Presto passionato

Thinking that he had finally completed his Piano Sonata in G minor, after working on it intermittently for five years or so, Schumann sent the manuscript to Clara Wieck for her approval. “I love the Sonata just as I love you,” Clara told him in March 1838. “It expresses your whole being with such clarity and at the same time it’s not too incomprehensible.” She did, however, have reservations about the last movement, marked Presto passionato, which she thought “far too difficult.” Even though she understood it and “would play it if need be,” she said, “other people, the public, even professional musicians - those for whom one composes - won’t understand it at all.” Nine months later Schumann replaced the offending Presto passionato with a quite different finale.

For once Clara was wrong. None of Schumann’s three Piano Sonatas has achieved anything like the popularity of such other large-scale piano works from the same period as Carnaval or the Fantasy in C major, but the Sonata in G minor might have had a better chance with its original Presto passionato finale, which is technically and temperamentally a better match for the first movement than the Presto that replaced it. Apart from that, as Horovitz so effectively demonstrated, it has a virtuoso appeal that could have persuaded pianists with that kind of ambition to adopt the whole work.

It has been very plausibly suggested that the problems Clara found in the Presto passionato were mainly rhythmic: it is certainly uncommonly complicated from that point of view, although it is actually its metrical contradictions that make it so irresistibly impulsive. There is also the possibility that Schumann himself feared that the keyboard figuration had too much in common with that of the virtuoso products of his not so serious-minded composer-pianist contemporaries. In fact, however, one of the most inspired aspects of the piece is the way in which the bravura element, which is present from the opening bars onwards, is so effectively integrated with the lyrical element, which is represented from an early stage by an expressive motif similarly featured in the replacement Rondo.