Robert Schumann, along with most Romantic composers, faced the vexing challenge of how to write a symphony after Beethoven. The approach some adopted was to retreat to less imposing forms and not try to innovate. Progressive composers such as Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt opted for programmatic pieces. They no longer wrote a traditional Symphony No. 1, but rather the Symphonie fantastique and A Faust Symphony.
In the longest review he ever wrote, Schumann highly praised Berlioz’s Fantastique (although he found the story silly and very French) and yet was not inclined to follow the same path. Only the title of Schumann’s First Symphony, “Spring,” has his authority (and that was just at an early stage). Rather than pursuing musical narratives in his orchestral music, Schumann inclined toward the aesthetic Beethoven famously proclaimed in his “Pastoral” Symphony: “more an expression of feeling than painting.”
With a few exceptions, Schumann despaired about the state of the symphony and, as a formidable music critic, made his views known. The exceptions he cited are telling. He felt that Schubert offered a remarkable model in his “Great” C-Major Symphony, written in 1825, less than a year after Beethoven’s Ninth. Yet that work was unknown for more than a decade after Schubert’s death in 1828, languishing in the house of his older brother. Schumann was amazed when he learned of its existence while visiting Vienna, and arranged for the first performance with Felix Mendelssohn conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in March 1839.
Throughout his career, Schumann would become intensely preoccupied with writing certain kinds of music and concentrate, sometimes for years at a time, on little else. Piano compositions dominated the 1830s and account for all of his first 23 published opuses. The year 1840, when he married the young pianist and composer Clara Wieck, was his “Year of Song”; 1841 was the symphonic year; 1842 he devoted to chamber works; and 1848–1849 primarily to dramatic music.
Although Schumann tentatively tried his hand at symphonies before 1841, he increasingly felt the need, as he approached age 30, to expand the scope of his musical palette. He wrote to a friend: “I often feel tempted to crush my piano; it is too narrow for my thoughts. I really have very little practice in orchestral music now; still I hope to master it.” Schumann set about acquiring skills he felt he lacked, both in orchestration and constructing large-scale forms.
Schumann’s discovery of Schubert’s C-Major Symphony was perhaps the principal impetus for him to focus more diligently on orchestral projects. After hearing the premiere he wrote to Clara, “I was totally happy and wished only that you should be my wife and that I also could write such symphonies.” She crucially encouraged her fiancé’s symphonic aspirations, telling him, “Your imagination and your spirit are too great for the weak piano.”
Schumann began the 1841 symphonic year by sketching his First Symphony in B-flat Major, Op. 38, and then started a piece that at various times he called a “Symphonette,” “Suite,” and Second Symphony, but which was eventually published as Overture, Scherzo, and Finale, Op. 52. In May, he began composing his Symphony in D Minor, Op. 120, best known in its revised version as the Fourth Symphony, which we hear on this concert. Schumann presented the score to Clara on her 22nd birthday in September.
Mendelssohn conducted the very successful premiere of the First Symphony in March 1841 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. The new D-Minor Symphony, billed as No. 2 and paired with the Overture, Scherzo, and Finale, fared less well on a concert in December with the same orchestra, this time led by its concertmaster, Ferdinand David. Schumann recounted that the two works “did not receive such hearty approval as the First Symphony. Perhaps it was too much at once, and then Mendelssohn was missing as conductor. But it does not matter, for I know that these pieces are in no way inferior to the First, and they will succeed to a splendid effect sooner or later.” But Schumann soured on the D-Minor Symphony, withdrew it from circulation, and only returned to it a decade later to make extensive revisions. He thickened the orchestration as well as modifying some of the transitions and motivic work. He conducted the revised symphony with great success in Düsseldorf, where he was music director, in March 1853.
From the start of the project, Schumann devised an unusually free design of thematically related sections. He and Clara repeatedly refer to the symphony as being in one movement, although the principal sections map onto a more traditional four-movement design, and that is the way many commentators describe the work. Perhaps with Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy” for piano in mind, Schumann at one time called the work a “Symphonic Fantasy for Large Orchestra,” but his publishers labeled it Symphony No. 4 and gave it a high opus number upon its release in 1853.
After a loud chord for the full orchestra (Ziemlich langsam or “Fairly slowly”), the symphony opens with a mysteriously languid theme played softly by strings and bassoons that will generate others to follow and return later. It is sometimes referred to as the “Clara theme” because it derives from an early piano piece of hers, the Romance variée, Op. 3, that Schumann and Brahms referenced in other compositions as well. Supporting the idea that the piece is all one movement, there are effective transitions between the parts, the introduction leading to a fast section combining energy and soaring lyricism (Lebhaft or “Lively”).
There directly follows a Romanze, in the place of a second movement, that opens with a plaintive solo oboe and cello over a pizzicato accompaniment in the strings and leading to a theme, now in a major key, derived from the opening “Clara” one. This section next features a florid violin solo that will return in the trio section of the following Scherzo (Lebhaft). Here the “Clara theme” is presented inverted; that is, the melody is played upside down. There is a long and impressive transition (Langsam), featuring a fanfare gesture heard earlier in the symphony, to the Lebhaft finale. Now the previous mysterious, melancholy, and minor-key moods turn major and triumphant, eventually bringing the work to brilliant conclusion with a presto coda.
“Grant Them Eternal Rest.” The solemn words that open the Mass for the Dead plead for enduring peace, but as the 35-year-old Mozart composed his miraculous Requiem in the fall of 1791, he experienced no such comfort. A relentless work schedule, declining health, and dark moods clouded much of the last months of his life.
