Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 38 “Spring”

Program notes

About the Work

Until he was thirty Robert Schumann was known almost entirely as a composer for the piano. Then, in 1840, the year he married Clara Wieck after a long legal fight with her father, he wrote songs: well over a hundred of them in a few months. Clara wanted more. She thought his imagination needed a larger canvas than the keyboard, and wrote in her diary that her highest wish was to see him compose for orchestra.

He did so at great speed. The whole symphony was sketched in four days, from 23 to 26 January 1841, and the orchestration was finished within a month. Felix Mendelssohn conducted the first performance at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 31 March. It was warmly received, and it changed Schumann’s standing: he was now a symphonist, and three more symphonies followed over the next ten years.

The nickname is Schumann’s own. The spark is usually said to have been a poem by the Leipzig writer Adolf Böttger, which ends with the lines ‘O turn, O turn and change your course, in the valley spring is blooming’. At first each movement had a title: the beginning of spring, evening, merry playmates, spring in full bloom. Schumann removed them before the score was printed, but he went on describing the work in the same terms. To a conductor preparing a performance he wrote that he would like the opening trumpet call to sound ‘as if it came from on high, like a summons to awakening’, and that the rest of the introduction might suggest the world turning green, even a butterfly in the air. He added that these were ideas that had come to him only after the piece was finished.

That is a fair warning against listening for a story. The symphony was written in the middle of a Saxon winter, and what it conveys is not a landscape but what Schumann called the longing for spring: restlessness, expectation and a great deal of physical energy.

What to Listen For

I. Andante un poco maestoso, Allegro molto vivace. Trumpets and horns open with the summons, a short fanfare that has traditionally been linked with the last lines of Böttger’s poem. The slow introduction that follows grows steadily brighter and faster until the fanfare, speeded up, turns into the main theme of the Allegro. Almost the whole movement is driven by that one rhythm. Near the end Schumann holds back a surprise: a new, songful melody that has not been heard before.

II. Larghetto. A long song for the violins, which the composer of so many recent songs lets unfold without hurry. It returns on the cellos and later on oboe and horn, each time with richer decoration around it. In the closing bars the trombones enter quietly with a solemn phrase. It turns out to be a preview of the next movement, which follows without a break.

III. Scherzo: Molto vivace. The trombones’ phrase becomes a stamping dance in D minor. Schumann gives the movement two contrasting middle sections instead of one: the first a quick exchange between strings and wind in two beats to the bar, the second built on running scales. The ending slows and fades away instead of closing with a bang.

IV. Allegro animato e grazioso. A bold rising scale from the full orchestra introduces a light, tripping theme for the violins. The movement has the grace of a dance and something of Mendelssohn’s quickness. Just before the opening music returns, everything stops for horn calls and a short flute cadenza, like birdsong heard out of doors. The coda gathers speed and ends the symphony in high spirits.