night rpm

My jones for Schumann’s F-A-E Intermezzo from Violin Sonata No. 3, from phonofranca:

First of all: a killer post on late Schumann by msodradek, my kindred spirit. She’s a total mystery and an inspiration to me, please go read her take on Märchenerzählungen.

Attached music file is the slow Intermezzo movement from Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 3, beautifully recorded by ECM. The violinist is Carolin Widmann sensitively accompanied by Dénes Várjon on the piano. I’d written about this movement before on a different website I used to keep, now defunct, so I thought I might as well re-post some of the posts here.

Schumann cobbled together No. 3 by taking two movements from another work to which he had contributed previously – the F-A-E Sonata. The F-A-E Sonata was a collective effort. The first movement was composed by Albert Dietrich, Schumann’s pupil who was to become Brahms’s lifelong friend. Schumann wrote the second movement (the attached mp3 file, Intermezzo) and the finale. And Brahms wrote the third movement, Scherzo. Why F-A-E? They decided to prominently feature the notes, F, A, and E as the sonata’s musical code, for Joachim’s self-proclaimed motto was Frei aber einsam - Free but lonely. Yes, I believe that if Joachim was alive, he’d perhaps be a devotee of the Twilight franchise of movies and books.

The F-A-E Sonata was composed just four months before Schumann threw himself into the Rhine. The deterioration of Schumann’s mental state was rapid and alarming. After he was rescued by the fishermen from his suicide attempt, he was committed to the asylum in Endenich in March of 1854, where he would live out the rest of his life for two and a half years, until his death.  

People still speculate as to what exactly Schumann’s mental ailment might have been. There is no doubt, however, that he was certifiably mad. He heard voices from Bach and Schubert, who dictated musical themes to him. Still other voices told him that he is sailing in the arctic seas and commanded him to make maps and lists of towns and rivers. From March of 1855, he began losing his ability to speak coherently, often merely gurgling; his doctor wrote in his diary that Schumann sounded as though he were speaking with his mouth half-full, and what he uttered were mostly a series of inchoate, animalistic vowels.

In 1856, he entered into a self-starvation mode, and became skeletal in figure. He became further obsessed with picking names out of maps and atlases. Here is Brahms’ account after visiting Schumann in April of 1856 -

We sat down, it became increasingly painful for me, his eyes were moist, he spoke continuously, but I understood nothing… Often he just blabbered, sort of bababa-dadada. While questioning him at length, I understood the names, Marie, Julie, Berlin, Vienna, England, not much more.

He died in July of 1856.

Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 3 is regarded as a slight work, and in fact, Clara Schumann had refused to publish it originally (the piece was only published in 1956). As thisNY Times article explains, for a long time, many of the critics claimed that Schumann’s late music suffered from “exhaustion” because they perceived mental and behavioral patterns exhibited by Schumann, noted by his doctor, Franz Richarz, as a mental exhaustion (Richarz’s diary noting Schumann’s symptoms is sad, but fascinating to read.) As the 20th century forensic diagnoses of Schumann’s symptoms revealed his condition as being more schizophrenic in nature, the notion that Schumann’s late music is characterized by “exhaustion” has become untenable. Pretty silly, actually. But the damage has been done, no doubt.

The attached music file, the Intermezzo movement from the Violin Sonata No. 3, reminds me of a supremely beautiful and melancholic late Schumann duet, “In der Nacht,” which I wrote about previously. The same kind of emotional compression evident in “In der Nacht” also paces the attached 3-minute long F-A-E Intermezzo from the No. 3 Violin Sonata. Carolin Widmann’s serenely luminous violin tone is an ideal instrument for this movement, just as Jan de Gaetani’s silvery, anti-hysterical voice had been for “In der Nacht” – both the F-A-E Intermezzo and “In der Nacht” fairly shimmer with subdued longing and poetry by their accounts.

The attached Intermezzo begins in F-major. The quietly lush, harmonically morphing triplets of the piano accompaniment play off the three notes, F-A-E. When the violin enters, the three notes sound in a guileless, forthright plainsong, exactly as they are in sequence. And the rest of the Intermezzo just plays off the pattern, but despite the almost overtly simplistic arrangement, the piece feels prismatically rich. The same effect holds true in “In der Nacht” as well. Both the F-A-E Intermezzo and “In der Nacht” seem to me the musical equivalents of zen koans: I keep turning them over in my mind, over and over, and there is no rational answer or outcome. Just the mystery and the achingly brief beauty of them turning in place, shifting.

(All images by Vilhelm Hammershøi)