arena to...

...love! This final section ('Zum Beschluss') always strikes me, for all its mellowness and beauty, as having that quality Brahms-lovers describe as "autumnal" - a wistful quality. Whatever, it's wonderful! Do I feel that the work's surprising coda is out of keeping? No, because this is a Humoreske!

Flutes flying magically across the years

Part piano solo, part piano concerto, part choral work, part fantasy, part set of variations - yes Beethoven's Choral Fantasia in C, Op.80 is an odd hybrid. Some critics have tried hard not to like this piece but I've long had a soft spot for it. 

The piano's introduction has fantasy in spades, turning generally sombre patterns into an arresting swirl. The orchestra eventually sneaks in and builds up to the announcement of the main theme - on piano. This simple tune is one of my main reasons for having a minor crush on the Choral Fantasia. Does it remind you of anything? It reminds many people of the 'Ode to Joy' theme from the Ninth Symphony. The first variation is led by the flute and has something of Mozart's Magic Flute about it; indeed, several features of this work have a Magic Flute-like quality to them. I feel that kinship even more strongly when the chorus enters towards the end. Is this connection often made? The other early variations are quite simple and charming; however, three later variations are far longer and much less simple. The first of these, a C minor allegro, spreads its wings and glides over often exciting landscapes. The second is a gentle A major adagio which dreams in broad daylight before the third, an F major military march, stirs the music back into action. This is a highpoint in the piece and leads to another passage where the piano fantasizes again, dramatically. After a brief hold-up, the delightful choral variations begin, strong and simple, and grow to a rousing climax that would be surely to meet Sarastro's approval. 

Another favourite work of mine that has passages which seem to be channelling the spirit of The Magic Flute is Schumann's endearing choral cantata for soloists, chorus and orchestra, Requiem für Mignon. This is a Goethe setting and portrays Mignon's funeral where four boys (sung by pairs of sopranos and altos) are consoled by a choir of angels. It opens in C minor with march rhythms. The soloists continue in the minor but their discussion is regularly interrupted by the chorus in the major, singing their solacing song in a manner which shows just how effectively Robert could write in this medium. Charming tunes come and go, including 'Ach! Wie ungern brachten wir ihn her!' for the soloists and also the chorus 'Seht die machtigen Flugel doch an!' (with its rousing horn entries). The most treasurable section, 'Kinder! Kehret ins Leben zuruck', begins with a brief woodwind-accompanied baritone solo and proceeds to a joyous march-like passage for the soloists which wouldn't sound out of place in The Magic Flute itself and is one of Schumann's most magical moments. The cantata ends with a superb chorus, wherein jubilation sings out with a symphonic-style accompaniment. 

Maybe after all this talk of The Magic Flute, a link to a fine passage from that very opera might be in order. Der, welcher wandert diese Strasse voll Beschwerden is the remarkable scene for the Two Armed Men (a tenor and a bass) where Mozart himself looks back to a great predecessor, one J.S. Bach, composing a chorale prelude on the theme of a hymn by Martin Luther. Later in the extract, the two lovers (Tamino and Pamina) then greet each other in phrases of great beauty before, at the end of the clip, undergoing the trials to march-like music and the accompaniment of the magic flute - enchanting music.  

And finally, bouncing forwards again in time (1870) to Liszt's transcription for two pianos of Der, welcher wandert, where I think it's fair to say that the Bachian impulses behind Mozart's masterly section are brought out to the full!

Canons to the left of them, Canons to the right of them

A few years ago, BBC Radio 3 broadcast 'A Bach Christmas', playing all the works of old Sebastian, and having enjoyed a feast of counterpoint I thought I might surprise the family with a little canon based on Bach tunes. They're not really into classical music (to put it mildly), but as I recorded it using the 'Bells' sound on our electric organ, it sounded very festive - like having our own cathedral to ring in the new year. It grabbed their attention for at least a couple of minutes. Yes, that was one wild new year!

I love trying to write canons but, no, I'm not going to share them with you. Instead, I want to try to give a short overview of what canons are.

You'll certainly all know what canons are anyhow (if you don't already know) if I tell you that they're also called 'rounds' (or 'catches') and you may have sung them at school. Popular examples are Frère Jacques, Row, Row, Row Your Boat and Three Blind Mice. 

A round is a piece of music where one voice (or instrument) begins the tune and two or more other voices (or instruments) join it later, singing the same tune, note for note, overlapping the first voice. The result is that different phrases of the tune are sung simultaneously. The result should sound harmonious. 

This definition (my own) of a round can serve just as well as the definition of a canon, as the round is only the simplest form of canon, known as a canon at the unison - that is when the second voice (and then the third voice and the fourth voice, etc) begins the tune on exactly the same note as the first voice. A canon at the octave is very nearly the same thing (and will sound pretty much identical to the listener, especially when a mixed choir is singing), except that the second voice begins...and I think you might guess where I'm going with this one...an octave higher. All my attempts so far have been canons at the unison or octave. 

