2015 Program Notes, Book 3 |
45
SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN E-FLAT MAJOR, OP. 97,
“RHENISH” (1850)
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony calls for pairs of woodwinds,
four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings.
Performance time is 32 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first
performed this work on July 10, 1964, Louis Lane conducting.
Robert Schumann arrived in Düsseldorf on September 2, 1850 to
assume his new duties as conductor of the local orchestra and choral society. He seemed
pleased with the situation: the musical forces were skilled enough to present an annual
music festival that had been conducted by such luminaries as Mendelssohn; Schumann’s
home life with his beloved wife, Clara, was happy; he had been composing a steady
stream of new music for nearly two decades; and his position offered him the chance to
live in the heart of the Rhineland, on the legendary river itself, a region for which he had
harbored great fondness throughout his life. During the three months following his move
to Düsseldorf, he wrote both the Cello Concerto and the “Rhenish” Symphony.
The inspiration for the Symphony came from the Schumanns’ visit to Cologne in
1850. The city and its great cathedral, still unfinished centuries after its inception,
made such a powerful impression on the composer that he determined to write a
work which, he said, “mirrors here and there something of Rhenish life.” Though he
provided only the fourth of the Symphony’s five movements with a programmatic title,
the second and last movements reflect the spirit and style of peasant dances, while
the first shows the confidence and joy Schumann felt in his new surroundings and the
third the deep contentment he found in living close to the Rhine. The fourth movement
was originally titled, “In the character of an accompaniment to a solemn ceremony.”
This great movement, which stands at the pinnacle of Schumann’s symphonic
achievement, grew from the ritual that the composer observed at the Cologne
Cathedral on November 12, 1850, when Archbishop Johannes von Geissel was
elevated to the rank of Cardinal. So overwhelmed was Schumann with the magnificent
service in that great church that he produced what the noted British musicologist
Sir Donald Tovey later dubbed “one of the finest pieces of ecclesiastical polyphony
since Bach.” Schumann, who revered and studied Bach’s music for all of his life, would
have been immensely pleased with Tovey’s evaluation.
The opening movement of Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony launches
without introduction into its main theme. This striding melody, characterized by its
buoyant syncopations and bright vitality, precedes a vigorous scalar motive and a lyrical
second theme, all of which are combined with considerable craft in one of Schumann’s
most elaborate developmental sections. The second movement, notable for its rich
harmonic palette and its two-trio structure, resembles a slow
Ländler
, the
peasant dance that was the forerunner of the waltz. The brief third movement, only 54
measures long, is a songful interlude similar in spirit to the many mood paintings
that abound in Schumann’s works for solo piano. The penultimate movement is the
composer’s depiction of the majestic ceremony in Cologne Cathedral. Its mystical
atmosphere is as much the product of its exquisite sonority—horns and bassoons
enhanced by the noble voices of the trombones, heard here for the first time in the
Symphony—as of its strict contrapuntal style. The finale exudes the aura of a folk
festival, as though Schumann had left the misty Gothic interior of the Cathedral to find
a sun-lit square filled with carnival revelers immediately outside. At the climax of the
movement, the Cathedral music again bursts forth from the winds and brass, and the
work closes with an energetic coda alluding to the theme of the first movement.
Friday, July 3, 2015
