Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Kreisleriana, Phantasien für das Pianoforte, Op 16 (1838)
Ausserst bewegt (Extremely moved)
Sehr inning und nicht zu rasch (Very inwardly and not too quickly)
Sehr aufgeregt (Very agitated)
Sehr langsam (very slowly)
Sehr lebhaft (Very lively)
Sehr langsam (Very slowly)
Sehr rasch (Very fast)
Schnell und spielend (Fast and playful)
In Kreisleriana, Schumann pays tribute to the novelist ETA Hoffmann and his most famous literary creation, Kapellmeister Kreisler; a musician in perpetual emotional turmoil, with an artistic soul that could never make peace with the Philistine society he had to serve. Hoffman was one of the towering figures of the German Romantic movement and his writings were enormously influential. Along with Schumann’s Kreisleriana, his fiction provided the source for Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker; Delibes’s Coppelia and Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann.
Much of Schumann’s piano music was written before his marriage, in 1840, to Clara Wieck, a match that her father, once Schumann’s piano teacher, had done all he could to avert. Kreisleriana dates from 1838, when Clara was only nineteen and still two years away from the age when her father’s objections could no longer prevent her from marrying. “There is so much music in me now, and such beautiful melody!” Schumann wrote, “I have written a whole sheaf of new things, and I shall call them Kreisleriana. You and the thought of you play the principal role in them and I shall dedicate them to you – yes to you and to no one else. You will smile so sweetly when you discover yourself in them. My music now seems to be so simply and wonderfully intricate, so eloquently from the heart. That’s the way it affects everyone for whom I play it – which I enjoy doing quite frequently!”
In his diary Schumann wrote: “Three wonderful spring days spent waiting for a letter (presumably from Clara) and then did the Kreisleriana in four days. Whole new worlds are opening up to me!” Musicologists now doubt that the piece was composed in four feverish days, as Schumann relates, but one can almost believe it, given its wild and manic nature. Perhaps Kreisleriana did seem a touch too wild for Clara, and her less-than-enthusiastic reaction to it may explain why Schumann did not dedicate the work to her, as he had originally planned, but “To his friend, Frederic Chopin”. Clara may have been genuinely bewildered since any comparison between her and Kreisler could hardly be flattering, bearing in mind Hoffman’s original title 'Lucid Intervals of an Insane Musician'.
The eight short movements that constitute Kreisleriana express a dazzling variety of moods. Passionate, dreamy and impulsive; there are moments of great drama and moments of devout serenity. Songlike simplicity contrasts with sections of contrapuntal writing in the manner of Schumann’s revered JS Bach. Above all, the score is a formidable test of the pianist’s technique and musical imagination.
© Stephen Strugnell
