Several others have expressed their gratitude for your work on making the Schumann 4th sonata sketch known to the public. I couldn’t agree more. Also your perceptive essay clarifies most things and Fred Moyer’s performance is indeed splendid.

I am a Danish composer and writer having some experience working to complete similar sketches (most significantly Schubert’s unfinished opera “Sakontala”); you may want to get more information from my site and blog. Thus I immediately decided to take you up on your suggestion: to attempt a completion of the Finale.
I think I can claim to be “familiar with Schumann’s idiom”, having, among other things, written a book on Schumann, orchestrated his Hans Christian Andersen songs (for the Bregenz Festival, recorded by Bo Skovhus on SONY) and his “Papillons” (commissioned by Riccardo Chailly and the Gewandhaus orchestra) and recently written a play about Clara Schumann.
However, here, as always, I have tried to avoid “composing in the style of a genius”, which is senseless. I have had to introduce a secondary subject, though, a cantabile version of the theme elaborated in the development section. But that is all. Everything else is derived from the existing material.
I do not claim that this would be anything like what Schumann would have done. It is just an attempt to shape the material into a form which will make the music performable as a meaningful whole.

Using the Kontakt player in “Sibelius” you can get an impression. That it is nothing like what a pianist can do goes without saying.

Thanks so much again for introducing me (and the world) to this overlooked piece by Schumann. I hope you will enjoy – or at least appreciate – this attempt.

Sincerely,

Karl Aage Rasmussen
http://www.karlaagerasmussen.com

Have you ever come across a painting, etching… of Schumann’s drawing of black cats on Music manuscript paper? It was supposed to have been drawn by Schumann himself after he was institutionalized in an asylum. One of the cats even have an arched back. My friend remembers seeing it in a book she has, might even have been one of his biographies. However, she cannot find the book anymore.

I am doing a Halloween recital on 10/31 which includes works for cello and piano by Schumann (Fantasy Pieces and Adagio & Allegro) and both Brahms sonatas (e minor and F major).

If you have ever seen such a painting.., please me know where I can get a copy of this image. Thanks.

Any ideas of how to tie Schumann and Brahms to Halloween?

All Best wishes,
Mary

**********************
Mary Au
(323) 666-2603
http://www.aumary.com

Hi. . . . I don’t know where I got the impression that you had gone the way of John Daverio, Peter Ostwald and others. How awful of me. I’ll fix it right away!

I just borrowed your magnificent one-volume (sic!) Schumann Werkeverzeichnis from the UNC Library and am numb with admiration for what you accomplished.

My notion that some rich angel should underwrite making the urtext images available for posterity digitally was to do so in bitmapped format (i.e. the original images, strikeouts, mistakes, blotches, etc. included), maybe even in color. How do you like the bitmap images that Fred has on this web site – you can see every little blotch and slip of the pen. I know that Charles Rosen, for one, seems not to have had much use for the present available editions, especially Boetticher’s. Actually, in thinking it over after looking at your volume, (and considering the ongoing new edition work), I guess there is just too much autograph material out there and much of it is in places where the owner is unlikely to want the uniqueness of his possession of an urtext diluted by making digital images publicly available. Do you agree that a giant digitization project would be a rather hopeless quest at this time?

Right now I’m looking at a CDROM that the British Library sent me of ADD37056, the images of Opus 14, and discovered another mistake in my paper: there are TWO images on page 566 of Boetticher, the first from the fragment, but there is also a second one, this from Opus 14 (given as Anhang 3 on pg. 60 of your volume). I had the two confused in my paper. This too I will fix. I don’t believe this invalidates my conclusion that Opus 14 and the fragment are “parent and child”; Ostwald also thought so.

As for the three late sonatas for his young children, Opus 118, I had several words of mention of these in an earlier draft, but they seem to have evaporated. I will reinstate this.

Again, a thousand thanks for your help. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .Paul Green

My compliments on your essay above which should be of interest to all Schumann fans!

May I just request a couple corrections concerning myself and my catalogue: clearly I am still alive and well — your reference may be the first (so far as I am aware) to my having already departed this earth…. Also, the Schumann catalogue is not a multi-volume work, but only a very large single volume.

With respect to the desideratum that all Schumann’s sketches be made available in transcription, this is being carried out gradually by the Schumann scholars editing the multi-volume Collected Edition. This effort is certainly aided by the surfacing of sources for public access, such as fortunately has been the case with the manuscript you have presented here.

Finally, strictly speaking, Schumann did once more turn to the piano sonata later in life, in the three didactic works he wrote for three of his daughters and published as Op. 118. Not, of course, that these can compare in interest with the early virtuosic works in this genre!

Sincerely yours,

Margit L. McCorkle

A couple comments on the interpretation of the manuscript of the first movement.

1) With respect to your reading of the horizontal line above mm 14-17, you’re right to interpret it as a sign to repeat. Schumann himself confirms this by writing “bis” (i.e. “again” above the barline between mm 14 and 15. (”Bis” was a common abbreviation in 19c sketches – I’ve seen it often in Beethoven and Chopin sketches.)

2) With mm 14-17 in mind, look above m. 39: to my eye, Schumann’s notation reads “bis (in 8ve)” – i.e. repeat the bracketed material (mm. 39-41) up an octave. As in mm. 14-17, Schumann seems to use the bracket above the staff together with writing “bis”. (And while on m. 41, to me that looks like “pp”, not “pizz”: it would be unusual for Schumann to have used “pizz” in the context of keyboard music.)

cheers!