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….
