Book review: Robert Schumann’s Leipzig Chamber Works: Music in the Great Stream of Time

Robert Schumann’s Leipzig Chamber Works: Music in the Great Stream of Time

Julie Hedges Brown

224PP ISBN 9780197749463

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS £64 

Julie Hedges Brown’s study of Schumann’s three string quartets op.41, Piano Quintet op.44 and Piano Quartet op.47 offers novel musical insights from the perspectives of both the composer himself during his career and his diverse global audience then and since. In analysing Schumann’s stylistic development, she uses these five works as examples of demonstrating, via detailed analyses of selected movements in various forms, some of the ways in which Schumann realised his belief that structural models inherited from his predecessors could inspire imaginative new ones. Whether the outcomes represent Schumann as a conservative or a progressive composer is also debated.

Brown’s compact, well-organised and impeccably produced volume is a welcome contribution to Schumann scholarship, its five chapters and brief epilogue exploring numerous different avenues in respect of Schumann’s biography and aesthetic, and potentially inspiring new interpretative pathways. Equipped with all the requisite scholarly apparatus, it incorporates a wide-ranging bibliography and especially copious endnotes, which provide not only relevant source details but also, in many cases, much helpful supplementary information.

Following an introductory chapter, in which she sets out her stall and justifies these works’ importance in Schumann’s compositional development, Brown traces the origins of Schumann’s ‘competing tonic’ usage back to both Beethovenian and style hongrois influence, exploring the phenomenon on both inter- and intra-movement levels (in op.41 no.1 and op.44’s finale respectively).

She then investigates Schumann’s quest for ‘new middle movements of different [expressive] character’ and explores the influences behind his creation of ‘nested forms’. She focuses on his re-conception of the repetition element in the scherzo-trio of op.41 no.1 and op.41 no.2’s Andante quasi variazioni, the latter mirroring the two variation sets ‘nested’ within the second movement of Beethoven’s Quartet op.127.

She develops her investigation further into various extramusical idioms, notably dance, airing Wayne Heisler’s observation that choreographers have often regarded knowledge about Schumann’s life as essential to experiencing his works (‘dancing to Schumann’s music is to dance also with Schumann’). Heisler cites Hans van Manen’s ballet Four Schumann Pieces (1975), based on Schumann’s op.41 no.3, and proposes that Manen’s subject is ‘pieces of Schumann himself’ – a misunderstood ‘outsider’.

Brown concurs, concluding that van Manen’s choreography of the Adagio, incorporating a pas de deux for two male dancers and duets for the principal ballerino with each of the two female dancers, adopts ‘different strategies for challenging conventional gender markers and boundary lines.’ She also claims that the movement invites fresh musical insights and multiple analytical interpretations, owing to the principal theme’s ‘resistance to a fixed identity’ within its continuous variation design and deliberately blurred divisions.

Chapter 5 examines the Leipzig chamber works’ reception in 19th-century London, where performances of Schumann’s music (from 1848 onwards) exposed ‘deep ideological divides’, initially between English and Continental tastes and later between conservative and progressive voices. Many English critics cast Schumann as the modernist opposite of the much-revered classicist Mendelssohn and their negative reviews of his music intensified as they began associating him with Wagner. The successful efforts of Clara Schumann to promote her late husband’s music in England and transform such negativity through her concert performances (especially of opp.44 and 47) in 1856–88 are also assessed.

Brown’s Epilogue focuses on an ad hoc ensemble’s performance, in the Grand Canyon’s intense heat, of op.41 no.3’s first movement to a diverse audience during a music-themed river-rafting trip. She conveniently aligns this bizarre scenario with her book’s overarching objective of discovering ‘alternative frameworks’ of hearing and understanding Schumann’s Leipzig chamber works. By bringing together an ‘old’ composer’s music with a new impromptu audience of vastly differing persuasions, the Colorado river’s eternal course through an ever-changing terrain fittingly epitomises her ‘great stream of time.’

ROBIN STOWELL