Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 61

Program notes

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.