A Demented Violin Concerto

Well, is it any good or is it—as Menuhin thought—a historical footnote, the missing link in the violin repertoire?

Yehudi Menuhin, one of the great violinists of the last century, was referring to the Schumann violin concerto, which dates from 1853—a year before Schumann gave in to syphilitic madness and jumped into the Rhine. Fearing that he would harm his wife, the pianist Clara Schumann who had long supported him creatively and financially, he asked the fisherman who rescued him to take him directly to the sanatorium. He died in 1856.

That’s part of the story. The other part? Joseph Joachim, a friend of both the Schumanns and Johannes Brahms, and the greatest violinist of his day. And so the concerto was written for Joachim, who played through it, and was less than impressed. In fact, he suspected the music was part of Schumann’s madness; allegedly, he called the work morbid. And he wrote the following words in a letter to a friend:

The piece has ‘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 never played the work in public, and later convinced both Brahms and Clara Schumann that the work wasn’t worthy of publication. Joachim kept the manuscript, and left it in his will to the Prussian State Library, with the instruction that it was not to be played until 1956, 100 years after the composer’s death..

OK—here the story gets seriously weird. Two grandnieces of Joachim—one improbably named Jelly D’Aranyi, the other Adila Fachiri—both violinists, decide to go to a séance in London in 1933. And guess who comes sailing through? Yup—Robert Schumann with instructions from the beyond. Yeah—“play my concerto,” or words to that effect.

First problem—where the hell was it? OK—round two, and this time Joachim comes through with the info. And so the sisters hightail it over to the archives and dig the concerto up. And they swear until their dying day that they had no idea that the piece existed.

(….stop that sniggering out there!)

The trail went cold until 1937, when the music publisher Schott sent the manuscript to Yehudi Menuhin. And he announced that he would give the world premiere in San Francisco.

You can guess what happened. Yes, Jelly stepped up and claimed right of first performance—hadn’t it been she who had been tipped off from the beyond? (You might wonder why Adila, the other sister, didn’t stake her claim—at least, I wonder…. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn’t say…)

It might have been interesting to see how the struggle developed—but sadly, the Germans held the copyright, and they decided it should be one of their own, Georg Kulenkampff, should premiere the work. So Menuhin gave the American premiere, and Jelly gave the London premiere—one critic said, “of this dismal fiasco, the less said the better.”

Since then, the work has met with divided opinion. Some have called it a violin concerto without the violin. And one senses what Joachim felt—it’s the work of a man whose mind is slipping. It may lack coherence, ultimately; but there are still beautiful moments.

In short, it’s a thing to hear….

    

May Music

Let me give you a hint, a kernel of advice, if you ever decide to do anything as inadvisable as write a daily blog. The first months will be easy, the next months will find you praising yourself for “professionally” practicing your craft. In the end, you’ll spend large amounts of time groping for material, and feel that you’re simply writing the same thing over and over again.

Short version—it gets stale.

Anything does, you know, if you do it repetitively. Musicians know that one—you love, you absolutely love the Dvorak Concerto, that first week you’re finally allowed to play it (it’s pretty mean…). You’ve been listening to recordings of it for years. Flash forward five months or—to put it better—150 hours of practicing the damn thing later. You dread the hour you have to spend on it—you’d rather play scales.

The other thing is that you cannot, you really cannot be in a rage all the time, because look—aren’t the lives of your readers hard enough? Are they turning to you for a rant, a diatribe, every morning? Nah—you can get away with a bit of it, but a steady diet is a turn-off.

What do you do then, after a week of raging at the National Rifle Association and agribusiness? Especially when North Korea is hovering to send missiles into South Korea, when Puerto Rico is about to be downgraded to junk bond status, when a jewelry store across the street from you is intermittently blaring its alarm into your apartment, your ears, and especially your sleep? Oh, and the owner of the store, which is closed, is in the United States, and the only thing you can do is talk to the employees of another jewelry—this one open—owned by the same guy. The employees there assure you they’ll try—never an assuring word—to get in touch with him.

