Alan Gilbert and Isabelle Faust: Brett Dean and Schumann’s Second Symphony

About the Work

Brett Dean’s violin concerto began with a worry about handwriting. In the note he wrote for the score he observes that the art of letter writing is disappearing, and that writing by hand may itself be an endangered skill. Watching his daughters grow up surrounded by screens persuaded him that we are losing touch with the tactile side of written communication. He cites an Australian newspaper report that personal letters had fallen from half of all the mail handled by Australia Post in 1960 to 13 per cent. We are in contact with one another more than ever, he concedes, but the nature of that contact has changed.

The concerto, completed in 2006, was commissioned jointly by the Cologne Philharmonie and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra for Frank Peter Zimmermann, to whom it is dedicated. Zimmermann gave the first performance in Cologne on 8 March 2007 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. In 2009 the piece won the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, awarded by the University of Louisville.

Each of its four movements is headed by a few lines from a nineteenth-century letter, and each title gives the place and year in which that letter was written. The letters range from private declarations to a public manifesto. Dean explains that the violin acts as both writer and recipient, and that the solo part is meant above all to catch the mood of each letter.

‘Hamburg, 1854’ draws on what Dean calls one of the great secret romances of classical music: Johannes Brahms writing to Clara Schumann. ‘The Hague, 1882’ comes from Vincent van Gogh, who tells a fellow painter that the lasting beauty of nature is the one constant in his troubled and unsettled life. ‘Vienna, 1886’ quotes the composer Hugo Wolf, in a frank outpouring of feeling to someone close to him. ‘Jerilderie, 1879’ takes its cue from the Jerilderie Letter of Ned Kelly, the Australian outlaw, who set down in that small country town a public statement pleading the innocence of his family and of other poor Irish settlers in north-eastern Victoria, and demanding justice.

Two of the four correspondents were composers, and Dean lets their music into his own. The first movement borrows a texture from Brahms and threads part of one of his early works through the orchestra. The third grew out of a movement of Dean’s song cycle Wolf-Lieder, in which he had set the same passage from Wolf’s letter.

The piece is a full-scale concerto of more than half an hour, with a large orchestra that includes four percussionists, harp and two pianos, one of them prepared.

What to Listen For

‘Hamburg, 1854’. The opening bars are a murmur of rapid, oscillating notes. Dean took the figure from a brief passage in the slow movement of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, an orchestral texture he says has always fascinated him. It makes a rippling background against which the violin enters like someone sitting down to write, spinning a long, passionate line to a person who cannot return the feeling. Listen also for traces of Brahms’s early Variations on a Theme of Schumann, which surface during the movement.

‘The Hague, 1882’. This is the slow movement, broad and prayer-like, and the longest stretch of calm in the piece. The violin sings over quiet, slowly shifting harmonies, the musical counterpart of van Gogh’s thought that nature stays beautiful whatever happens to the person looking at it.

‘Vienna, 1886’. A short intermezzo, and the most song-like of the four, since it began life as a setting for voice. The solo violin takes over the singer’s part.

‘Jerilderie, 1879’. The finale is a desperate perpetuum mobile: the soloist hardly stops, and the music hurtles through passages of great virtuosity. Dean notes that for all its brilliance the movement never loses the sense of approaching catastrophe that hangs over Kelly’s document.

About the Work

Schumann sketched his C major symphony in about two weeks, in the second half of December 1845. Finishing it took most of the following year. The work of orchestration was interrupted again and again by poor health, including low spirits and a ringing in his ears, and the score was not ready until October 1846. Felix Mendelssohn conducted the first performance at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 5 November. It was received coolly, and did better when it was repeated some ten days later. Published in 1847 as Symphony No. 2, it was in fact the third symphony Schumann had completed.

It was also the first large work he wrote after a severe breakdown in 1844, which for a long time had left him unable to compose at all. Schumann himself linked the symphony to his illness. Three years later he told the Hamburg musician D. G. Otten that he had written it in December 1845 while still half sick, that he feared this could be heard in the music, that he began to feel himself again only while working on the finale, and that the piece reminded him of a dark time. Alan Gilbert, according to the Berliner Philharmoniker, calls the symphony a “musical autobiography”, shaped by Schumann’s love for his wife Clara and by his reverence for Bach.

Bach matters here. In 1845 Robert and Clara Schumann had worked their way through an intensive course of counterpoint together, studying fugues and writing their own, and Schumann said that from this year he began to compose in a different way, working ideas out in his head. The symphony shows it. Its themes are often conceived as two lines sounding together, and ideas from one movement turn up, transformed, in another.

The darkness Schumann heard in the piece is real but it does not win. The annotator John Daverio pointed out that for a work supposedly marked by sickness, the Second is fundamentally affirmative, and that its sombre moments serve mostly to set off the brighter music around them.

What to Listen For

Sostenuto assai. Allegro, ma non troppo. The symphony begins quietly, with a solemn call in the brass over a slowly flowing line in the strings. Keep that brass motto in your ear: it returns at key moments later on. The fast music that grows out of the introduction is restless and driven, full of sharp dotted rhythms.

Scherzo: Allegro vivace. Schumann places the scherzo second. It is a whirl of rapid violin figuration, notoriously awkward to play, relieved by two calmer trio sections. At the very end the brass motto from the opening bursts in.

Adagio espressivo. The slow movement, in C minor, is the emotional centre: a long, aching melody introduced by the strings and taken up by the woodwinds. Schumann singled out the “melancholy bassoon” here as a sign of the dark period in which he wrote. Listen also for the high violin trills and for a contrapuntal middle passage, a trace of the Bach studies.

Allegro molto vivace. The finale sets off like a march, and soon sweeps up the melody of the Adagio in its rush. Partway through, the march gives way to a new, gentler theme, in which many listeners hear an echo of the last song of Beethoven’s cycle An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved). In the closing pages Schumann combines this song-like theme with the brass motto from the very opening, and the symphony ends in a blaze of C major.