Manfred Overture, Opus 115
Robert SCHUMANN
Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Germany
Died July 29, 1856, Endenich, Germany

Robert Schumann felt a special enthusiasm for Byron's Manfred. Friends reported that he would read it at social gatherings, and on one of those occasions he was so moved that he burst into tears and had to stop. Written in April 1817, when Byron was 29, Manfred tells the story of that morose and lonely figure who lives in a castle "amongst the Higher Alps," where he not only champions liberty but broods over some nameless sin from the past, perhaps involving his sister Astarte, now dead. In this world of turmoil, one that seems peopled more often by spirits than human characters, Manfred remains true to his ideals, even in death.

Manfred has been described variously as a "dramatic poem" or a "poetic drama," but Byron was adamant that it was not to be performed on stage-he himself described it as a "Poem in Dialogue" and intended that it was to be read. Nevertheless, Manfred was sometimes staged in the nineteenth century, and Robert Schumann was invited to compose incidental music for a stage performance in Weimar. Schumann was excited about the project, and he worked quickly: he made his first sketches in the summer of 1848, completed the overture on October 19, and had the entire score complete by the end of November. But that music, which consists of the overture and fifteen shorter pieces, had to wait a long time for a performance: it was not until four years later, on June 13, 1852, that Franz Liszt led the first staging in Weimar. By that time, Schumann himself had already conducted the première of the overture, on March 14, 1852, in Leipzig.

Schumann was particularly enthusiastic about the overture, telling Liszt that he "felt it is one of the finest of my brain children, and I wish you may agree with me." Liszt in fact liked the overture very much ("I count it among your greatest successes," he wrote to the composer), and the Manfrend Overture has become the most popular of Schumann's overtures. Some have been ready to hear the Manfrend Overture as a tone poem, with different themes depicting different characters, but that may be over-interpreting. Dark and dramatic, the overture sets the mood for Byron's melancholy tale. It gets off to a fierce start: three quick chords make a firm call to order. Schumann syncopates these chords, so that each is a sort of rolling attack, then immediately relaxes the tempo for a long, slow introduction. Here various theme-shapes anticipate the overture's principal themes before the music rushes ahead into the main body of the overture, marked "At a passionate tempo." The impetuous opening idea alternates with a falling, gliding second theme, and this fluid alternation of tempo will characterize the entire piece. Across the span of the overture we hear faint but ominous trumpet calls, perhaps a reminder of the doom awaiting Byron's hero. At the end, the music of the slow introduction returns, and Schumann's overture descends into morose silence on brief reminiscences of its principal themes.

Piano Concerto in A Minor, Opus 54

In September 1840, Robert Schumann married the young Clara Wieck, one of the finest pianists in the world, and in that happy first year of marriage he wrote over 130 songs. But Clara was anxious that he try something more ambitious. In her journal she wrote, "My greatest wish is for him to compose for orchestra-that's his field. May I succeed in leading him to it." In the spring of 1841, she got her wish: Schumann composed his "Spring" Symphony and sketched a further symphony, but he also pressed on with another project, this time with his wife specifically in mind. He composed what he called a Concert Fantasy for piano and orchestra, and Clara (eight months pregnant) tried it out at a private rehearsal with the Leipzig orchestra that summer. But Schumann could find no publisher interested in a one-movement piece for piano and orchestra, and the music stayed on the shelf for four years. Then in the summer of 1845 Schumann returned to it, wrote a finale, and composed the middle movement last. What had begun as an individual movement had become a piano concerto.

Clara was delighted: "Robert has . . . done a fine last movement . . . I am very glad, because I have never had a large-sized bravura piece from him." She played the première in Dresden on December 4, 1845, with Ferdinand Hiller conducting, and repeated it in Leipzig on New Year's Day 1846 with Mendelssohn on the podium. It was soon played throughout Europe, and it remains-a century and a half after its composition-one of the most popular piano concertos ever written.

Yet it has a unique form. This is not a virtuoso concerto, a style that was becoming popular by the middle of the nineteenth century. Schumann said: "I cannot write a concerto for virtuoso; I shall have to contrive something else." But neither does he return to the classical model of Mozart and Beethoven, with its symphonic argument advanced mutually by soloist and orchestra. This is a much smaller-scaled conception, more intimate in character, with the piano right at the center. Recognizing that his concerto did not conform to any existing model, Schumann called it "something between symphony, concerto and grand sonata." Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate the ingenuity of this concerto. Despite a period of composition that stretched over four years, this music is beautifully unified around one main theme, which appears in all three movements, imaginatively varied on each appearance.

Schumann gives each movement an Italian tempo marking, but modifies each of these with an important qualification meant to suggest the music's character. The opening movement is the expected Allegro, but Schumann specifies that it should be affetuoso: "affectionate." He instantly reverses classical form by having the piano introduce the orchestra: its cascading chords lead to the woodwinds' statement of what will be the concerto's central theme, here marked espressivo. The piano plays virtually throughout this concerto: the orchestra's role is to accompany and sometimes to repeat or expand the soloist's melodies. Characteristically, Schumann writes out a cadenza himself rather than allowing soloists the opportunity to write their own-he was afraid that too brilliant a cadenza would violate the gentle spirit of this music. The coda, a brisk march derived from the main theme, propels the movement to its firm close.

