For years before Robert Schumann completed his First Symphony in 1841, which he nicknamed the Spring Symphony, he’d been finding that his riotously original solo piano music tended to perplex, even irritate, listeners. Clara Wieck, the greatest female pianist of the age, who became his wife in 1840 after a protracted battle with her disapproving father, would ask him for less nutty pieces that she could play at her recitals, to help draw attention to his obvious raw talent as a composer. But, as he once said to a critic who reproached him for not writing piano sonatas that obeyed traditional structural rules: “As if all mental pictures must be shaped to fit one or two forms! As if each idea did not come into existence with its form ready-made! As if each work of art had not its own meaning and consequently its own form!”
This was a new way of thinking, ahead of its time. Before the Spring Symphony, there was Carnaval, written in something of a manic state a year after his first nervous breakdown in 1833, aged 23. It’s a suite of 21 short piano works, each representing different figures at a masquerade ball, two of which he invented to represent opposing sides of his personality – Florestan (wild) and Eusebius (mild). It’s fabulously imaginative music that Clara would play often, but it didn’t fit into any neat boxes; it wasn’t a set of variations or a collection of preludes and fugues. Neither was his fiendishly difficult Fantasie in C – dedicated on publication in 1839 to Franz Liszt, one of the few pianists in Europe capable of playing it – although it was written in approximate, three-movement sonata form. As for 1838’s Kreisleriana, you could be forgiven for not keeping up. A highly conceptual, eight-movement work, it uses Bach-like counterpoint to tell the story in sound of the “fantastic and mad” Johannes Kreisler, a character from the writings of ETA Hoffmann. Clara was in awe of the work, while admitting that she was almost frightened to marry its creator.
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