Explore Newly Unveiled Schumann Works

As you may know, Paul Green and Frederick Moyer have presented on this site two works by Robert Schumann that have never before been available to the general public. If you are viewing this site with Safari, Google Chrome, or the latest Firefox click the following links to explore these works in detail:

Schumann: Sonata No. 3: Original Finale Movement

http://rodeocloud.com/Schumann/4d9a4f534b43d/

Schumann: Sonata No. 4 (Sketch): First Movement

http://rodeocloud.com/Schumann/4d3ba35f1c84f/

Schumann: Sonata No. 4 (Sketch): FinaleMovement

http://rodeocloud.com/Schumann/4d65a0cb05055/

Note: These web pages will only run properly with Safari, Google Chrome, or Firefox as these browsers use the latest web technology (“WebKit” / “HTML5.”) Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are  free and run on Windows and Mac. For the latest versions, please click the respective links above.

On our Schumann pages, you can:

• See both the original manuscript and our deciphered score:

• Listen to Frederick Moyer perform these works while following along in either manuscript or deciphered score:

• See the manuscript zoomed in:

• Read notes on places in the manuscript:

• Hear animated commentary about other places:

Note: If you would rather download the software as a standalone application, please click on the following links:

Schumann4thSonata: Windows – Mac

SchumannPrestoPossibile: Windows – Mac

Please let us know if you have any problems!

Concurrently, Moyer’s record label, JRI Recordings, has made available for purchase the sheet music for these works, either in printed form or as PDF downloads. These then are the first publications of these works by the great Romantic master:

• ”Presto Possibile” — early version of finale movement to Sonata No. 3 in F Minor, Op. 14, is available here.

• Sonata No. 4 (Sketch,) is available here.

NEW as of 4/19/11:

If you have Safari, Google Chrome or Firefox you can investigate Schumann’s Original 3rd Sonata Finale Movement using the following link:

http://rodeocloud.com/Schumann/4d9a4f534b43d/

For more information, please visit our latest blog by clicking here

To download our Proprietary Software, click on the appropriate link:  Windows –  Mac

The Original Finale Movement to Schumann’s Sonata No. 3

Since unveiling the Schumann Fourth Sonata fragment on this web site in July of 2009, Paul Green and Frederick Moyer have been deciphering another Schumann manuscript: an early version of the Finale movement to his Third Sonata.

BACKGROUND:
During his research on the Fourth Sonata, Paul had acquired from from the British Museum a copy of Schumann’s manuscript of the Third Sonata. This was the final version, the manuscript that Schumann sent to the publisher. Paul and Fred were intrigued to see that the last movement begins with a single page of an alternate version that is then crossed out, and followed by the final version, the version that was of course published.

The crossed out page is easily readable, and Paul and Fred found that it is good music! Was there more? Yes — Paul located a second and more extensive manuscript at a library in Stockholm (“Stiftelsen Musikkulturens Främjande, Sammlung Nydahl.”) He acquired a high-resolution scan and with his grandson Rafael Green and Fred, began deciphering it. They were bowled over to find that, except for a coda, this is a complete piece nearly six minutes long, over 300 measures. Why this important addition to Schumann’s output has never been published is puzzling. Fred finished the piece by inserting the coda to the final version (a perfect fit.)

COMMENTS:
Marked “Presto Possibile” the piece is dramatic, explosive, even bizarre. At a climactic moment, it references a theme written by Clara that Schumann uses in the slow movement of the same sonata. But it is introduced here first in a grotesque crashing mutation marked fortississimo, and then immediately quietly in an almost-verbatim quote from one of the variations from the slow movement.

Another quote is stated by the 4th and 5th fingers of the left hand: the opening phrase to Mozart’s “La ci Darem la mano” from Don Giovanni.

Translated “Give me your hand,” this is certainly a message for Clara. Robert was pining away for her while writing this piece, their separation caused by Clara’s father who had threatened to shoot Robert if he caught him with her. (This famous conflict between Robert and Clara’s father was raging at the time of this composition and certainly contributed to the extreme passion of the music.)

The movement also has an inspired and ingenious secondary theme. If you play it yourself, you will see that it is best played “a la Liberace” with high hands to allow the thumbs to play loudly when the arms come down!

Click Here to purchase the score.

