Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 97 (‘Rheinische’)

Program notes

About the Work

Schumann’s ‘Rhenish’ Symphony is music of homecoming and celebration. In 1850 he took up a new post as municipal music director in Düsseldorf, on the Rhine, and the move into the warm, vital cultural life of the Rhineland clearly delighted him. The symphony (the last he composed, though published as his Third) poured out in a few weeks at the end of that year, and it overflows with the broad, generous, open-air spirit of the great river and its people. Where so much of Schumann’s music is inward and confiding, the ‘Rhenish’ is public and expansive, a portrait of a region and a mood.

It has an unusual five-movement design, recalling Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, and the extra movement is the key to its character. After a soaring first movement and a genial scherzo (originally headed ‘Morning on the Rhine’), Schumann inserts, before the finale, a solemn, awe-struck slow movement inspired by a real event: the Schumanns had visited the great Gothic cathedral at Cologne, where the archbishop was about to be elevated to cardinal. The fourth movement, marked ‘Feierlich’ (solemnly), is Schumann’s musical evocation of that grandeur: a hushed, archaic processional built on chorale-like brass, conjuring the soaring stone vaults of the cathedral.

The symphony was premiered in Düsseldorf on 6 February 1851 under the composer’s own direction. It remains the sunniest and most extrovert of his symphonies and, in its ‘cathedral’ movement, the site of some of his most profound and original music.

What to Listen For

The first movement bursts in without preamble on a great, surging theme in swinging triple time, one of Schumann’s most exhilarating openings. Listen for how the rhythm seems to push against the bar-lines, giving the music its irresistible forward sweep, and for the broad, horn-led climaxes that evoke the wide Rhineland landscape.

The second movement is a relaxed, rustic scherzo with a folk-like, almost beer-hall lilt (Schumann first marked it ‘Morning on the Rhine’); the third is a tender, songful intermezzo. Then comes the heart of the work: the solemn fourth movement. Listen for the hushed entry of the trombones intoning a grave, chorale-like theme, and for the dense, archaic, almost ecclesiastical counterpoint that follows: music of extraordinary weight and mystery, evoking the vast space of Cologne Cathedral. Out of this solemnity the finale springs, bright and festive, sweeping away the shadows; listen near the end for the return of the cathedral music, now transfigured and triumphant, crowning the symphony in radiant E-flat.