Three Romances, Op.22 (1853)

Leidenschaftlich schnell

“I once thought I possessed creative talent,” Clara Wieck wrote in her diary in 1839, “but I have now given up this idea: a woman must not desire to compose – not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to? It would be arrogance, although, indeed, my father led me into it in earlier days.”

Happily, Clara did not succumb to convention at that time, discouraging though it clearly was. She had been composing piano music for as long as she had been playing in public – her Quatre Polonaises, Op.1, were written in 1828 – and, although it was difficult for her after her marriage to Robert Schumann in 1840, she did keep up the composition, even if only intermittently. Robert was not to be disturbed or distracted when he was working but, in the intervals between giving birth to her eight children, Clara still found the time to write not only piano pieces and songs (some in collaboration with her husband) but also her impressive Piano Trio in G minor, Op.17. In 1853, when the Schumanns moved to a new house in Düsseldorf and they had the room to work without disturbing each other, she began composing again in earnest: the Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, Op.20, the Three Romances for piano, Op.21, the Three Romances for violin and piano, Op.22, and the Six Songs, Op.23, all date from this time. But for Robert’s suicide attempt in February 1854 and the consequent necessity to support the family by giving concerts, Clara might well have gone on to write much more. As it was, she became a kind of mentor to Brahms, who valued her opinions highly, and an authoritative performer of both his and Robert Schumann’s piano music.

The Three Romances, Op.22, were written in July 1853 and dedicated to Joseph Joachim, who had been working with the Schumanns at the Lower Rhine Festival at Düsseldorf two months earlier. Unpretentious in structure, they are sophisticated in harmony and rhythm and entirely worthy of comparison with Robert Schumann’s chamber pieces on the same kind of scale. The Andante molto in D flat major is particularly subtle in its exchanges between the two instruments as the violin registers its reactions to the intimate little gesture introduced by the piano in the opening bars. No phrase in the violin part is heard more than once, even in the closing section where, after a spontaneous diversion in a different direction, one might expect the first part to be literally repeated.

The Allegretto, with tenderly melancholy outer sections in G minor and a happily trilling and chirping middle section in the tonic major, is less elusive - although there is an understated surprise in this case too as a brief allusion to the G major material changes the mood in the closing bars. The last piece, marked Leidenschaftlich schnell (passionately quick), is the most outspokenly expressive of the three, particularly in its rhythmically impulsive outer sections in B flat major. Again, the composer avoids literal repetition by varying the articulation of the keyboard accompaniment in the reprise and then, towards the end, transferring the melodic interest to the piano part.