Arabeske in C major, Op.18

“Look Robert,” wrote Clara to her fiancé in April 1839, “couldn’t you just once compose something brilliant, easily understandable, and without inscriptions - a completely coherent piece, not too long and not too short? I’d so much like to have something of yours to play that’s specifically intended for the public.” In fact, although she didn’t know them as yet, he had written at least two such pieces in Vienna a few months earlier. Neither Arabeske nor Blumenstück is “brilliant” in the virtuoso sense of the word but, while remaining easily understandable, they are both brilliantly imaginative. They are completely coherent, perfectly proportioned and so appealing that Schumann dismissed them (to a male friend) as “delicate – for the ladies” and (to a female friend) as “not so important.”

Arabeske was originally to have been called “Rondelette,” which describes the shape of the piece adequately enough. The “Arabesque” title is better, however, in that it so aptly describes the delicately intertwining lines that form the texture of the three main sections in C major. The slow coda, with its melodic allusion to “The Poetic Speaks” from the recently completed Kinderszenen, indicates that Schumann had not entirely renounced his private messages to Clara even here.

“Look Robert,” wrote Clara Wieck to her fiancé in April 1839, “couldn’t you just once compose something brilliant, easily understandable, and without inscriptions - a completely coherent piece, not too long and not too short? I’d so much like to have something of yours to play that’s specifically intended for the public. Obviously, a genius will find this degrading, but politics demand it every now and again.” In fact, although she didn’t know them as yet, he had written at least two such pieces in Vienna a few months earlier. Neither Arabeske nor Blumenstück is “brilliant” in the virtuoso sense of the word but, while remaining easily understandable, they are both brilliantly imaginative. They are completely coherent, perfectly proportioned and so appealing that Schumann dismissed them (to a male friend) as “delicate – for the ladies” and (to a female friend) as “not so important.”

Arabeske was originally to have been called “Rondelette,” which describes the shape of the piece adequately enough. The “Arabesque” title - which derives from the literary theory of the time and which had probably never been applied to music before - is better, however, in that it so aptly describes the delicately intertwining lines that form the texture of the three main sections in C major. Between them are slightly slower episodes in E minor and A minor which, although the latter adopts the opening phrase of the rondo theme as its own, recall the reality which the floating C major material is so happily unaware of.

The piece ends not with the last recall of the rondo theme but with a slow coda which, with its separate heading Zum Schluss (“And finally”) and its melodic allusion to “The Poetic Speaks” from the recently complete Kinderszenen, indicates that Schumann had not entirely renounced his inscriptions or his private messages to Clara even here.