I’ll tell you what you do. You tell yourself—this is the best part of being old—that you’ve seen a lot, been through a lot. There was the day your mother died virtually in your arms. There was that morning when your lost your job—that was OK—as well as your connection to 500 people who were friends / students / functionally your children (not OK). The day, years ago, that you sent off your lover to Puerto Rico, where he had to live and where you couldn’t, and walked through the longest terminal in O’Hare with the stupid, dentist office music welling behind you, and you thought the credits would start rolling. The movie, the life, was over.

Then you go to YouTube and try to figure out—if there were a piece of music that was absolutely quintessential, what would it be? You’re thinking this way because you’ve just heard the end of a work by Schumann, and were struck immediately by another work by Schumann, the first song of Frauenliebe und -leben.

That makes you remember the first time you were introduced to lieder, which—don’t get thrown off here—is nothing more than the word in German for song. You were eighteen, alone, living away from home for the first time. You didn’t know what you would make of your life, and worried what life would make of you. Because it felt, you know, that it was more likely that life would shape or misshape you; you weren’t the kind to go out, grasp circumstances, sculpt the world to your liking.

Let me turn around here and get back into the first person….

So there I was that day, in Boston, with my aching shoulders—practice an instrument for five hours a day and the smallest tension leads to knotted muscles—and my tired ears listening to the radio. I had come to study cello with the best—or so he said—cello teacher in America, a man with a method that had become a sort of cellist production line. You got on and four years later were bumped off, ready to spend the next forty years playing the standard orchestral repertoire—maybe a hundred pieces in all. It was already clear—I was falling out of line.

And then, someone was singing—an opera singer, I thought. And I didn’t like opera—or singers at all. There’s always been an animus between instrumentalist and singers. Mention the phrase, which used to be in common use, “musicians and singers,” as in, “musicians and singers, assume your positions,” and watch the singer bristle….

Then, the singer on the radio, having been rumbling around in her low range, soared effortlessly up to a pure, shimmering note: a feather on the breath of God. And I was hooked—I had to hear that singer.

I was broke, so I sat in the cheapest seats in the theater, and heard Jessye Norman sing—yes, as you suspected—Frauenliebe und –leben. In English, A Woman’s Love and Life. It’s classic Schumann, totally melodic, at times joyful, at times melancholic. It follows the story of a woman’s love from the beginning until the end—“Now you have caused me pain for the first time,” sings the mezzo, after her husband has died.

And it’s music, I think, for a young man or woman. However much I wouldn’t go back to it, there is something wonderful about discovering life and love for the first time in your twenties. The sun has never shined before on a young man but you, the moon has never streamed its silver before on a boy and girl, holding hands, stopping to kiss in doorways, dancing in the empty streets.

There’s also, of course, music for the old—music which could only have been written by someone who had suffered and endured, seen life ebb and then flicker out, suffered mourning and resignation and finally acceptance, and a cold joy. For me, that was the greatest of the Schubert song cycles, Die Winterreise, and that was the music I turned to, as I lost my mind following losing my job following losing my mother. And it’s music that I haven’t been able to hear since. (In fact, I’ve barely heard Schubert this year.)

But Schumann, what of Schumann? In case you want to feel guilty for being seriously unproductive (or underproductive), I give you this fact—in one year alone, Schumann wrote not one but the three greatest song cycles of his career. And arguing whether Winterreise is better than Liederkreis is like arguing whether War and Peace is better than Brothers Karamazov—any decision would be subjective, and who cares? They’re masterpieces.

The year was 1840, sometimes called Schumann’s “year of song”; Schumann had just won a long battle to marry the love of his life, Clara Wieck. And that comes through in the music, as well as the poetry—this is a young man writing.