Schumann calls the middle movement an Intermezzo and marks it Andantino grazioso. Graceful it certainly is, with soloist and orchestra offering a delicate question-and-answer opening section and cellos soaring in the middle. The concerto's main theme reappears in the transition to the finale as a tantalizing foretaste of what is to come, and this bursts to life at the Allegro vivace, where the piano thunders out the theme-shape in its most powerful manifestation. The finale is in sonata form, and Schumann treats the main theme to some vigorous counterpoint (and some wonderful rhythmic displacements) along the way before rushing to the close of this unique concerto, music that is fired in every measure by its creator's love for his wife.

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Opus 92
Ludwig Van BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770, Bonn
Died March 26, 1827, Vienna

Beethoven turned 40 in December 1810. Forty can be a difficult age for anyone, but for Beethoven things were going very well. True, his hearing had deteriorated to the point where he was virtually deaf, but he was still riding that white-hot explosion of creativity that has become known, for better or worse, as his "Heroic Style." Over the decade-long span of that style (1803-1813) Beethoven essentially re-imagined music and its possibilities. The works that crystalized the Heroic Style-the Eroica and the Fifth Symphony-unleashed a level of violence and darkness previously unknown in music, forces that Beethoven's biographer Maynard Solomon has described as "hostile energy," and then triumphed over them. In these violent symphonies, music became not a matter of polite discourse but of conflict, struggle, and resolution.

In the fall of 1811, Beethoven began a new symphony-it would be his Seventh-and it would differ sharply from those two famous predecessors. Gone is the sense of cataclysmic struggle and hard-won victory that had driven those earlier symphonies. There are no battles fought and won in the Seventh Symphony-instead, this music is infused from its first instant with a mood of pure celebration. Such a spirit has inevitably produced a number of interpretations as to what this symphony is "about": Berlioz heard a peasants' dance in it, Wagner called it "the apotheosis of the dance," and more recently Maynard Solomon has suggested that the Seventh is the musical representation of a festival, a brief moment of pure spiritual liberation.

But it may be safest to leave the issue of "meaning" aside and instead listen to the Seventh simply as music. There had never been music like this before, nor has there been since-Beethoven's Seventh Symphony contains more energy than any other piece of music ever written. Much has been made (correctly) of Beethoven's ability to transform small bits of theme into massive symphonic structures, but in the Seventh he begins not so much with theme as with rhythm: he builds the entire symphony from what are almost scraps of rhythm, tiny figures that seem unpromising, even uninteresting, in themselves. Gradually he unleashes the energy locked up in these small figures and from them builds one of the mightiest symphonies ever written.

The first movement opens with a slow introduction so long that it almost becomes a separate movement of its own. Tremendous chords punctuate the slow beginning, which gives way to a poised duet for oboes. The real effect of this long Poco sostenuto, however, is to coil the energy that will be unleashed in the true first movement, and Beethoven conveys this rhythmically: the meter of the introduction is a rock-solid (even square) 4/4, but the main body of the movement, marked Vivace, transforms this into a light-footed 6/8. This Vivace begins in what seems a most unpromising manner, however, as woodwinds toot out a simple dotted 6/8 rhythm and the solo flute announces the first theme, a graceful melody on this same rhythm. Beethoven builds the entire first movement from this simple dotted rhythm, which saturates virtually every measure. As theme, as accompaniment, as motor rhythm, it is always present, hammering into our consciousness. At the climax, horns sail majestically to the close as the orchestra thunders out that rhythm one final time.

The second movement, in A minor, is one of Beethoven's most famous slow movements, but the debate continues as to whether it really is a slow movement. Beethoven could not decide whether to mark it Andante (a walking tempo) or Allegretto (a moderately fast pace). He finally decided on Allegretto, though the actual pulse is somewhere between those two. This movement too is built on a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the first five notes: long-short-short-long-long-and this pattern repeats here almost as obsessively as the pattern of the first movement. The opening sounds like a series of static chords-the theme itself occurs quietly inside those chords-and Beethoven simply repeats this theme, varying it as it proceeds. The central episode in A major moves gracefully along smoothly-flowing triplets before a little fugato on the opening rhythms builds to a great climax. Beethoven winds the movement down on the woodwinds' almost skeletal reprise of the fundamental rhythm.

The Scherzo explodes to life on a theme full of grace notes, powerful accents, flying staccatos, and timpani explosions. This alternates with a trio section for winds reportedly based on an old pilgrims' hymn, though no one, it seems, has been able to identify that exact hymn. Beethoven offers a second repeat of the trio, then seems about to offer a third before five abrupt chords drive the movement to its close.

These chords set the stage for the Allegro con brio, again built on the near-obsessive treatment of a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the movement's opening four-note fanfare. This four-note pattern punctuates the entire movement: it shapes the beginning of the main theme, and its stinging accents thrust the music forward continuously as this movement almost boils over with energy. The ending is remarkable: above growling cellos and basses (which rock along on a two-note ostinato for 28 measures), the opening theme drives to a climax that Beethoven marks fff, a dynamic marking he almost never used. This conclusion is virtually Bacchanalian in its wild power-no matter how many times one has heard it, the ending of the Seventh Symphony remains one of the most exciting moments in all of music.

The first performance of the Seventh Symphony took place in the Great Hall of the University in Vienna on December 8, 1813. Though nearly deaf at this point, Beethoven led the performance, and the orchestra was able to compensate for his failings, so that the première was a huge success. On that occasion-and at three subsequent performances over the next few months-the audience demanded that the second movement be repeated.