Programme — chester, Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Op.52, Andante con moto - allegro …

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Op.52

Andante con moto - allegro

Vivo

Allegro molto vivace

Having completed an overture, a scherzo and a finale all, basically, in E major, why did Schumann not add an Adagio in some relevant key such as C sharp minor, parcel them together and present them as a symphony? The fact is that, although the three pieces were originally intended to be part of what would have been his Symphony No.2 in E major, the slow movement did not materialize. Reconciling himself to the fact that it never would, Schumann thought of calling the work “Symphoniette” but, when it was first performed in Leipzig in 1841, settled for “Overture, Scherzo and Finale” instead.

The reason why the Overture, Scherzo and Finale could not become a symphony, or even a sinfonietta, is to be found in the first piece, which really is an overture rather than the first movement of a symphony. The transformation of the material of the slow introduction in the second subject of the Allegro is not unsymphonic, it is true. But the comparative proportions of the short, dramatically articulated development and the long più animato coda would be out of place in the first movement of a romantic symphony.

The Scherzo, which recalls the opening theme of the work in the two Trio sections, would be no less effective in a symphony than it is here. The Finale, on the other hand, relates to the Overture and Scherzo only by virtue of its tonality and its structural scale. So vigorous in the introduction of its main theme in fugal form and so impressive in its broad augmentation of that theme at the end, it is no more than the unambiguous celebration which, after its thorough revision in 1845, Schumann surely intended it to be.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem)

for soprano and baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra

Selig sind die da Leid tragen (Blessed are they that mourn)

Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras (Behold, all flesh is as the grass)

Herr, lehre doch mich (Lord, make me to know)

Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen (How lovely is Thy dwelling place)

Ihr habt nun traurigkeit (Ye now are sorrowful)

Denn wir haben hie (Here on earth)

Selig sind dit Toten (Blessed are the dead)

Among the more interesting projects Schumann had in mind but never developed was a “German Requiem.” Brahms might well have known about it. Certainly, his own German Requiem is intimately connected with Schumann’s death, although it wasn’t until nine years after that event, on the death of his mother in 1865, that he started writing the music for it. His painstaking work on compiling the text, on the other hand, from the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha of the Lutheran Bible, must have started much earlier than that - presumably as the first stage in paying a large-scale tribute to his late friend in a way which would be worthy of him and which he would himself have approved of.

Brahms had been similarly moved by Schumann’s suicide attempt in 1854. The creative result of that was a work which eventually became the turbulent First Piano Concerto in D minor, completed after Schumann’s death and enshrining a memorial to him in the central Adagio. One of the movements discarded in the process was a kind of sarabande, the theme of which Brahms now used as the main theme of the second movement of the German Requiem, Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras. With its Schumann associations and its resemblance to the melody of the chorale, Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, by the seventeenth-century Lutheran composer Georg Neumark, it must have seemed heaven-sent for this particular purpose. The chorale melody is also incorporated in the first movement, Selig sind, and, on the recall of those words, in the last movement too.

So, although Brahms’s work on the score was stimulated by the death of his mother, the German Requiem as first performed in six movements in Bremen Cathedral on Good Friday in 1868 was his long matured tribute to Schumann. It was only after that performance, when it had become clear that something was missing both structurally and spiritually, that Brahms added what is now the fifth movement. Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit is very clearly addressed by the bereaved son to his mother. It is also, in its prophecy of the Resurrection in words taken from St John, the only allusion to specifically Christian doctrine in the whole work.

Brahms was a Christian only in the broadest sense. But for fear of causing offence, he would rater have called this, the longest work he ever wrote, “a human Requiem.” Not for him the wrath of the Dies Iræ and the liturgical imperatives of the Roman Mass for the Dead. The message of the German Requiem, symbolised by its mainly major tonalities rising ever upwards, is one of hope and consolation for the living.

Gerald Larner©

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Piano Concerto No.2 in D minor, Op.40

Allegro appassionato -

Adagio: molto sostenuto -

Finale: presto scherzando

Five weeks before he was to perform his Second Piano Concerto at the Birmingham Festival Mendelssohn confessed that he had written “not a note.” But, of course, when he made his much anticipated appearance in the newly built Town Hall on 5 August 1837, he was able to deliver a concerto as elegantly turned out - from its seriously stylish beginning to its characteristically playful finale - as any of his other compositions.

It is true that the Piano Concerto in D minor is not as inspired as the long considered Violin Concerto he was to complete seven years later and that it is not as fresh as the delightful Piano Concerto in G minor written six years earlier. On the other hand, it is not only more mature than its predecessor but also more romantic. The song-without-words intimacy of the second subject of the first movement and the thoroughly German inwardness of the slow movement - which is a marked advance on the modish poetry of the Andante of the Concerto in G minor - are particularly endearing characteristics of the work. At one point in each of the first two movements, moreover, the soloist treats the lyrical material with gestures so broad as to anticipate the heroic manner of the large-scale concertos of late-romantic composers not yet born.

Although there is no cadenza in either of Mendelssohn’s two piano concertos, the Concerto in D minor offers compensatory opportunities to the soloist in the introduction to the first movement and in the transitional passages which (as in the Violin Concerto and the First Piano Concerto) link the three movements together in an unbroken continuity.

Gerald Larner©