Violin Concerto (Schumann)
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Robert Schumann’s only Violin Concerto, in D minor, was one of his last significant compositions, and one that remained unknown to all but a very small circle for more than 80 years after it was written.
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[edit] Composition
Schumann wrote it in Düsseldorf between 11 September and 3 October 1853 for the great violinist Joseph Joachim. He had just previously completed another work for Joachim, the Fantasie in C major op.131, and then later in October would compose for Joachim the 'F-A-E' Sonata for violin and piano, jointly with his pupil Albert Dietrich and the young Johannes Brahms, who had entered the Schumanns’ life on 1 October. It appears that Schumann composed the finale of the Concerto in the three days 1-3 October, after making Brahms’s acquaintance.
[edit] Subsequent History and Conflicting Opinions
Though Joachim performed Schumann’s Fantaisie, he never performed the Violin Concerto, whose manuscript he retained throughout his life, after playing it through with piano accompaniment for Schumann in October 1853. After Schumann’s attempted suicide in February 1854 and subsequent decline and death in a sanatorium in Endenich, Joachim evidently suspected the Concerto was a product of Schumann’s madness and thought of the music as morbid. Joachim’s biographer Andreas Moser reproduced a letter in which Joachim discussed Schumann’s concerto as showing ‘a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy’, though ‘certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist’. Joachim’s opinion prevailed on the composer’s widow Clara and on Brahms, and the work was not published in the Complete Edition of Schumann’s works and was in effect kept secret throughout the 19th century. Brahms did however publish, in a supplementary volume of the Schumann Edition, ‘Schumann’s last musical thought’, a theme on which Schumann had begun to compose variations in early 1854. Schumann had thought the theme had been dictated to him by the spirits of Mendelssohn and Schubert, no longer recognizing that it was a melody he had used in the slow movement of the Violin Concerto. Brahms also wrote a set of piano-duet variations on this theme, his opus 23.
Joachim deposited the manuscript of the Concerto with the Prussian State Library in Berlin and only in the 1930s was it retrieved by Joachim's great-niece, the violinist Jelly d’Aranyi. Publication of the Concerto was undertaken by Schott, with a violin-piano reduction by Paul Hindemith. The world premiere was given by Georg Kulenkampff in 1937; he subsequently made the first recording. The Concerto has only slowly made its way into the concert repertoire, partly due to the authority of Joachim’s judgement of it and a general critical perception that the first movement was too heavily scored; but it is now recognized as an important work of the composer. For a recording made in 1988 the German violinist Thomas Zehetmair went back to Schumann’s original manuscript, correcting many errors in the published edition.
[edit] The Music
The Concerto is in the traditional three-movement form, fast-slow-fast. It belongs less to the poetic and passionate style of Schumann's early masterpieces than to the more objective, classical manner of his later music, as ushered in by the 'Rhenish' Symphony of 1850. Certainly the opening movement in D minor is conceived more on symphonic than concertante lines. Its powerful opening subject dominates the proceedings, and although the violin’s role is extremely taxing its subordination to a ‘symphonic’ scheme is emphasized by the fact that there is no cadenza. The slow movement, in B flat, has the character of an intensely lyrical intermezzo, and passes without a break into a vigorous and dance-like sonata-rondo finale in D major. An unusual feature of the movement is its strong polonaise rhythm.
[edit] Dietrich's Concerto
It is interesting to note that Albert Dietrich, who would certainly have seen Schumann’s Violin Concerto in the month of its completion, composed a Violin Concerto of his own in 1874, intended for Joachim, which is in the same key (D minor) and also has a finale in Polonaise rhythm: possibly an allusion, by one of the few people ‘in the know’, to Schumann’s then-unplayed work.