Or in this case singing. Because I decided that the first song of the Frauenliebe und -leben is really sort of meaningless, listened to alone; so much of it is setting up the mood, and also the structure (the theme will be heard at the end). So why not dig up Fritz Wunderlich, an amazing tenor who died at just age 35 from falling down the stairs at a guest’s cottage. He virtually owns Liederkreis.

“In the Wonderful Month of May,” it’s called, and really—that’s all you need to know….. 

A Norwegian Song Cycle

First scenario—I tell you that I’m taking you to the symphony tonight, and that we’ll be hearing some Beethoven. What are your chances of guessing what we’ll hear?

Not very good, I’m afraid—besides the nine symphonies and the five piano concerti and the violin and triple concerti, there are roughly half a dozen other orchestral works, mainly overtures.

Second scenario—I tell you that I’m taking you to the symphony tonight, and that we’ll be hearing some Grieg. And here, you’ll very likely be able to pin it down in the first three guesses. It’ll be the piano concerto, Peer Gynt, or possibly the Holberg Suite. Unless you’ve got a conductor willing to scrounge into the forgotten corners of Grieg’s repertoire, that’s all you’re likely to hear.

So Grieg falls into that enigmatic category—you might call it famous but not well known. He certainly has his place in the pantheon, but only for a handful of works. And given that he died at age 64, shouldn’t we know more music of his? He had to have been doing something other than writing merely three pieces in nearly half a century of creative life.

Yes and no. He wasn’t a very healthy man; a lung condition he picked up at age 17 plagued him most of his life. He was also a conductor, and worked for many years with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he served as music director from 1880 – 1882. But he was unusual for his time in not producing a symphony, except for an early work that he suppressed.

He was, said one commentator, a man of little works, almost a miniaturist. He struggled even to produce a string quartet, although he came up a creditable one—Debussy, not an easy man to please, thought highly of it.

He got around, this man from Norway who studied in Leipzig, disliked the rigidity of the system, and went back to his native land. He met Liszt, who was impressed with him (and sight-read the famous piano concerto and invented a reduction of the orchestral score—they were giants on the earth, some of those guys…). He also met Tchaikovsky, and was struck by how sad he was.

You could—perhaps fancifully—say that he met me this morning on the daily trot, when I was cruising my iPod for something new to listen to. It’s a discipline for me, now—how much new music can I listen to? For years, I was buying CDs of interesting music that I never found time to listen to. Well, now’s the time.

And so it had been with a CD of Grieg’s songs, as sung by Anne Sofie von Otter. And instantly I was struck by the rich harmonies, the deftness of the piano part, the freshness of the music.

What I didn’t know was that I was listening to a song cycle, indeed the only song cycle that Grieg ever wrote. And what, you ask, is a song cycle? A musical form that crops up with Beethoven and is still going on—a group of songs that are meant to be performed together, often because they are telling a story, or are thematically linked. And the 19^th century was a sort of golden age for the song cycle: Schubert with his Winterreise and  Die schöne Müllerin; Schumann with Liederkreis, Dichterliebe, Frauenenliebe und Leben.

Grieg wrote the song cycle Haugtussa over a three-year period, and mind you, the work only lasts 25 minutes. But it was worth it; Grieg later wrote that it was his best effort in song. Sadly, though, in the YouTube clip below, we’re missing the one crucial component of a song cycle—the lyrics themselves.

So here is what will have to suffice, a brief description of the work from Wikipedia:

Haugtussa opens and ends with the nature mysticism of "The Enticement" and "At the Brook". The second extended stage includes the two melancholic portraits "Veslemøy" and "Hurtful Day". Between them the climax is reached in the central love songs "The Tryst" and "Love", which have a cheerful, pastoral approach, and approached and transitioned from in, respectively, "Blueberry Slope" and "Kidlings' Dance". The main character, the Veslemøy, is a shepherd girl who has abilities that others do not have and therefore can not find a place for her personality in rural communities. She turns to nature for answers to her desires and questions. During the course of the text she falls in love with the boy Jon, and "Hurtful Day" describes her feelings when she is deceived by him. In the last song, "At the Brook", which is often compared with the last song of Franz Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin or Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe,[4] she seeks refuge by a mountain brook, musically represented by a rhythmic figure on the piano. From verse to verse, Grieg gradually changes this passage using different harmonizations.

