Schumann’s Second Symphony

In the often Western-centric world of classical music, Tōru Takemitsu achieved an extraordinary amount of success outside of his native Japan. While some of his contemporaries graced international concert stages (including Akira Ifukube and Yasushi Akutagawa), most people today associate Japanese classical music with either Takemitsu’s works or the film scores of Joe Hisaishi.

Takemitsu’s 1981 orchestral work Dreamtime — commissioned by the Nederlands Dans Theater — continued a four-decade trend of combining myriad influences. Takemitsu took philosophical and musical cues from sources native to Japan and imported from the West, including traditional musics like gagaku, bunraku, and noh, and the works of composers like J.S. Bach, Debussy, Messian, and Cage.

A writer and teacher as well as a composer, Takemitsu infused his personal philosophy into his compositions. His beliefs, which similarly combined influences from the East and West, valorized sound objects as they are, rather than as they fit into a whole. He made no distinction between “high” and “low” art and saw his art as extracted from a “stream of sound,” where the piece exists continuously in the aether, from he merely extracts a fragment. As Takemitsu described, “My music is composed as if fragments were thrown together unstructured, as in dreams. You go to a far place and suddenly find yourself back home without having noticed the return.”

While Takemitsu had been preoccupied with modernist and avant-garde techniques in the 1960s and early 1970s, a marked change happened in 1977.  His orchestral work A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden from that year began a trend in Takemitsu’s works towards a Neoromantic conception of tonality that had been lost in his earlier works. He described this shift in the score of his 1982 piece Rain Coming: “It was [my] intention to create a series of works, which like their subject, pass through various metamorphoses, culminating in a sea of tonality.” As such, many works from the late-70s on feature water as a recurring motive, with evocative titles like Toward the Sea (1981) and Rain Tree (1980) and a programmatic thread often literalized through tones. For example, throughout these works, Takemitsu uses the musical cryptogram “S–E–A” as a melodic fragment. (“Es” is E flat in German, and thus the motive is the notes E flat–E–A and its transpositions.)

Beyond the “sea of tonality” and Takemitsu’s “Waterscape” pieces, he also developed a preoccupation with dreams and numbers, leading to a cycle of pieces with “Dream” in their title in the 1980s. In his philosophy, dreams are undefined and ephemeral, and numbers are the antagonistic and conscious desire for form and structure. His “Dream and Number” pieces capture the fluidity of dreams into sound and color: “Through the absolute simplicity of numbers I want to clarify the complexities of the dream.”

Takemitsu’s Dreamtime builds upon this series of musical and philosophical concepts that he was grappling with at the time. Musical devices from his Waterscape and Dream and Number pieces — namely the S–E–A motive and the notion of the sea of tonality — are both present. Listen as the piece opens softly in pianissimo, offers clusters of sound, floats upon waves of undulating dynamics, and ultimately fades away on a pentatonic collection of string tones.

One final influence on the piece is the notion of “Dreamtime” or “The Dreaming,” which describes the cultural beliefs and mythologies of the Australian aboriginal people. While “Dreamtime” is a rich and intricate series of symbols and practices, this term generally describes an ancestral period when the land was inhabited by supernatural figures. Takemitsu takes this notion and combines it with his broader fascination with dreaming, summarizing the work as follows: “Just as a dream, for its vividness of detail, points to an unanticipated, unreal whole, so in this work short episodes hang suspended in seeming incoherency to form a musical whole.”

Dreamtime thus functions as a rich access point to Takemitsu’s broad range of philosophies, musical styles, and influences. Just as his “stream of sound” extracts musical segments from an implied whole, Dreamtime offers just a sliver that reveals much about Takemitsu as an artist, thinker, and human.

— Tanner Cassidy

Tanner Cassidy is operations manager for the Four Seasons Chamber Music Festival. He holds a PhD in music theory from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has written program notes for the Music Academy of the West.

Igor Stravinsky became a practicing Christian in the mid-1920s. His spiritual transformation culminated in 1926, when he formally rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church, in which he had grown up.

Some musicologists have offered some probable links between Stravinsky’s revived religiousness and his evolving musical style. An immediate and obvious connection is the appearance of religious subjects in his music. In 1926, he set The Lord’s Prayer in Old Church Slavonic (Otche nash) for a cappella chorus; he would later adapt it to the Latin translation (Pater noster) in 1949. In the 1930s, he wrote two more liturgical pieces to Old Church Slavonic texts: the Simbol’vyeri (Credo) and the Bogoroditse d’vo (Ave Maria).

