Bach, whose revered surname is encoded in the cipher that forms the initial fanfare and its variation in the second movement.Īctually, professional musicians and musicologists find this symphony to be chock-full of ciphers, coded messages, and micro-quotations from earlier works by Bach, Schubert, Mozart, and Schumann himself. But while that section may reference Schumann’s personal struggles, it also pays tribute to Schumann’s musical ancestors, all the way back to J.S. Eventually a dark, melancholy mood shrouds the third movement, an adagio. Composed mainly in the optimistic key of C Major, its positive sound seems to affirm individual action in the face of life’s challenges, beginning with a simple fanfare that slowly and surely builds energy. But in listening to it, what we hear most is not suffering, but striving not illness, but strength and even heroism. 2 to his publisher, Schumann worried that his illness might be evident in the music.
Nine year old piano prodigy full#
Finally, he finished the score for full orchestra on October 19, 1846, and published it the following year. His joints ached, his head throbbed, but he persevered. But the slower work of refining and orchestrating, which began the following February, was interrupted by bouts of depression, dementia, and tinnitus-a ringing in the ears that plunged his musical imagination into shadow, like an eclipse. In little more than two weeks he had completed a draft score for piano. 2 in early December of 1845 in a burst of inspiration.
Schumann began sketching his Symphony No. 3 in the catalogue his second effort, published posthumously, became No. (He eventually completed a fourth symphony, No. 2 his third complete work in symphonic form. He completed another that same year but withheld it from publication, making his Symphony No. With Clara’s encouragement and sound musical judgment, Schumann published his first symphony in 1841, the year after they married. It was Clara who persuaded him to look beyond the keyboard to full orchestra, and to the symphony as a form. When a hand injury foreclosed that option, he turned to piano composition: more songs and jewel-like piano pieces. (One wonders whether his truncated legal studies helped him win her hand.) In the intervening years, Schumann had begun to lay the foundation for his own career as a virtuoso pianist. He turned to one of the most celebrated German piano teachers of the day, Friedrich Wieck, for intensive piano studies.įriedrich Wieck’s daughter Clara was a nine-year-old piano prodigy when Schumann first met her by the time he prevailed over her father’s personal and legal objections to marry her, she was 21. Inspired by Schubert’s example as well as the poems of Jean Paul Richter, Schumann began exploring song composition-to the detriment of his law studies. After customary studies at the Zwickau Gymnasium and facing intense family pressure, he matriculated at the University of Leipzig to study law. But music continued to preoccupy him the year before his enrollment at Leipzig he encountered another fantastically gifted young composer named Franz Schubert, who was thirteen years his senior. Schumann’s life was a dark struggle, yet in his music we sense light.īorn in the Saxon town of Zwickau (now Germany), Schumann began his musical studies at age six. His illness was so severe that he periodically needed hospitalization, yet he was a devoted husband, a productive composer, and a champion of up-and- coming composers. Throughout his adult life, Schumann experienced bouts of crippling depression, yet he managed to breathe the most positive elements of Romanticism into his music.
1, and the predominant sense of life and affirmation in both these symphonies tells us much about their composer. But “Spring” is actually the nickname for his Symphony No.
Listening to the sunlit music of Robert Schumann’s second symphony, one could easily imagine naming it for the spring season. Sostenuto assai – Allegro ma non troppo.
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