Something from the bicentennial birthday boy

Here is a canon for pedal piano by Robert Schumann, who would be 200 this year, had he lived past the comparatively tender age of forty-six.







This was the palette cleanser at a concert I played last November in Mooroolbark, a far and distant suburb of Melbourne.  The title of the programme was "Under the Influence," highlighting the ways in which composers in the nineteenth century found themselves reflecting the discovery of Bach as a major composer.

The Opus 56 Studies in the form of Canon, Op. 58 Skizzen and Op. 60 Fugen uber B A C H all date from 1845, and constitute something of a watershed in Schumann's compositional methods.  Having returned from a personally disastrous tour to Russia with his wife, the great pianist Clara Schumann, the couple settled down by working their way through Cherubini's Cours de Contrepoint, one of the key manuals on counterpoint.  The result was a transformation in this most radical of composers; Schumann went from composing in a very stream-of-consciousness manner to developing his rhetorical strategies in advance.  Sadly, his illness got in the way, so it's impossible to say where he might have ended up.  It's sufficient to say that his drift towards a more conservative view of the future of music in the face of the Zukunfstmusik movement was well established in his critical writings by this stage, so I wonder if he might well have been seen as a relic if he had remained active another ten or fifteen years.