What’s good about the clip? It has the wonderful Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter singing at her best, and that “best” is nearly unbeatable. And how fortunate we are that von Otter is Swedish, and can thus sing in a language most other singers wouldn’t tackle.

Which leads me, perhaps, to the last strike against Grieg—he’s Norwegian, he’s identified as a nationalist composer, and ever so slightly looked down on. However much the piano concerto gets played, among musical snobs—and you don’t have to be told that snobbery is rampant in classical music, do you?—Grieg isn’t considered in the absolute top drawer.

But listening to this song cycle, I think he is….

A Composer Reborn

There’s music that gets played all the time and shouldn’t. How many times have you heard the Moldau, the Bartered Bride, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?

There’s also music that never or almost never gets played and should. Zelenka comes to mind, as well as Reinecke—guys who languish in undeserved obscurity.

As does a guy named Hans Gal, who appeared on a recording done by a new follower on Twitter, Kenneth Woods. Well, there’s a lot I don’t know—and more and more piling up every day—so it was time to head for Wikipedia.

Which has, I was relieved to find, only a couple of paragraphs on Gal; clearly he’s not as mainstream as I had feared. Ironic, because at one point in his life he was well known and much played.

Born in a small town near Vienna, he attended the New Vienna Conservatory and went on to win an important competition, the Columbia Schubert Centenary Prize, in 1928. The conductor Furtwangler and composer Richard Strauss helped him obtain the position of director of the Mainz Conservatory. This lasted until 1933, when the Germans overtook Mainz. Gal, a Jew, was dismissed and his music, extremely popular and influential through the twenties, was banned.

Fortunately, there’s a backup. Donald Tovey invites him to Scotland, and he assumes a position at the University of Edinburgh. All is well—as far as we know—until about 1940, when, according to one source, Churchill said, “collar the lot” and Gal and other German émigrés found themselves in an internment camp. Did I mention—there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know?

It was, as you can imagine, a pretty distinguished bunch, this cultured group of German Jews who had not so much escaped the camps as found a decidedly better one—so what do they do?

Write and stage a revue, called “What a Life!”

It took, according to Wikipedia, about six months to determine who was who, and most of the Germans were released. Presumably, Gal goes back to the University and resumes his career. As well, he edits the Brahms symphonies, composes a lot of chamber music, symphonies, songs and incidental music.

He was played extensively in the ‘20’s but, by the end of his life he was forgotten. (Grammar break—the computer has just green-squiggled that last phrase and suggested “the end of his life forgot him!” Your choice, dear Reader!) His symphony number four, his last work in the genre, was premiered in 1972, and then sat on the shelf for another 30 years.

Then along came Kenneth Woods, a writer / cellist / conductor / rock guitarist, who decides to pair the Gal with another composer of four symphonies—Robert Schumann. And it’s well received, becoming a Gramophone Editor’s Choice in 2012.

Woods, in a short clip introducing the disc, makes the point that Gal never jumped on board whatever musical style was fashionable at the time—the  Second Viennese School, or twelve-tone music. The music sounds crisp, distinctive and at least in the clip below, wonderfully lyrical.

Woods also mentions that it must have been frustrating for Gal’s daughter Eva to have to wait thirty years for the rediscovery of her father’s work. She replies with understatement: “the first thirty years are the hardest.” In fact, thirty years is not too long—in the case of Bach, it was one hundred years. And the sad fact is that there are many fine composers that we will never hear.

Kenneth—I’ve just bought the Gal Symphony No. 4 and the Schumann Symphony No. 2, and downloaded them to my iPad. Now then—could I suggest another forgotten composer?

Gunnar Johansen.