During the same years, Stravinsky composed the Symphony of Psalms, the first of many large-scale compositions on sacred texts. He had received a commission for a symphony from Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but at that point had little interest in symphonies in the traditional form. In his autobiography, he recalled the successive steps in which his thoughts took shape:

My idea was that my symphony should be a work with great contrapuntal development, and for that it was necessary to increase the media at my disposal. I finally decided on a choral and instrumental ensemble in which the two elements should be on an equal footing, neither of them outweighing the other. ... I sought for my words ... among those which had been written for singing. And quite naturally my first idea was to have recourse to the Psalms.

The verses chosen by Stravinsky represent some of the principal types of psalms. The three movements of the symphony — played without pauses — are in turn a prayer, a song of salvation, and a song of praise, taken from the 38th, the 39th, and the 150th Psalms. (These numbers are from those of the Vulgate, the Latin translation Stravinsky used.)

In the Symphony of Psalms, emotional intensity is achieved without a trace of sentimentality. Stravinsky used simple means like modified triads, single intervals, and elementary rhythmic patterns. (His orchestra is also built on darker instrumental colors, omitting clarinets from the woodwind section and violins and violas from the string section.) The entire first movement is based on a striking E-minor chord, and a simple melody consisting solely of two notes: E and its upper neighbor, F. Musically speaking, the movement could be described as a progression from this yearning musical world toward the luminous G-major chord at the end, which is underscored by a continuous crescendo in the orchestra.

The second movement is a double fugue between the orchestra and chorus. In Stravinsky’s words:

The “Waiting for the Lord” Psalm makes the most overt use of musical symbolism in any of my music before The Flood [1962]. An upside-down pyramid of fugues, it begins with a purely instrumental fugue of limited compass and employs only solo instruments. ... The next and higher stage of the upside-down pyramid is the human fugue, which ... also represents a higher level in the architectural symbolism by the fact that it expands into the bass register. The third stage, the upside-down foundation, unites the two fugues.

The last movement has alternating slow and fast tempos. The word “Alleluia” is sung to harmonies that, like the E-minor chord in the first movement, consist of traditional patterns modified ever so slightly to sound completely new. The fast tempo is based on typical Stravinskian ostinatos. Of this, the composer wrote: “The allegro in the 150th Psalm was inspired by a vision of Elijah’s chariot climbing the heavens; I do not think I had ever written anything so literal as the triplets for horns and piano to suggest the horses and chariot.”

The end of the movement returns to a slow tempo, and the opening “Alleluia” theme is expanded into a serene hymn which is unexpectedly deflected into a new key. The last sonority is an otherworldly C major that again has something unusual about it: the C is sounded in six different octaves, with its fifth, the G, vibrating along as a natural overtone. The E, however, the pitch that makes the chord complete, hovers in the uppermost register, played ethereally by flutes, oboes, harp, and piano.

— Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007

Sung Texts

I. Psalm 38

CHORUS 
Exaudi orationem meam, Domine, 
et deprecationem meam: 
auribus percipe lacrymas meas. 
Ne sileas, quoniam advena ego apud te, 
et peregrinus, sicut omnes patres mei. 
Remitte mihi, ut refrigerer priusque abeam, 
et amplius non ero. 

Hear my prayer, O Lord, 
and my supplication: 
give ear to my tears. 
Be not silent: for I am a stranger with You, 
and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. 
O spare me, that I may be refreshed 
before I go forth, and be no more. 

II. Psalm 39

CHORUS 
Exspectans expectavi Dominum 
et intendit mihi. 
Et exaudivit preces meas; 
et eduxit me de lacu miseriae, 
et de luto faecis. 
Et statuis supra petram pedes meos; 
et direxit gressus meos. 
Et immisit in os meum canticum novum, 
carmen Deo nostro. 
Videbunt multi et timebunt, 
et sperabunt in Domino. 

Patiently I have waited for the Lord 
and He was attentive to me. 
And He heard my prayers; 
and brought me out of the pit of misery, 
and the mire of dregs. 
And he set my feet upon a rock; 
and directed my steps. 
And he put a new canticle into my mouth, 
a song to our God. 
Many shall see, and shall fear, 
and they shall hope in the Lord. 

III. Psalm 150

CHORUS 
Alleluia. 
Laudate Dominum in sanctis ejus; 
laudate eum in fi rmamento virtutis ejus. 
Laudate eum in virtutibus ejus; 
laudate eum secundum multitudinem magnitudinis ejus. 
Laudate eum in sono tubae … 
Laudate eum in tympano et choro; 
laudate eum in chordis et organo. 
Laudate eum in cymbalis bene sonantibus; 
laudate eum in cymbalis jubilationis. 
Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum!  
Alleluia. 

