Piano Quartet in E flat Op.47
Sostenuto assai – Allegro ma non troppo
Scherzo: Molto vivace
Andante cantabile
Finale: Vivace
The great energising force behind Schumann’s mature music was his love for Clara Wieck. As their long and difficult courtship neared a happy end, his piano music of the 1830s blossomed into the great song cycles of 1840. "I have been composing so much that it really seems quite uncanny at times," he wrote to her "I cannot help it, and should like to sing myself to death, like a nightingale". After the couple were married in September that year he broke out into the Symphony; he produced his first two symphonies, an Overture, Scherzo and Finale and the first movement of his Piano Concerto in less than twelve months. The following year he fell briefly silent again - Clara was away on a concert tour to Denmark and throughout the spring he stayed behind in Leipzig and drowned his melancholy in "beer and champagne" and the scores of Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart’s string quartets. As soon as Clara was back his creativity boiled over anew; in 7 weeks in June and July 1842 he completed his three String Quartets Op.41; he wrote his Piano Quintet Op.44 in 19 days in September and October; and on 24th October began his Piano Quartet Op.47, completing it a month later.
So it’s not surprising that the Piano Quartet turned out as it did, composed under the inspiration of Schumann’s feelings for Clara and under the discipline of his recent study of the classical masters. The Quartet is less expansive, less flamboyant than the better-known Piano Quintet, but it shows a special effort by this essentially epigrammatic composer to grasp classical structure. The slow introduction, which returns to signpost the key structural features of the first movement, shows a clear debt, in character as well as form, to Beethoven’s late quartets, and each of the four movements displays the concision and thematic unity that Schumann had already tried to master in his D minor Symphony of 1841. The theme of the opening Sostenuto assai, for example, becomes the main subject of the first Allegro, and the opening chords of the finale are prefigured in the coda of the Andante. It’s worth noting Schumann’s achievement in this regard, because it is so easily overshadowed by the work’s sheer force of character. The fast melodies of the Piano Quartet rush forward impetuously with brilliant and demanding writing for each instrument; the slow music explores a special depth of personal feeling. The whole work is unified by the sheer enthusiasm with which Schumann drives the music forward, and the unselfconscious ardour and affecting tenderness of the more reflective passages. Even when working out counterpoint and constructing fugatos, Schumann was the consummate Romantic, striving to prove himself worthy of Clara’s aspirations and his own artistic ideals.
The Piano Quartet is in the standard classical four movements. As already described, the sonata-form first movement is preceded by a slow introduction which recurs at the ends of the exposition and the recapitulation, bringing a note of seriousness to the exuberant and vigorously worked-out main Allegro. The scherzo dances like Mendelssohn’s "fairy music"; Mendelssohn was an admired friend of the Schumanns in Leipzig, but the two short trio sections, which merge seamlessly with the faster music, are absolutely quintessential Schumann miniatures, creating the most delicate poetry from a single petite phrase in the first and the simplest exchange of chords in the second. The Andante is simply a love-song. The instruments take turns to sing and embellish the sweet, heartfelt melody, and at the centre of the movement withdraw into a warm, intimate G flat major in a passage of Beethovenian nobility and pathos. Magical harmonic progressions in the delicate coda prepare the way for the energy of the finale. After the three loud chords anticipated in the closing bars of the Andante, Schumann creates a brilliant and spirited finale from a short semiquaver "tag" and a swinging, song-like second subject. With four chamber-works behind him, and borne on by the full flood of his inspiration, Schumann completed his Piano Quartet with a movement in which the head and the heart find a perfect union.
R. G. Bratby 2001
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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