{ program notes
This morning, yes, this morning,
I kneel down on the green grass— And I notice your presence. Flowers, that speak to me in silence. The message of love and understanding has indeed come.”
With mutes deadening the sound of their strings, the musicians open with a poignant four-note motive drooping downward. This expression of grief gradually becomes more elaborate and passionate as the instruments collide against each other. Ultimately, there is a crisis of pain, and the music is reduced to the unyielding drone of the double bass while above, the others offer only choked cries. Five minutes before the end, even this dissolves into silence. Then the music is miraculously reborn and becomes more consonant and melodic, reaching outward and upward.
Instrumentation: Six violins, three violas, three cellos, three basses.
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major,“ Rhenish”
Robert Schumann
Born in Zwickau, Germany, June 8, 1810; died in Endenich, near Bonn, Germany, July 29, 1856
On September 2, 1850, Robert and Clara Schumann, full of optimism, arrived in the city of Düsseldorf on the Rhine River. Through the kindness of their friend Ferdinand Hiller, Robert had been appointed to succeed him as municipal music director of Düsseldorf, with responsibilities that included directing a 40-member orchestra and a 120-voice chorus.
The first months in the Rhineland were like a second honeymoon. Mental instability had plagued the composer throughout the 1840s, yet in 1850 and 1851, he experienced a prolonged creative high. Works poured from his pen: in October 1850, his Cello Concerto and between November and December, the“ Rhenish” Symphony.( Though numbered as his Third, this was actually Schumann’ s last symphony to be completed.)
Meanwhile, his public duties faltered. Schumann was an artist who, while creating, completely withdrew from the world. Tongue-tied on the podium, he made his musicians rehearse passages over and over without ever giving them a clue about what he wanted. Not surprisingly, the city fathers soon lost patience with a leader who could not lead, and in October 1852, they asked for his resignation. Schumann managed to hold on for another year, but he fell apart on the podium the next fall, and a complete mental breakdown soon followed. On February 20, 1854, he attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge into the icy waters of the Rhine. Rescued by fishermen, he died two and a half years later in an asylum near Bonn.
The waters of the Rhine sparkled when Schumann wrote his Third Symphony, full of the joy of living.
But the waters of the Rhine sparkled when the composer wrote his Third Symphony, full of the joy of living. The expansive first theme of the sonata-form first movement is like an open-armed embrace of the castle-studded Rhineland, home of Germany’ s proudest legends and traditions. Schumann intensifies the theme’ s grandeur by syncopating its beats across the opening measures so that what we first hear sounds as though the tempo— marked Lebhaft or“ Lively”— is twice as slow as it actually is. A gentle second theme in the woodwinds flows like the river itself. In his lengthy development section, Schumann tantalizes us by withholding the return to the home key with numerous false starts of the principal theme that keep landing in the wrong key.
The middle two movements are light in tone. Movement two is marked as a scherzo, but has the character of a rather heavy-footed ländler folk dance, featuring the warm glow of the four horns.
The third movement is a moderatetempo intermezzo, a movement type that Schumann invented and Brahms later adopted. It has the loose, improvisatory feeling of Schumann’ s piano music.
The slow fourth movement in E-flat minor is the work’ s most remarkable. In 1850, the Schumanns traveled to Cologne Cathedral to witness the installation of a new cardinal. Protestant himself, Schumann was overwhelmed by the grandeur of the cathedral and the ceremony, and this is his musical portrait of the occasion. For the first time in the work, the trombones, partnered by horns, enter with a stately rising theme. With this subject Schumann builds his own mighty cathedral in the contrapuntal manner of his idol Bach. Toward the end, two mighty brass fanfares are softly echoed by strings and winds— surely a memory of the echoing sounds in the cathedral’ s vast spaces.
After all this splendor, the brief, lively finale seems a little anti-climatic. But Donald Francis Tovey has proposed an interesting solution: that the fourth and fifth movements are really a two-part finale, with this music“ as the natural … reaction from the awe inspired by the Cathedral.” Indeed, after a brass fanfare, Schumann briefly reprises his contrapuntal cathedral music, recalling a glorious memory.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings.
Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major
Johannes Brahms
Born in Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833; died in Vienna, Austria, April 13, 1897
In April 1878, Johannes Brahms decided to treat himself to a vacation in Italy. He fell in love with this land of sunshine, good living and even greater art, and would return there eight more times. This rich multi-sensory stimulation inspired a new work, which would eventually become his Second Piano Concerto. In July 1881, he announced the Concerto’ s birth in a series of teasing letters to several friends. To his
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