Andante and Variations for Two Pianos, Two Cellos and Horn
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau
Died July 29, 1856, Endenich

This unusual piece is almost unknown to audiences. Schumann himself abandoned it, and the music exists today only because it had one very passionate-and famous-admirer.

In the year 1842 Schumann turned to chamber music. He was most naturally a composer of piano music and of songs, and he felt threatened by the whole prospect of chamber music-Schumann did not play a stringed instrument, and he knew how formidable the competition was. He spent the spring studying quartets by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and then-in a great rush of energy-composed three string quartets that summer. The Piano Quintet quickly followed in October, and Schumann kept going: after "constant fearful sleepless nights," he completed the Piano Quartet in November. And still he continued to write chamber music. A Piano Trio in A Minor was finished in December, and in January 1843 he wrote the Andante and Variations for Two Pianos, Two Cellos and Horn.

But now Schumann began to have doubts about his work. He was dissatisfied with the last two works and held them back. Seven years later he would recast the trio as the Phantasiestücke, Opus 88, but-on the recommendation of Felix Mendelssohn-Schumann quickly revised the Andante and Variations, recasting it for two pianos, and in this form it was published as his Opus 46 in August 1843.

The manuscript of the original version went onto the shelf, and there it might remain to this day but for one man. Johannes Brahms, who as a youth of twenty had been championed by Schumann, knew and loved this music in its original form. In 1893-half a century after it was composed-Brahms convinced Schumann's widow Clara to allow him to edit and publish the original version. Brahms particularly liked the unusual combination of colors in Schumann's original, and it is only because of his passion for this version that we are able to hear the work on this concert. (And do we hear some of Brahms' love for this music's combination of string, piano and horn sonorities in his own Horn Trio of 1865?)

The music itself consists of a gentle theme, marked Andante espressivo, and a set of variations on it. Even in Schumann's original version, the two pianos have most of the musical interest, and the cellos and horn are used primarily for color and harmonic underpinning. When Schumann revised the work for two pianos, he shortened it considerably, cutting out some of the episodes that feature the other three instruments more prominently.

A misty introduction by the cellos and horn leads to the presentation of the theme, which the two pianos take turns introducing. As noted, the pianists have most of the responsibility for the variations, with the other three instruments contributing occasional swirls of sound and color to their texture. In the course of the variations Schumann quotes the music of the first song, "Seit ich ihn gesehen," from his cycle Frauenliebe und -leben, which he had composed three years earlier.

The song speaks of the first rush of a young woman's love for the man she will eventually marry, and here that theme contributes to the romantic ardor of Schumann's variations. One of the most effective variations comes near the end, when Schumann writes a brusque march-like episode (despite the triple meter) that proceeds tautly along its way; this was, unfortunately, one of the variations he would cut from the two-piano version. At the end, quiet chains of sixteenth-notes from the two pianos draw this little-known music to its subdued close.