The Schumanns: Clara and Robert

Growing up in the musically fertile city of Leipzig, Clara Wieck—the future Clara Schumann (1819-1896)—blazed through a rigorous curriculum of piano, composition and ear training devised by her father. Clara made her public debut at age nine, the same year an 18-year-old law student with musical inclinations, Robert Schumann, moved into the Wieck household to take intensive piano lessons. His piano career fizzled out after a hand injury, but 11 years after he was first enchanted by Clara’s talents (and after overcoming a bitter and protracted legal battle with her father), the struggling composer and journal editor, Robert, was able to marry the budding superstar pianist, Clara.

Clara found a way to keep up a concert career while raising children and caretaking her mentally ill husband, but she never resumed the pace of composing that peaked during her teenage years. Though small in quantity, the works from her married years are superb in quality, a sign of the high level of musical discourse and mutual respect in the Schumann family. The Piano Trio in G Minor from 1846 was the first of only two works of chamber music she ever completed, but a lifetime of playing chamber music made her an expert from the start. She had the benefit of close contact in Leipzig with Felix Mendelssohn, a champion of Baroque and Classical styles who tended the flames of 18th-century counterpoint and clarity when few others cared to do so, including an effort to revive trios for violin, cello and piano that had fallen out of fashion after the time of Beethoven. Clara also joined her husband in a deep study of Bach in the period right before she composed the trio, and her skill in contrapuntal layering helped her devise chamber music textures that allow all three instruments to shine.

After a well-argued first movement in the traditional sonata-allegro form, the Scherzo comes second, making great fun out of its hiccupping rhythmic pattern known as the “Scotch snap.” The Andante third movement is especially gorgeous and tuneful, pointing to her skills as a songwriter that were every bit the match of Robert’s. Brief bursts of fugal counterpoint in the Allegretto finale shows how well Schumann married the intellectual and emotional tools at her disposal to craft a deeply affecting work.

Program Notes by Aaron Grad
© 2023 Aaron Grad.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856), amid a lifelong struggle to maintain his mental health, reached a particularly low point in 1844, when he experienced debilitating symptoms of insomnia, phobias, exhaustion, paranoia and auditory hallucinations. As he emerged, he found that the flow of music that had once come so naturally could no longer be taken for granted. He later wrote in a diary, “I used to compose almost all of my shorter pieces in the heat of inspiration. … Only from the year 1845 onwards, when I started to work out everything in my head, did a completely new manner of composing begin to develop.”

Schumann was back in peak form by 1847, when he composed two piano trios that demonstrated the renewed rigor and cohesion of his craft. One key was his embrace of counterpoint, inspired by a deep study of the music of J. S. Bach. A prime example comes at the start of the Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor; instead of placing the violin’s theme over a subservient accompaniment, the piano’s left hand contributes an equally important bass line, and the cello fills in the middle range with its own counter-line. Still, this new approach did not neutralize that poetic aspect of Schumann, the quality that fueled his hundreds of songs and instrumental miniatures. One particularly sublime moment comes in the first movement’s development section, when the strings play delicate strands of melody near the bridge, creating a quiet, glassy sound.

Another source of inspiration for Schumann was the piano trio in the same key composed eight years earlier by his friend Felix Mendelssohn. Schumann’s lively second movement dances with a sturdier gait than Mendelssohn’s tiptoeing Scherzo, but each serves as a joyful diversion within an otherwise profound trio.

Yet one more undeniable influence on Schumann was his wife, Clara, the piano virtuoso who wrote her own splendid Piano Trio in G Minor a year before Robert took up the genre. The third movement, to be played “Slowly, with intimate feeling,” attests to the sensitive and openhearted artistry that Schumann explored within one of music’s sweetest partnerships.

The finale’s tempo marking is “With fire,” and it only burns hotter as the closing coda gradually accelerates. The careful interweaving of contrapuntal voices, a hallmark of this trio from its first notes, continues all the way to the final cadence.

Program Notes by Aaron Grad
© 2023 Aaron Grad.