Name: Robert Schumann - Piano Quintet, Op. 44 (1842) | Videos | Gan Jing World
Uploaded: 2022-02-07T05:00:00.000Z
Duration: 30 min 29 s
Description: Robert Schumann (8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the R... | Videos | Gan Jing World

Bartje Bartmans

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Robert Schumann (8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. Schumann left the study of law, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. He had been assured by his teacher Friedrich Wieck that he could become the finest pianist in Europe, but a hand injury ended this dream. Schumann then focused his musical energies on composing.

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Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44 (1842)
Dedicated to Clara Schumann

1 Allegro brillante (0:00)
2 In modo d’una marcia: Un poco largamente (9:27)
3 Scherzo: Molto vivace (18:05)
4 Allegro, ma non troppo (23:10)

The Atlantis Ensemble
Jaap Schröder and Etienne Abelin violins
Peter Bucknell, viola
Enid Sutherland, cello
Penelope Crawford, fortepiano

Schumann began work on his Piano Quintet in E-flat major, op. 44, on 23 September 1842, completing the fair copy on 12 October; such a brief span of time to create such an extraordinary work bespeaks white-hot inspiration. It was first performed in a Hausmusik setting, with Clara, five months pregnant with her second daughter and not feeling well, replaced at the piano by none other than Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn criticized the second trio in the slow movement as lacking in vitality, and Schumann, responsive to his friend’s critiques, replaced the trio with another as part of a roiling series of emendations to this work en route to completion. The quintet was originally conceived in five moments, not four, and the third or middle movement was at first designed as a “Scena” in G minor. After writing twenty-plus measures of figuration and the beginnings of a melody for the cello, Schumann abandoned the notion and dispensed altogether with any such movement. But the strenuous labours paid off: this work was an instant success. When it was performed in Berlin as part of the 1846- 1847 Singakademie season, it was hailed as “one of the most important works of its kind since Beethoven.” For Schumann, who wrote in his diary for November 1842, “I love Mozart dearly, but I worship Beethoven like a god who is forever apart, who will never become one of us,” this must have been the highest of high praise.
What he created in the quintet, according to the great Schumann scholar John Daverio, was a nearly ideal mediation between quasi-symphonic traits—the breadth of the scoring and the spacing of the sonorities are orchestral in quality— and chamber music elements. “In this work,” Schumann seems to say, “you too can have an orchestra in your parlour.”

Mrs. Crawford plays Conrad Graf ’s Grand Piano, Opus 2148
The grand piano was found in Sweden by Edward Swenson of Trumansburg, NY, who, with the help
of his colleague Robert Murphy, spent two years restoring it. The beauty of the cabinet work and the extensive gilded brass decoration suggest that the instrument may have been made for a noble family. Although unplayable at the time of its discovery, the instrument still had most of its original strings, tuning pins, leather hammers, and dampers. The piano is triple-strung (three strings per hammer) throughout most of its six-and-a-halfoctave range. The case design and label suggest that the piano was built around 1835, toward the end of Graf's middle period of work, just before he won the gold medal in the first Austrian industrial products exhibition. (From December of 1835 on, the soundboards of his instruments bore printed and signed labels celebrating this triumph.) Most of Graf's piano of this period, Opus 2148 included, were equipped with four pedals: one to raise the dampers, one to shift the keyboard so that the hammers struck only one or two, rather than all three strings, and two “moderator” pedals, which placed a single or double strip of felt between the hammers and string, creating a soft and unusual timbre.
Edward E. Swenson
(Trumansburg, NY) #ClassicalMusic