Disobedient Flowers

I’m horrified to admit that it’s now past noon, and I haven’t written anything.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that yes, I was up by seven, I did the trot, and I’ve been pondering Robert Schumann and Emily Dickinson.

February is always a wrenching time for me, even if I have spent it, these last two decades, in a warm place. And it may be that a Wisconsin childhood will always trump a tropical adulthood. February—darkness. February—change.

And I am facing two potential losses, and starting to grieve for both. Which may be why the final movement of a—for me—unknown piece of Schumann hit me so deeply.

‘How often,’ you think, ‘can Schumann repeat that theme? And why, far from being bored, do I want to hear it again?’

Part of it is the modulation, the shifting from one key to another. Part of it is also the feeling that this is really a folksong, something Mother sings to Baby. A lullaby, really.

It’s marked langsam, the German word for “think glaciers as you play it.” And helpfully, Schumann indicates that it should be melancholic.

Yeah? There’s more blood on the page than ink, and it’s clear—they’re putting the sheets on Robert’s bed in the madhouse. Many people argue that Schumann’s music, in this last decade of his life, shows signs of his mental illness, rapidly cycling between manic elation and haunting grief. And there’s a bit of that in this piece—themes so poignant that you almost feel embarrassed to hear them: they seem to reveal so much so painfully. And yet the third movement is a joy—as playful as a dog chasing a Frisbee on the first day of spring.

So it’s another wonder, another discovery. As was another newcomer, the Master letters of Dickinson. Oddly, they’re from the same decade as the Schumann; the three letters were written between 1858 and 1862.

Time to confess—I don’t do poetry very well. A lot of it goes over my head. More often, it just goes through my head, and seems to stick as well as spaghetti thrown at the fridge. My mother could read Walter de la Mare; I cannot. I get to something like the following and think, ‘so?’   

“We wake and whisper awhile,

But, the day gone by,

Silence and sleep like fields

Of amaranth lie.''

My eyes glaze; my mind is fogged with poetic numbness.

But faithful to my commitment to the mid-nineteenth century, I soldiered through the Dickinson Master letters. And though I ordinarily like Dickinson a lot—seems like a safe thing to say—these letters completely stump me.

Had she been eating too many morning glory seeds? Was a Chinaman smoking opium under her window?

Nor am I alone. Here’s a guy smarter than I:

For nearly twenty years I’ve taught Dickinson and the Master Letters in my early American literature course, always hoping to come closer to the source of the mystery. Instead, just the opposite has happened. The mystery has deepened. The more I study them, the more we hash them out in class, the longer the shadows grow and deepen over their meaning.

That’s Nicholas Rombes, about whom I know nothing. But he has puzzled over lines like the following for 20 years, so he must think it’s worth it….

You ask me what my flowers said—then they were disobedient—I gave them messages—

Gotta be something I get from Jack. Write it simple, write it short. And if, after twenty years of puzzling you’re farther from the shore of understanding, isn’t it time to jump ship? Go on to another poet, and hope for better luck and lucidity?

At the end of his life, Schumann feared that he would hurt his wife. I understand rage and madness, how brooding anger and despair can flash—a match in the rum factory—at a look, a raised eyebrow, the turning of a back. I’ll listen, in these dark days within, to the Schumann again.

But twenty years of wondering about Emily’s disobedient flowers?

Catch you around!

Two Women and a Masterpiece

Well, it was a lesson in comeuppance. I prided myself on being musically literate, well-heard or well-listened, or whatever the musical equivalent of well-read is. But there is a problem with being a musician: you have to learn how to play the instrument. That means that you sit in tiny little rooms with terrible acoustics and try to hear yourself since, of course, there is a tuba player on your left and, inevitably, a trumpeter on your right.

That gives you an excellent excuse to do what you really want to do, which is put the cello down and go hang out and listen to another cellist who somehow has managed to get not just the adjoining practice rooms free but also an entire AISLE empty. So you hang and listen to him or her.