Alleluia. 
Praise the Lord in His holy places; 
praise Him in the firmament of His power. 
Praise Him for His mighty acts; 
praise Him according to the multitude of His greatness. 
Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet … 
Praise Him with timbrel and dance; 
praise Him with strings and organs. 
Praise Him on high-sounding cymbals; 
praise Him on cymbals of joy. 
Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!  
Alleluia. 

Robert Schumann composed his Second Symphony as he was recovering from a serious nervous breakdown, the result of a long 1844 concert tour to Russia with his wife, the great pianist and composer Clara Schumann. The tour was a triumph for Clara, but Robert’s “nervous fever” was debilitating for a good part of the Russian journey. His ailments — including dizziness, anxiety, and hallucinations — continued through much of 1845 and ’46.

The health crisis was possibly linked to over­whelming artistic challenges in Schumann’s career. The composer, who had spent his early years writing exclusively for solo piano, was striving to establish himself in large-scale symphonic forms, but had yet to write a work to match the grandeur of Schubert’s “Great” C-major Symphony. (Schumann had discovered the manu­script of that symphony in Vienna and had boundless admiration for it.) In an effort to concentrate on composition, Schumann relinquished the editorship of the music journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, of which he had also been the chief music critic. At first, however, this only gave him a sense of loss that was furthered by his relocation from Leipzig to Dresden in fall 1844.

Schumann enjoyed a respite from his ailments in December 1845. It was during this period of Aufschwung (“upswing,” to borrow the title of a famous youthful piano piece) that he began the Second Sym­phony, though the orchestration and the revision of the score took up the better part of 1846, amidst more ups and downs. Schumann himself felt that the difficulties he experienced before and during composition had an impact on the work. He wrote to D.G. Otten, the music director in Hamburg, in 1849:

I wrote my symphony in December 1845, and I sometimes fear my semi-invalid state can be divined from the music. I began to feel more myself when I wrote the last movement, and was certainly much better when I finished the whole work. All the same it reminds me of dark days.

The work has a rather curious reception history. The first reviews after the premiere were enthusiastic. Both Brahms and Tchaikovsky considered the symphony the high point of Schumann’s output, and musicologist Philip Spitta, writing in 1883, saw Schumann’s Second as closest to Beethoven in “its bold decisiveness of form and overpowering wealth of expression.” Later, however, critics started finding fault with the symphony for what they perceived as formal incoherence, and the work was relatively neglected for decades. Only in the relatively recent past has the music world fully “rehabilitated” this forgotten symphony.
One way of understanding this symphony would be to view it as a struggle between the forces of light and darkness. The two opposing forces are present from the symphony’s opening measures, where a fanfare motive in the brass is set against mysterious chromatic figures in the strings. Transformations of both motives dominate the entire first movement. Though the “light” fanfares seem to have the last word at the end of the first movement, they will briefly reappear in the second and third movements.

The “dark” chromati­cism returns at the beginning of the second-movement Scherzo which, for all its briskness and dynamism, has been aptly described by British author Brian Schlotel as “pervaded by a mood of restlessness and uncertainty.” The Scherzo has two trios; the first moves in a light-footed triplet motion led by the woodwinds, the second is a chorale for strings, in which one may recognize the first germs of the last movement’s final melody, the ultimate goal of the symphony’s progress.

The Adagio espressivo is one of Schumann’s most pro­found slow movements. In it, echoes of J.S. Bach are combined with some personal touches, including an unusually subtle orchestration. Schumann wrote in his letter to Otten: “That my melancholy bassoon in the Adagio, written into that place with special affection, did not escape you gave me the greatest plea­sure.” First intoned by the strings, the main theme is soon taken over by the “melancholy bassoon” and an equally melancholy oboe. After a short fugal interlude, the main melody returns. Although the tempo is slow to begin with, there is a further ritardando (slowing down) near the end, and the final chords are marked “molto Adagio.”

Musicologist Anthony Newcomb has written of the finale: “[It] starts as one thing and becomes another, and this formal transformation is part of its meaning.” The opening suggests a cheerful movement with a spirited melody that returns after an episode of equally bright character. Then, about halfway through the movement, we reach three solemn C-minor chords followed by general rests. Schumann quickly introduces a new theme, one that will gradually evolve into a quote from Beethoven’s song cycle To the Distant Beloved, which he had already used prominently in his Fantasy in C major (Op. 17) from 1836. This time, the melody becomes the triumphant conclusion of the sym­phony; the ending is made even more grandiose by the spectacular timpani solo in the last measures.

— Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007