Symphony No. 2

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