“Wow, that sounds GREAT!” you exclaim completely falsely when he or she comes out, ostensibly to go to the bathroom but really to drive you away. That’s OK, because now you can go hang out with your friends and say snakes and toads (sapos y serpientes—a good Puerto Rican expression) with your pals.

“Yup, the Dvorak…”

“What, she can barely play The Swan!”

“Heard it!”

Multiply this by four years and you have—if lucky—a Bachelor’s in Music, affectionately called a BM. If you have spent enough time in the practice rooms, you may be able to make a career as a musician. If you have spent enough time in the halls, you’ll also have learned a valuable skill. Scratch that word “valuable” and replace with “essential.” Because with the curious exception of those at the absolute top, the average musician is backbiting, hypocritical, insecure, and frequently backstabbing. And cellists, I’m sorry to say, are the worst.

Now then, you’re in an orchestra. That means you are likely to play perhaps fifty odd pieces over and over again for the next forty years. Yes, I exaggerate, but not by much. And you may never listen to any other music again.

OK, look, maybe it’s different now. But it was very uncommon thirty years ago to meet a string player who had listened to Dichterliebe (my red squiggling friend, there ARE some things you don’t know), perhaps the most famous of Robert Schumann’s song cycles.

So I was quite smug, since I thought that having heard a lot of Schumann, I could comfortably be sure there were no surprises. Which is to say, I could ignore the rest of his life’s work. So I was surprised to discover, yesterday, that there was a piano quintet that is well…

…major.

Actually, more than major. It’s at the pinnacle, it’s sitting up there on Mt. Olympus with the gods, and of course EVERYBODY knows it but Marc.

It was written in 1843 in Schumann’s chamber music year (well, I did know about that, though I learned of it only recently), and was first performed, as you would expect, by Clara Schumann, the preeminent pianist of her day.

Although it may not have been she, it might have been Felix Mendelssohn, whom Schumann idolized. Clara was sick for either the first or second performance, so Mendelssohn sight-read for the event.

“Only a man can play this piano part,” said Schumann of the piano quintet opus 44. But the legend is that he said it in a moment of jealousy. She was the hot item; he was on occasion asked if he could play the piano too. (Answer, by the way, is yes—but by no means as well as she….)

She was one tough lady. Her father was very strict, and she was programmed from childhood on to be a concert pianist. She bumps into Robert Schumann as a teenager, and he is smitten. They marry, against her father’s wishes. Robert, of course, goes nuts, and spends the last two years of his life in the madhouse. That might be enough hardship for the average Jane, but the gods apparently seemed to think she needed more. Wikipedia time!

Her family life was punctuated by tragedy. Four of her eight children and her husband died before she did, and her husband and one of her sons ended their lives in insane asylums. Her first son Emil died in 1847, aged only one. Her husband Robert had a mental collapse, attempted suicide in 1854, and was committed to an insane asylum for the last two years of his life. In 1872 her daughter Julie died, leaving two small children. In 1879, her son Felix, aged 25, died. Her son Ludwig suffered from mental illness, like his father, and, in her words, had to be "buried alive" in an institution. Her son Ferdinand died at the age of 43 and she was required to raise his children. She herself became deaf in later life and she often needed a wheelchair.

“Punctuated by tragedy?” How about “saturated?”

Well, she was the breadwinner all her life since Robert was, in his words, “always living in the realm of the imagination.” An excellent place to be, except a dinner time….

And however caring she could be, she spoke quite frankly. She is “hostile”—in Wikipedia’s words—to Liszt. She is “scathing” on Wagner. She calls Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony “horrible.”

It was the custom of the time for pianist to include one or two of their one compositions—she does that, but gives up composition in midlife. But she does more—instead of the showy pieces common in recitals of the time, she treats her audience seriously, giving them the real stuff.

OK—let’s do a better job here. These are the composers she played early in her career: Kalkbrenner, Henselt, Thalberg, Herz, Pixis, Czerny. And here are the guys she played later: Chopin, Mendelssohn, Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and—duh—Robert Schumann.

