Three Novellettes

in D major, Op.21, No.2

in E major, Op.21, No.7

in F sharp minor, Op.21, No.8

During the long period of tormented but often happy anticipation of his marriage to Clara Wieck - which was so violently opposed by her father - anything or anybody that reminded Schumann of Clara aroused his interest. One such reminder was Clärchen (a diminutive of Clara), the heroine of Goethe’s Egmont. Another was Clara Novello, the “beautiful singer” who visited Leipzig in 1837 and who, curiously, lent her name to the Novelletten he wrote in 1839. “Wiecketten doesn’t sound good enough,” he explained to his own Clara.

So the eight Novelletten, Op.21, are to be understood as “Clara Novelettes,” short stories in which Clara figures in some way - or, as the composer put it, “jests, Egmont stories, family scenes with fathers, a wedding…” It would be interesting to know exactly which Novelletten fall into which of the categories the composer mentions but, in the absence of further information, we can only guess. If the Novellette in D major, the second in the complete set, is one of the “family scenes with fathers” - and the impetuous and unrelentingly active outer sections are vociferous enough to sustain that notion - the lovers are evidently left to themselves in the central Intermezzo in A major. The somewhat shorter seventh Novellette in E major seems to be based on a similar kind of situation except that the vigorous outer sections are less combative and the middle section even more exquisitely lyrical.

The complex construction of the last and much the longest of the Novelletten has usefully been defined as two scherzos each with two trios. The even more complicated emotional scenario revolves round the point at the very centre of the piece, at the end of the second trio of the first scherzo, where a sustained melody in the right hand quietly steals in over the continuing hunting rhythms in the left. This “Stimme aus der Ferne” (or “voice from afar”), as the composer describes it in the score, is none other than the stepwise descending melody shared by Robert and Clara - it occurs in much the same form in the Notturno of her Soirées musicales, Op.6 - and often used to carry a secret message between them. Its entry here confirms and sustains the tendency of a piece that began in F sharp minor to end in D major. Could the stormy opening section of the first scherzo be another of the “family scenes with fathers” and could the second scherzo, with its poetic references back to the “voice from afar,” be the long anticipated wedding?

Gerald Larner©