Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54

Program notes

About the Work

Schumann’s Piano Concerto began life as something else. In May 1841, in the first year of his marriage to Clara Wieck, he wrote a single-movement Fantasy in A minor for piano and orchestra. Clara, one of the great pianists of the age, tried it out with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra that August, but no publisher wanted a one-movement piece of that kind and it went into a drawer. Four years later, in the summer of 1845, Schumann revised the Fantasy and added two more movements, an Intermezzo and a finale. Clara was the soloist at the premiere of the full concerto in Dresden on 4 December 1845, with Ferdinand Hiller, the work’s dedicatee, conducting. It was performed in Leipzig on New Year’s Day 1846, and it has been one of the most loved concertos in the repertoire ever since.

Schumann had made several attempts at a piano concerto in his twenties and abandoned them all. He was wary of the kind of concerto then in fashion, written mainly as a vehicle for a travelling virtuoso’s fireworks. What he produced instead is a conversation. The piano has a demanding part, including a large cadenza, but it often accompanies the orchestra rather than dominating it, supporting a clarinet or oboe solo, or weaving figuration around a melody in the strings. Early reviewers noticed this, some praising the independent and colourful orchestral writing and others remarking that the piano sometimes seemed to recede into the background.

The music is also, unmistakably, about Clara. The wistful oboe melody that dominates the first movement begins with the notes C, B, A, A. In German notation B natural is written H, so the notes can spell C-H-A-A, a shortened form of “Chiara”, the Italian version of Clara’s name that Schumann used for her in his writings. Whether he meant it as a cipher is debated, but the theme returns in so many guises, tender, urgent, dreamy and finally triumphant, that it is hard not to hear it as a portrait.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro affettuoso. The concerto opens with a single sharp stroke from the orchestra, and the piano answers with a cascade of loud chords tumbling downward. Then the mood switches at once: the oboe sings the gentle main theme, and the piano repeats it. Almost everything in the movement grows from that melody. Listen for it speeded up and agitated, for a slow, dreamy version in a distant key in the middle of the movement, and for the passages where a solo clarinet takes the lead and the piano becomes its accompanist. The large written-out cadenza near the end is followed by a fast coda built, once again, on the main theme.

II. Intermezzo: Andantino grazioso. A short, intimate movement in F major. The piano and strings exchange a delicate little figure, almost a dialogue of polite remarks, and in the middle section the cellos take over with a broad, warm melody while the piano accompanies. At the end, the winds recall the first movement’s main theme, and without a break the music slides straight into the finale.

III. Allegro vivace. The finale bursts in, in a bright A major, with a vigorous, waltz-like theme. Schumann plays tricks with the rhythm here: in places the music seems to switch into slower, broader beats that cut across the written time, and a good performance lets you feel the ground shift. The movement is long and exuberant, and it builds to an extended coda that ends in unambiguous celebration.