Oh, and by the way, she teaches for many years at the conservatory. Here’s our friend again:

In 1878 she was appointed teacher of the piano at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, a post she held until 1892, and in which she contributed greatly to the improvement of modern piano playing technique.

Just reading about her makes me yearn for a nap.

Fitting, then, that the pianist in the clip below is a woman at the top of her game. One hopes that Clara—her work done at last, the money brought in, the household organized, the students taught and the concerts played—is sitting, doing nothing, hearing without the need of playing, seeing another woman as able as she playing her husband’s great music.

Her husband, “who is always living in the realm of imagination.”

Music Insanely Good

OK—today’s problem: what to do about Robert Schumann.

There’s no question that something was going on, neurologically or psychiatrically speaking. The guy died in 1856 in an insane asylum. Two years previously, he attempted suicide by throwing himself in the Rhine—he then asked the fishermen who rescued him to take him directly to the asylum. He had warned his wife Clara earlier that he feared he might hurt her.

Right—so he’s not quite your average, happy guy. Nor has he been for a long time. One theory is that he contracted syphilis when at the university, and that it lay dormant until turning into its tertiary state in his last decade.

The diagnosis at the time was dementia praecox, later known as schizophrenia. But a theory more prevalent, today, is that he was bipolar, or manic-depressive.

And there is certain weirdness in the late works. Of which, I may say, I only know one; that, for reasons which should be obvious, is the A minor Cello Concerto.

OK, maybe not as well as Clara did. She was, as you remember, not a lazy girl. She was certainly one of the finest pianists of her time (once, on tour with his wife, Schumann was asked, “oh, are you a musician too?”). She bore eight children, two of whom died in infancy. She cared for Schumann until the end, and was with him when he died. In addition, she composes, and composes well.

So she knows a thing or two, our Clara, or rather Robert’s Clara. And she brings a critical eye—or ear—to anything she hears of plays. So what’s her take on the cello concerto?

Clara Schumann's evaluation of this work, written on October 11, 1851, a year after it was composed, is still valid today. "I have played Robert's Violoncello Concerto again and thus procured for myself a truly musical and happy hour," she recounted. "The romantic quality, the flight, the freshness and the humor, and also the highly interesting interweaving of cello and orchestra are, indeed, wholly ravishing -- and what euphony and what sentiment are in all those melodic passages!"

This, taken from a Kennedy Center program note for the piece.

To me, it’s a work that really requires the right cellist. Whereas the piano concerto pretty much runs itself, the cello concerto is quirky. Lyrical, yes. The third movement is playful, indeed. And the second movement is moving.

But the first movement?

My first reaction is that it’s all over the map. Oh, and where in the world is it going? Because the moment you settle in for a nice tender phrase, the cellist slashes out a D Major arpeggio—a whiplash of energy. And then he goes back again.

There are cellists who can play it, make sense of it, make you like it. Yo Yo Ma, to my surprise, is one. He gets the lyricism, he gets the energy, he can mold the two.

The surprise, here, was listening not to Ma but the recording of the Andante movement of Clara Schumann’s Trio opus 17. And seeing, of course, the photos of the great pianist and composer herself.

I’ll listen to it, again. But I think my reaction will be the same.

There’s music that just misses the jumping off point, the point where you say, “WHAT! What did he just do!” It can be an unexpected modulation, a chord sequence that’s off the chart, a melodic line that’s so unbearable—and so devoid of the bar-line—that you can’t sing it. (That was my experience of the second movement of the Barber Violin Concerto—it drove me crazy until I realized what it was….)

There’s also music that has all the craft, all the skill, and abundant talent. You listen with pleasure. You know that you are in good hands.

What I heard in Clara’s work is a composer in full command of her abilities. But not a composer who will surprise you.

And Robert?

Next to his wife’s work, he both suffers and shines. For all the times he seems to drift aimlessly, there are moments when the score flashes as if doused with gasoline…

…lit by a spark of genius.