When Mozart received a mysterious request to compose a Requiem during the summer, two ambitious operas were in the offing. He was already composing The Magic Flute, which he had to interrupt when he got a prestigious commission to write a serious opera, La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus), for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia. Mozart composed that work feverishly in August, travelling to Prague at the end of the month to conduct its premiere on September 6. He then returned to Vienna to finish The Magic Flute, writing two additional numbers just before conducting its triumphant premiere on September 30. Within weeks, he composed his great Clarinet Concerto and a small cantata to celebrate the opening of a temple of his Masonic lodge, New Crowned Hope (Zur Neugekrönten Hoffnung), in Vienna.
At some point in September, Mozart began serious work on the Requiem, but legend has it (and more about other legends later) that when his wife, Constanze, returned from a rest cure at a spa in Baden she was distressed to see how exhausted he was and how obsessed he had become in particular with the Requiem, which she allegedly took away from him. Mozart nonetheless returned to its composition somewhat later, and worked on the piece until his death on December 5.
The well-known movie Amadeus fictitiously has Mozart on his deathbed dictating the Requiem to his rival Antonio Salieri, who was long rumored to have poisoned him. Although there was no such final meeting between the two composers (or any murder), Mozart did reportedly gather Constanze and various colleagues around him to sing through parts of the Requiem and instructed his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr on how to finish the piece. The haunting opening of the Requiem, the only part completed by Mozart, may have been performed at his funeral a week later.
Constanze enlisted a series of Mozart’s students to finish the Requiem; she asked Joseph Eybler, who did only minimal work, as did two others who orchestrated some incomplete sections. Most of the task of completion fell to the 25-year-old Süssmayr, thus earning him some limited fame as well as some infamy. Over the course of the 19th century, Mozart’s Requiem became the most famous musical setting of the Mass for the Dead, and was sung at memorial services for Haydn, Beethoven, Weber, Chopin, and other celebrated musicians, as well as at funerals of public figures such as Napoleon.
It is hardly surprising that so many legends surround the work. The idea of someone of Mozart’s gifts, just age 35, writing what he apparently came to believe was his own musical memorial was immediately appealing to contemporaries and even more so to later Romantics. Soon after Mozart’s death, a newspaper in his hometown of Salzburg reported that he composed the piece “often with tears in his eyes, constantly saying: I fear that I am writing a Requiem for myself.”
There are numerous uncertainties about the Requiem, most importantly about who actually composed much of the music. The manuscript shows that Mozart completed only the opening Introit, as well as most of the following Kyrie. The next sections to the opening of the Lacrimosa were drafted by Mozart, but not finished. For the final sections no authentic materials survive.
The mysteries about the piece begin with the circumstances of its genesis. A legend emerged that a “grey messenger” appeared to Mozart with the anonymous request for him to write a Requiem and that he should not ask who was initiating the commission. In fact, it came from one Count Franz von Walsegg, who hired noted composers to write pieces that he would then pass off as his own. (It is not entirely clear that his intent was fraudulent—he seems to have enjoyed having invited audiences guess who the composer actually was.) In any case, Mozart was given half the handsome fee in advance and, although pressed with his opera projects, was hardly in the financial position to refuse the lucrative offer.
Mozart had recently received an appointment as assistant music director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral (Vienna’s most prominent), which meant that composing sacred music would henceforth play a larger role in his career. Although he had written a large amount of religious music during his early years in Salzburg, this activity dropped off after he moved to Vienna in 1781. His greatest sacred work, the Mass in C Minor, K. 427, had remained unfinished, and such, of course, would be the fate of the Requiem as well. The masterly late music for the Requiem encompasses Mozart’s astounding range of styles, beginning with the pleading expressiveness of the Introit even before the first words are sung. The contrapuntal virtuosity of the double fugue in the Kyrie gives evidence of his increasing interest in the music of Bach and Handel. Mozart the keen dramatist is also present—the Magic Flute character of Sarastro may come to mind with the bass solo of the Tuba mirum.
After Süssmayr finished the piece, he wrote out a new score so as to avoid suspicion of its multiple composers; he forged Mozart’s signature and dated the manuscript 1792. The Requiem was then dispatched to Count Walsegg who in turn copied it all out again in his own hand and wrote “Requiem composta del Conte Walsegg” at the top. He conducted the work on December 14, 1793, at a Mass in memory of his wife, who had died two years earlier at age 20.
After the opening entirely by Mozart, there follow parts for which he provided most of the music but that required fleshing out of the orchestration. For the last movements—the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei, and concluding communion—there is nothing in Mozart’s autograph manuscript. Süssmayr asserted in a letter written in 1800 that he wrote this music himself (“ganz neu von mir verfertigt”—“wholly composed by me”). The claim has aroused considerable debate. In the early 1960s, a sheet of Mozart’s sketches for a projected fugal end to the Lacrimosa was found, and there has long been speculation that other such sketches were available to Süssmayr, as well as whatever Mozart may have told him while writing the piece.
The general consensus is that the music for the missing parts of the Requiem is at a much higher level than Süssmayr’s other sacred music and therefore must have been based on authentic Mozart materials. Thus when something awkward or less satisfactory appears in the score, poor Süssmayr is blamed, putting him in the unenviable situation of getting little credit and a good deal of blame. In any case, the music that opens the Requiem returns for the final communion, thus ensuring a genuine Mozartean frame to the work.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
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