Download overture, scherzo, and finale, op. 52 composed in

OVERTURE, SCHERZO, AND FINALE, OP. 52
COMPOSED IN 1841
ROBERT SCHUMANN
BORN IN ZWICKAU, SAXONY, JUNE 8, 1810
DIED IN ENDENICH (NEAR BONN), JULY 29, 1856
The orchestral portion of tonight’s concert shows ways in which Schumann and Brahms,
relatively early in their respective careers, confronted one of the central musical
challenges of the 19th century: how to write a symphony after Beethoven. More
specifically, what does a composer do after the Ninth. Most retreated to simpler, less
imposing forms that offered little new. With a few exceptions, Schumann as composer
and critic despaired about the state of the symphony.
The exceptions are telling. One remarkable solution was offered by Schubert, who
completed his lone remaining symphony, the “Great” C major, less than a year after
Beethoven’s Ninth. Yet this work remained “outside of history” for more than a decade,
unperformed and almost completely unknown as it languished in the house of Schubert’s
older brother. Schumann was amazed when he discovered this Symphony on a trip to
Vienna 11 years after Schubert’s death, and he quickly arranged for its first performance,
with Mendelssohn conducting, in March 1839.
Another strategy after Beethoven was pursued by progressive composers such as
Berlioz and Liszt, who opted for programmatic solutions. These composers no longer
wrote a Symphony No. 1, but rather a Symphonie fantastique or a Faust Symphony.
Schumann penned his longest review highly praising Berlioz’s Symphony, yet was not
inclined to follow the same path himself.
A SYMPHONY YEAR
After years devoted to composing keyboard music, the area in which Schumann produced
his first masterpieces, and the 1840 “year of song,” he turned to writing orchestral music
in early 1841. Although he had tentatively tried his hand at symphonies years before, he
increasingly felt the need to expand the scope of his musical palette. Schumann wrote to a
friend: “I often feel tempted to crush my piano; it is too narrow for my thoughts. I really
have very little practice in orchestral music now; still I hope to master it.” And so
Schumann set about to acquire the skills he felt he lacked, both in orchestration and in
constructing large-scale forms—gifts, it should be said, that his friend Felix Mendelssohn
possessed in abundance. (Mendelssohn, one suspects, basically viewed Schumann as a
remarkable critic but as only an exceptionally talented amateur composer.)
Years earlier Schumann had planned to recast an incomplete Piano Quartet (1829)
into a symphony and in 1832-33 had written, and partially performed, movements of a
Symphony in G minor, sometimes called the “Zwickau.” The discovery and performance
of Schubert’s C-major Symphony was perhaps the principal impetus for him to focus
more diligently on orchestral projects. After hearing Mendelssohn conduct the work he
wrote to Clara, “I was totally happy and wished only that you should be my wife and that
I also could write such symphonies.” Clara indeed encouraged him, “Your imagination
and your spirit are too great for the weak piano.”
He began his “symphony year” in 1841 by rapidly sketching his First Symphony
in B- flat, Op. 38, the “Spring.” A couple of months later he started the composition we
hear tonight, which he at various times called a “Symphonette,” “Suite,” and Second
Symphony, but which was later published as Overture, Scherzo, and Finale, Op. 52. In
the spring Schumann began composing his Symphony in D minor, Op. 120, which we
now know in its revised version as the Fourth. Originally called a “Symphonic Fantasy,”
Schumann presented the final score of that work to Clara on her 22nd birthday in
September. The same year he also wrote a Fantasy for piano and orchestra, which would
later become the first movement of his Piano Concerto. It is a lot of music for a composer
relatively new to deploying orchestral forces and negotiating large formal structures.
A PROPHESY OF “SPLENDID EFFECTS”
Mendelssohn conducted the very successful premiere of the First Symphony in March
1841 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. The Overture, Scherzo, and Finale was paired with the
D-minor Symphony on a December concert with the same orchestra lead by its
concertmaster, Ferdinand David. As Schumann recounted in a letter the next month, “The
two orchestral works performed in our last concert did not receive such hearty approval
as the First Symphony. Perhaps it was too much at once, and then Mendelssohn was
missing as conductor. But it does not matter, for I know that these pieces are in no way
inferior to the First, and they will succeed to a splendid effect sooner or later.”
Yet Schumann in fact soured on the D- minor Symphony, withdrew it from
circulation, and returned to it years later, in 1851, to make extensive revisions, at which
time it was christened with a high opus number and labeled the Fourth Symphony. He
also made a new version of the last part of the Overture, Scherzo, and Finale, which he
presented, together with Clara playing the premiere of the Piano Concerto, at a Dresden
concert in December 1845.
AN UNUSUAL FORM
A couple of years before writing the Overture, Scherzo, and Finale, Schumann remarked
in a review in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik: “For the most part the more recent
symphonies decline intellectually into the overture style—the first movements, that is to
say; the slow [movements] are only there because they cannot be left out; the scherzos
are scherzos in name only; the finales no longer know what the preceding movements
contained.” He was therefore quite honest two years later in naming the work we hear
tonight—the first movement Overture is very much in the concert overture tradition of
Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and others. It begins with a slow, minor-key introduction that
melodically prefigures the following major-key Allegro. Schumann omits any slow
movement, showing that it can, in fact, “be left out.” The Scherzo, in C-sharp minor and
originally entitled “intermezzo,” has a repeated trio section. The lively, fugal Finale does
seem to know what the “preceding movements contained” and culminates with an
impressive chorale.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Program note © 2003. All rights reserved. Program note may not be reprinted without written
permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.