About this Piece

Robert Schumann married Clara Wieck, the daughter of his piano teacher and herself one of the age’s great pianists, on September 12, 1840. Having gradually given up his ambition to become a professional pianist himself, Robert was happy to yield the virtuoso title to his wife and focus on his activities as a composer.

Before his marriage, Schumann had concentrated exclusively on composing songs and piano works. We can thank Clara for encouraging her husband to try his hand at larger-scale forms such as symphonies, oratorios, and concertos. In a letter dated January 7, 1839, Clara wrote, “Don’t take it amiss if I tell you that I’ve been seized by the desire to encourage you to write for orchestra. Your imagination and your spirit are too great for the weak piano.”

With Clara’s support, Schumann entered one of the most creative periods of his life after their marriage. For five years, he produced large-scale masterwork after large-scale masterwork, including the “Spring” Symphony; the Overture, Scherzo and Finale; the oratorio Paradise and the Peri; the three String Quartets, Op. 41; and the E-flat Piano Quartet and Quintet. He didn’t neglect the song either—these years produced the Op. 39 and Op. 48 song cycles (the Liederkreis and the Dichterliebe, respectively). Only his output of solo piano music dropped off.

The Piano Concerto bookends these years of manic creativity. It began life as a Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra in one movement, completed in May 1841 and his first completed work for piano and orchestra. In 1845, Schumann added a slow movement and finale to a revised version of the Fantasy to create a three-movement concerto.

In Clara, Robert not only found encouragement but perhaps also a model. She wrote her Piano Concerto, also in A minor, between 1832 and 1835, and Robert had orchestrated the finale during late 1834 and early 1835. The works have more in common than their key—both modulate into A-flat major for a lengthy, contrasting slower section in the first movement, and Robert uses a four-note motive from the finale of Clara’s concerto prominently in the coda of his own concerto’s first movement.

The completion of Robert’s concerto in mid-July 1845 was followed by total physical collapse and debilitating worry for its composer. He had to cancel appearances at a Beethoven festival in Bonn and spend the summer and fall resting. He did manage to pull himself together long enough to attend the work’s premiere in Dresden on December 4, 1845, with Clara as the soloist.

The concerto’s opening movement adheres loosely to the strictures of the sonata-allegro (exposition-development-recapitulation), but it also retains the freewheeling character of the original Fantasy. After a long cadenza that challenges the soloist’s expressive and technical abilities (as any good cadenza should), the movement ends with a martial coda.

The brief intermezzo slow movement relaxes the tension after the vigorous close of the allegro. Schumann surrounds pointed, crystalline writing for the piano with a dreamlike haze of strings in a movement that is among his most purely beautiful creations. This frames a central section comprising a dialogue for the soloist and the cellos.

The intermezzo leads directly into the finale without a pause. The movement’s opening theme is a major-key reworking of the first movement’s main one, its nobility nicely contrasted with the more playful character of the syncopated second theme. As in the first movement, Schumann approaches form with great freedom, with a new motif introduced by oboes and piano later in the finale. A long coda, impulsive and irresistible, ends Schumann’s concerto, one of the most accomplished and unique in the repertory.

—John Mangum