The first-ever (known) piece of counterpoint was a canon at the unison: Sumer Is Icumen In (Summer is here!), dating from around 1260. Even if you don't read music, comparing the shapes of each of the lines in the score below should give you a good idea of how a canon at the unison looks on the page, and perhaps how it might work in practice:

With Sumer Is Icumen In, it's not very difficult to hear the process in action. Even the accompanying figure (which you can see beginning in the tenor part at the end of printed score) doesn't distract the ear. 

That's not always the case. A well-known later example of a canon at the octave is the eight piece, God grant with grace, in Tudor composer Thomas Tallis's extremely beautiful Nine Psalm Tunes for Archbishop Parker's Psalter, a piece known as Tallis's Canon, or as the hymn Glory to thee, my God, this night. Here the soprano follows four beats behind the tenor and begins an octave higher. The other two voices do their own thing, though occasionally echoing parts of the canon. Whether you listen from 6.10 in this video or 6.07 in this one or 6.08 in this one, can you hear the canon being sung between the tenor and soprano? I'm afraid I just seem unable to hear the piece as anything other than a soprano tune accompanied by three other voices providing harmony. For me, the tenor's tune gets lost in the lines and harmony of his two non-soprano companions. I can see the canon in the score but can't hear it in performance. Possibly if some performances brought out the tenor part out more (got Placido Domingo to sing it maybe!) then I might hear the process of Tallis's canon in action, but I'm not so sure about that. 

You can have canons at any interval - at the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, etc. Pachebel's Canon, if you were wondering, is a canon at the unison, with a ground bass for accompaniment: 

Canons are fun for composers. They are a bit like doing crossword puzzles or playing chess. They take a great deal of ingenuity to pull off. Many composers want us listeners to share their pleasure in the ingenuity of their canons. They want us to hear what they're up to. We listeners can indeed find it highly satisfying to follow the different voices as they imitate each other. However, some composers are far less concerned that the listener hears the canonic process. They might even wish us not to notice the intellectual scaffolding beneath their music. Or they might care only to please themselves, or connoisseurs of scores, or performers. The anonymous composer of Sumer Is Icumen In clearly fell in the first camp, and I suspect Tallis fell in the second camp.

Where does Webern fall with his Dormi Jesu from the 5 Canons on Latin Texts, Op.16? Well, he's not exactly hiding the fact that his pieces are all canons, having chosen that title for the set. This particular tiny little piece for soprano and clarinet, however, is an example of a type of canon that is rather hard for the listener to follow as a canon - canon by inversion. Here any rising interval in the first voice becomes a falling interval in the second voice - an instance of contrary motion. It's easiest heard at the very start of Dormi Jesu, where the first four notes played by the clarinet rise through three intervals and the soprano then enters with four notes falling through the same three intervals, upside down. Thereafter I suspect you will find it harder to follow (as a listener), given the wide leaps in the two lines and the fact that you will probably hear the two parts as being completely different melodies.

Even harder not to hear as two completely different melodies is the retrograde canon, or crab-canon, or cancrizans. Here the second voice imitates the first voice by simultaneously singing/playing the melody backwards. The ear is, I would say, incapable of hearing the second voice's part as a new tune altogether, unrelated to the original tune - except to anyone reading a score. With a crab-canon, the composer is satisfying himself and score-reading scholars, but not his listeners - at least as regards the satisfaction given by following canons. Obviously, the piece can still delight us even if we don't know that there are canons at work. (That really is obvious!) This truly excellent YouTube video gives a very clear demonstration of the cancrizans at work in a movement from Bach's Musical Offering.

And there's more. Stravinsky wrote a deeply expressive Double Canon, where two canons on different themes proceed simultaneously. You can have triple canons, or as many canons going on as you like. The great American-born maverick Conlon Nancarrow had twelve of them going on in his jaw-dropping Study No.37 for player piano! Plus, as the Nancarrow example shows, canons can be played at different speeds. There are prolation canons where the tune is, indeed, played at different speeds in different voices. A beautiful recent example is Arvo Pärt's Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten. where an A minor scale falls repeatedly against itself at various speeds.

Canons have been with us since around 1260 then and continued to flourish for the rest of the Medieval period. They were very popular with the Renaissance and the Baroque. After a very short dip they rose again with the Classical era. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all wrote them. Many were jokes, such as Beethoven's delightful Ta ta ta, lieber Mälzel (the tune of which might well remind you of this). One of Beethoven's most wonderful creations, the quartet Mir ist so wunderbar from the opera Fidelio, is also a canon. YouTube has huge numbers of these fantastic little chips from Beethoven's workshop here. Canons lasted even through the Romantic era, where they tended to become far less strict and were usually accompanied examples, such as this gem from Schumann, his Study No.4 from Op.56. Brahms was their greatest Romantic exponent, using canons in many of his works and writing a fair few stand-alone ones, such as this magical specimen, Einförmig is der Liebe Gram, based on Schubert's Der Leiermann from Die Winterreise. With the coming of the Twentieth Century, canons of the stricter and unaccompanied kind came back with a vengeance. All manner of composers relished them, from Schoenberg (you should enjoy these!) to Stravinsky (see above), from Pärt (also see above) to Ligeti (not yet on YouTube). 

In other words, they've always been loved by composers and are one of the most durable musical forms.  Long may that continue to be so!