PF2023 Brochure - Flipbook - Page 14
ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)
Piano Quartet in E flat, Op 47
The work opens with a brief, slow introduction
which reappears twice in an altered form during
the course of the movement, and which contains a
four-note motif that is the basis of the Allegro’s main
theme. This melody, along with a more energetic
idea beginning with an ascending minor-key scale
figure, dominates the movement. The Scherzo
follows, all staccato vigour and rushing imagery,
but is interrupted by two contrasting Trios, each of
these shot through with the Scherzo’s impetuosity.
The movement ends with a whispered echo of the
first Trio.
1 Sostenuto assai – Allegro ma non troppo
2 Scherzo: Molto vivace – Trio I – [Tempo I] –
Trio II – [Tempo I]
3 Andante cantabile
4 Finale: Vivace
In 1840, the year of his marriage to Clara Wieck,
Schumann suddenly discovered that he was a
born song-writer, and produced no fewer than
130 songs (well over half his complete output) in
that year alone. A comparable revolution in his
attitude towards chamber music took place two
years later when, after a period of avid study of the
string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, he
composed his first important chamber works: the
three quartets, Op 41, which followed one another
in quick succession between 4 June and 22 July. It
was to be expected that they would be followed by a
work featuring the instrument on which Schumann
and his wife felt most at home – the piano – and,
sure enough, not many months later he added to
this already impressive feat by the composition of
both a quintet and a quartet for piano and strings.
The slow movement, somehow beginning midsentence, offers one of Schumann’s most achingly
romantic melodies, announced by the cello.
This theme embodies the nineteenth century’s
quintessential longing and unrest with its major
and minor sevenths reaching upward and then
falling away. In the coda of the Andante, the cello
is instructed to tune its lowest string, a C, down to
B flat so that in the final bars it can provide a pedal
bass. During these bars, the theme of the Vivace last
movement is heard softly and slowly.
This Vivace theme – a falling fifth and ascending
sixth followed by semiquaver figures – is treated
fugally, and later set into sharp contrast to more
lyrical material. At the end of the movement, three
of the thematic ideas are combined ingeniously,
a fourth theme returns fleetingly, and the work
concludes with great élan, the piano continuing
to play the dominant role it has been assigned
throughout the work.
Schumann’s Piano Quartet never achieved the same
degree of popularity as the more famous quintet
which preceded it. Even in the composer’s own
day it was heard less often. While Clara Schumann
immediately took the Piano Quintet into her
repertoire, and performed it perhaps more often
than any other work of her husband’s, the Piano
Quartet had to wait until 1849 before she played it
in public. Of the two works it is, however, the Piano
Quartet that is the more subtle and refined.
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