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.”
