Schumann Piano Concerto, Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1

The founding of the Neue Zeitschrift Musik (New Journal of Music) in 1834 grew largely out of Robert Schumann's polemic attacks against the prevailing musical taste in German society. The opera and concert stage, he felt, had been inundated hy superficial music from abroad, such as French and Italian opera and Parisian piano virtuosos. As the journal's owner, editor and principal critic, Schumann declared war on the “salon composers”, admonishing his colleagues to heed the great traditions of the German past. This call was permeated by a healthy dose of nostalgia. In an 1839 essay, Schumann mourned the condition of piano concerto writing and recalled the works of Mozart, Beethoven, and the “insufficiently appreciated gentleman, Johann Sebastian Bach”:

“Surely it would have to he counted a loss if the piano concerto with orchestra were to pass from the scene... so we must await the genius who will show us in a newer and more brilliant way, how orchestra and piano may he combined, how the soloist, dominant at the keyboard, may unfold the wealth of his instrument and his art, while the orchestra, no longer a mere spectator, may interweave its manifold facets into the scene.” This genius, for the time being, was to be the critic himself.

In 1841 Schumann was at work on a piece for piano and orchestra that intended to explore poetic feelings rather than virtuosity. “I cannot compose a concerto for virtuosos,” he wrote to his pianist-wife Clara Wieck, “but must light on something different.” Schumann described the result (Phantasie in A minor) as a self-contained movement - “something between symphony, concerto and grand sonata.” In 1845, because a full-length concerto was more marketable than a one-movement work, he added an Intermezzo and the finale.

Audiences of the time, excited by the technical prowess and the narcissistic playing of Thalberg, Dreyschock and, of course, Franz Liszt (whose recitals reportedly sent ladies into a bacchanalian frenzy), were not impressed by the lyricism and subtlety of Schumann's Piano Concerto. Liszt sardonically described the work as “a concerto without piano.” Clara, who premiered the work, became its greatest advocate. She performed the concerto to eventual acclaim throughout Europe both during and after Schumann's lifetime. She saw herself as the keeper of the “classical” tradition, a “pure” musician against the hypertheatricality of the piano virtuosos of Liszt's generation. “Before Liszt,” she would say, “people used to play; after Liszt, they pounded or whispered. He has the decline of piano playing on his conscience.”

Ironically, after Schumann had given up the reins of the Neue Zeitschrift Musik in 1844, the journal became a propaganda sheet for the music it was created to oppose. By 1848 Liszt, along with Richard Wagner, had become the central figures of the polarizing movement called the “New German School.” Under the editorship of Franz Brendel, the journal became preoccupied with the idea that instrumental music's traditional forms were exhausted. It hailed a “Music of the Future” headed by Wagner's musical dramas and Liszt's symphonic poems. “These pages from now on,” declared Brendel in the opening editorial of 1852, “have the task of furthering in every possible way that transformation which musical art is now entering.”

Within the climate of what was now essentially a “new music” journal, imagine the dramatic impact when the Neue Zeitschrift printed a surprising article by Schumann who, after a ten-year absence, announced a musical Messiah quite outside the Liszt-Wagner circle. “His name is Johannes Brahms,” Schumann wrote in the 28 October 1853 issue, “and he has come, a youth at whose cradle the graces and heroes of old stood guard.” In words of deepest purple Schumann continued: “He carries all the marks of one who has received a call . . . When he waves his magic wand where the power of great orchestral and choral masses will aid him, then we shall he shown still more wonderful glimpses into the secrets of the spirit-world. May the highest Genius strengthen him for this . . . His contemporaries salute him on his first journey through the world where wounds may await him, hut also palms and laurels; we welcome him a powerful fighter ...” By training and temperament Brahms was much more inclined toward the aesthetic views of the Schumanns; however, this introduction, boldly entitled Neue Bahnen (New Paths), threw the unprepared youth into the hotbed of German musical politics.

In January 1859, after four years of compositional and personal struggle, Brahms presented his most ambitious work to date. The massive, protean Piano Concerto, Op. 15, emerged from the ashes of the problematic D-minor Symphony. Conceived after Schumann's 1854 suicide attempt, the work started as a sonata for two pianos but then evolved into a tragic symphony of Herculean proportions. It wasn't until shortly before Schumann's death in 1856 that Brahms combined the resources of piano and orchestra to create a piano concerto of symphonic stature and emotional intensity. In Op. 15 Brahms fulfilled Schumann's 1839 call for a genius who would “show us in a newer and more brilliant way, how orchestra and piano may be combined.”

