BRAHMS & SCHUMANN ORCHESTRAL WORKS
In March 1879 Brahms was made a Doctor of Philosophy by Breslau University and asked to compose something for the occasion, but it was not until August 1880 that he complied with the request – not with a ‘Doctoral Symphony’ or a ‘Festival Ode’ as requested, but with an Overture, which, in retaliation of the University’s Latin description of him as ‘the most famous living German composer of serious music’, was, in his words, ‘a pot-pourri of student songs a la Suppe’, ending with an exuberant setting of Gaudeamus igitur. Brahms himself conducted the first performance, in Breslau, on 4 January 1881.
Brahms began his last symphony in the summer of 1884, finished it a year later, and conducted the first performance on 25 October 1885 in Meiningen. It is, in a sense, the most classical and ‘contained’ of the four, if compared with the heroic grandeur of No. 1, the geniality of No. 2, and the impassioned fervor of NO. 3 – admittedly a generalization. The opening at once emphasizes the thoughtful quality of the work, but it gives no hint of the drama of later events in the course of the first movement. The two middle movements are a noble Andante moderato in E major and a rondo-like Allegro giocoso in C, which, with its ‘bacchanalian fury’, Sir Donald Tovey (momentarily forgetting the third movement of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony?) described as ‘perhaps the greatest scherzo since Beethoven’. The finale is in the form of a huge passacaglia, that is, a movement based on one continuously repeated theme (here eight bars long and taken from the final choral Ciacona of Bach’s Cantata No. 150).
Schumann’s only opera, Genoveva, to a libretto by Robert Reinick based on dramas by Tieck and Hebbel, was produced in Leipzig on 25 May 1850, with the composer conducting. It re-tells, in rather melodramatic terms, the medieval legend of Genevieve, the wife of Count Siegfried of Brabant, who was falsely accused by his major-domo Golo of adultery during Siegfried’s absence at the wars, sentenced to death but then exiled, and finally rescued by and reunited with her husband.
In 1848-9 Schumann wrote an overture and fifteen pieces of incidental music for a stage performance of Byron’s dramatic poem Manfred. This performance did not take place during the composer’s lifetime, but he conducted a performance of the overture at a Gewandhaus concert in Leipzig on 14 March 1852. Ignaz Moscheles considered it to be ‘the most magnificent thing Schumann ever did‘, and it is unquestionably the finest of his overtures, capturing the dark, brooding mood of its subject in a way that the incidental music itself never quite matches.
By Robin Golding, 1999
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