About this Piece

On September 12, 1840, Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck were finally married, after a long, ugly battle with Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, which ultimately had to be adjudicated in court. The wedding was the day before Clara’s 21st birthday, and at the time she was far better known throughout Europe than her new husband, nine years her senior. Her father, a prominent pianist and composer himself, had planned to make her an eminent soloist even before her birth; Clara made her public debut at 9 and went on her first extended concert tour at 12.

Robert had also studied piano with Friedrich Wieck and at times boarded with the Wieck family. Clara studied composition with Robert, and their relationship was artistic before it became romantic.

Both Robert and Clara were regular diarists and contributed to a joint diary in the early years of their marriage. A year before the wedding, Clara wrote in her diary, “My highest wish is that he [Robert] should compose for orchestra—that is his field! May I succeed in bringing him to it.”

In the first months after the wedding, Robert was preoccupied with songs, but in January 1841, he sketched out his “Spring” Symphony in just four days and finished the orchestration three weeks later, to Clara’s great delight. Mendelssohn led the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra in its premiere at the end of March, on a concert benefiting the orchestra’s pension fund at which Clara was the soloist. The new symphony was reasonably well received, sufficiently so that Robert envisioned “all sorts of other orchestral plans.”

The first of these that came to fruition was the Overture, Scherzo, and Finale, begun in the middle of April and completed May 8—“a month of May such as I have never, absolutely never, lived before,” the diarist and now happily married Robert enthused. It is, if anything, even more springlike, more joyful, than the “Spring” Symphony.

Robert first called the work a suite, then a “Symphonette,” a little symphony without a slow movement. But when he had it published after reorchestrating it in 1845, it was an “Overture, Scherzo, and Finale”; three movements that he felt could be performed independently.

The work’s sunny, “spring” character is not immediately apparent. Schumann begins the Overture with a solemn—ominous, even—slow preface in E minor for the strings and woodwinds. This gives him two motifs that drive the ensuing cheerful main section in E major in vigorous, highly kinetic music.

Rhythmic and metrical games abound in the Scherzo in C-sharp minor, a fleet, grinning ghost dance that flips into major mode for its sly trio section. The Finale also dances, emphatically at first, but with increasing abandon, as high-stepping joy slips its bounds.

—John Henken