Brahms' work fell largely on deaf ears and provincial thought. As with Schumann's Piano Concerto audiences were expecting a virtuoso showpiece, not what contemporary critics later dubbed “a symphony with piano obbligato.” The Concerto's immense length and seriousness, not to mention the superhuman demands asked of the soloist, was lost on one critic who dismissed it as “a composition dragged to its grave... Herr Brahms has deliberately made the pianoforte part as uninteresting as possible.” The morning after the work's second performance a surprisingly philosophical and good-natured Brahms reported the disastrous event to violinist-friend Joseph Joachim: My Concerto has had here a brilliant and decisive failure. . . At the conclusion three pairs of hands were brought together very slowly, whereupon a perfectly distinct hissing from all sides forbade any such demonstration. There is nothing more to say about this episode, for not a soul has said a word to me about the work! . . . I believe this is the best thing that can happen to one; it forces one to concentrate one's thoughts and increases one's courage. After all, I am only experimenting and feeling my way as yet. But the hissing was too much of a good thing, wasn't it?

In the eyes of the “New Germans,” the Concerto's entry into the musical polemic only confirmed Brahms as part of the anachronistic Schumann circle. Deeply engaged in the study of older masters, Brahms would not brook a “Music of the Future” that tried to denounce its past. In 1860, perhaps feeling isolated since Schumann's death, Brahms and Joachim publicly declared their objections to the policies of Brendel's Neue Zeitschrift Musik, especially its assumption that all worthy contemporary composers were in sympathy with the aims of the music the journal championed. The Neue Zeitschrift fired back with a venomous parody starring “J. Geiger” (J. Fiddler - i.e., Joachim), Hans Neubahn (a reference to Schumann's Neue Bahnen article heralding Brahms), and the German equivalent of Tom, Dick and Harry. Though Brahms never wavered in his compositional aesthetics, he never ventured into public criticism again. Rather he endured in silence the many critical attacks from the journal that was responsible for thrusting him into the musical limelight.

In spite of its piecemeal genesis Schumann's work is remarkably coherent. Underlying the Concerto's unity is the fact that it is virtually monothematic: most of the materials of the outer movements are thematic transformations of the Concerto's introspective opening theme. Even at the end of the slow Intermezzo, the poetic dialogue between the soloist and orchestra recalls the opening motif of the main theme from the first movement before leading directly into the finale.

Op. 54 stands apart not only from the virtuoso tradition (in its lyricism) but from the classical tradition as well. The hallmark of the classical style was the sonata form, a style of composition based on successive stages of stability (exposition), tension (development), and resolution (recapitulation). In the first movements of their piano concertos Mozart and Beethoven integrated thematic, harmonic, and rhythmic elements. They generally used two or three themes in the exposition, fragmented and combined them in various keys in the development, and ended with a return to the opening key in the recapitulation. Schumann, on the other hand, limits himself to basically one theme and focuses instead, through harmonic and rhythmic variation, on thematic unity. After a brusque introduction, the lyrical theme opens in minor. In lieu of using a different melody in the secondary area, Schumann has this theme, now in the major mode, serve as the principal idea. A nocturne-like paraphrase of the main theme opens the development section and is then dissolved in a series of lyric effusions leading to the recapitulation. In short Schumann, while altering classical sonata form from within, retains its external contours.

From his unfinished symphony, Brahms kept only the first movement, discarding the slow movement, the Scherzo (emerging later as the funeral march in the Deutsches Requiem), and an incomplete Finale. The titanic first movement was probably the longest, most dramatic symphonic movement since Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The richness of themes bandied about in the exposition alone is another indication of the movement s enormous scale. According to Joachim, the heaven-storming opening reflected Brahms' emotional state on hearing that Schumann, after cycles of growing depression, had thrown himself in the Rhine River. The fevered intensity of the orchestral introduction colors the rest of the movement. While the dialogue between the soloist and the orchestra in Schumann's Piano Concerto is gracious and poetic, the dialogue in Brahms' is combative and impassioned. The piano's lyrical opening theme soothes the orchestra's palpable sense of catastrophe; the warmth and serenity of the piano's majestic, flowing second theme is juxtaposed against the tragic, pathetic character of the orchestra. Although most of the development is stormy (it opens with the piano plunging into a salvo of double Octaves in D minor), Brahms surprises with a sunny D major episode in a quick waltz time, snatched away by an unrelentingly tragic build up to the recapitulation.

When sketching the benevolent D major Adagio Brahms wrote above it the text “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini” (“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord”) - little doubt a requiem to Schumann whom Brahms affectionately addressed as “Mynheer Domini”. Despite two assertive outbreaks in the movement, the music, an expression of intimacy on a grand scale, remains one of his most profound. The energetically rhythmic D minor Rondo snaps the listener out of an idyllic daze. The muscular, contrapuntal themes are broader, more lyrical, and more optimistic than those of the preceding movements. The piano finally gets to break free from the orchestra in a short cadenza bringing the Concerto to a triumphant close in the parallel major.