As news of the uncovering of Robert Schumann’s 4th piano sonata spreads, various newspapers, magazines, Schumann scholars, radio stations, bloggers and others are taking note:

Newspapers:

Washington Post

Baltimore Sun

Chicago Tribune

The Herald Sun

Magazines:

The New Yorker

International Piano

Classical Music Magazine

Radio Stations that aired the Schumann 4th in 2009:

CBC Radio Music Canada (First to air the 4th Sonata performed by Fred Moyer on 8/22/09 at 12:00 PM during the program “In Tune” with Host Katherine Duncan)

88.3 KPAC-FM Classical Oasis, San Antonio, TX

89.9 WDAV Classical Public Radio, Davidson, NC

90.3 WHRO-FM Public Radio, Norfolk, VA

New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR)

Blogs:

Instant Encore

Dial “M” for Musicology

From Stanford University:

Green Library, Stanford University

Stanford Information Center

NEW as of 4/19/11:

If you have Safari, Google Chrome, or Firefox: You can investigate Schumann’s Sketch for the Fourth Sonata using the following links:

Schumann: Sonata No. 4 (Sketch): First Movement

http://rodeocloud.com/Schumann/4d3ba35f1c84f/

Schumann: Sonata No. 4 (Sketch): FinaleMovement

http://rodeocloud.com/Schumann/4d65a0cb05055/

For more information, please visit our latest blog by clicking here

If you would rather download the software as a standalone application, please click on the following link: Windows – Mac

Available to the public for the first time:

Robert Schumann’s Sketches for a Fourth Sonata

In 2009, Dr. Paul Green and his nephew, Frederick Moyer, tracked down a fragmentary unfinished fourth piano sonata of the great romantic composer, Robert Schumann. With help from Stanford University, Green and Moyer acquired electronic copies of the sketch, transcribed them, and entered the score into clean computerized format.  On July 26, 2009, this unknown classical work was made available to the public for the first time here on this site. Below is an extensive music essay by Green describing his search, work, and the piece’s historical significance.

Recent media comments about this site and this project:

Alex Ross, New Yorker: “a discovery worth reporting . . . you can read Green’s meticulous account of the find and then download an ingenious computer application that allows you to listen to Moyer’s performance (expertly, sensitively done) while following along in the Schumann score.”

John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune: “a model of how modern scholarship and digital technology can serve each other’s interests.”

Tim Smith, Baltimore Sun: “This project is a very classy example of musicological excavation, IMHO, and the product is doubly enhanced by Moyer’s sensitive, involving performance of this tantalizing music.”

For more media comments click here

Purchase the  Deciphered Sheet Music

Read the essay: The Second Schumann F-minor Sonata: A Detective Story

Examine and listen: Karl Aage Rasussen’s completion of Schumann’s Finale

Essay:

The Second Schumann F-minor Sonata: A Detective Story

Copyright 2009, Paul E. Green, Jr.

pegreen@earthlink.net

October  14, 2009

Note: We are soliciting ideas stimulated by this writeup. Please give us your comments in the COMMENT AREA at the end of this article. . . . . . Paul and Fred

Introduction

Late one night back in 1990, alone with our Steinway and digital recording equipment, Fred Moyer, our genius pianist nephew, sat down and recorded the Third Schumann Piano Sonata, Opus 14 in F Minor, sometimes referred to as the Concerto Without Orchestra. As is so often the case, it then happened that other more mundane things intervened with both Fred and us Greens and the existence of this tape was soon quite forgotten.

When Skip and I moved to Chapel Hill in 2007, the DAT tape of that midnight séance resurfaced and we were so smitten by the magnificence of the composition and the beauty of Fred’s performance that we had a number of CD copies made and started giving them out obsessively to our friends or anyone who would listen and telling them insistently about the listening experience awaiting them. I kept listening to this music and began to wonder why such a great piano composer had not gained more visibility for his sonatas – after all, there is something about the sonata format of two-theme statement, quasi-improvisatory development, and recapitulation that has grabbed the musical soul and persisted to become, in spite of centuries of change-of-fashion, the most favored vehicle of much of the music that the world calls “the greatest.” Continuing long after Schumann, almost every composer of note had something important to say in this medium[i].

This listening experience, plus a passing exposure to the equally impressive first Schumann Sonata in F-sharp minor, opus 11, (when Elizabeth Allen played it at one of our house concerts in the mid-1970s) caused me to wonder “Who was this Schumann that he could write music like that while everyone seems to know him mostly for his concerto, his symphonies, and his suites of miniatures (Fantasiestücke, Davidsbundlertänze, etc., some of these earlier than the sonatas, most of them later). Many of these miniatures were great enough, but not nearly so great as the sonatas, to my taste.

So I betook myself to the comprehensive Grove’s dictionary[ii] to see what else there was, and lo and behold there was a second F-minor piano sonata that Schumann had only started on, the fourth one to be given the name “sonata” in his own catalog of his works. The authoritative biography by the late John Daverio[iii] pronounced it “lost,” as I later found out.

But it hadn’t been permanently lost, as it turns out.

The search begins

Certainly a contributing reason that nobody was very curious about it is that it kept getting confused with the well-known third piano sonata, also in the key of F-minor, the one in Fred’s midnight taping activity that began this investigation of mine. One had to realize that Schumann, for some reason, had liked that key well enough to visit it twice in rapid succession.

But Mr. Grove’s Schumann maven had not been confused – not he. The Schumann article in Grove mentions in passing that Schumann had alluded in correspondence to what had to be two F-minor sonatas, one that was finished and one unfinished. Composition of the second one was interrupted by a series of concerns that Schumann had with his journal, so that by the time he got back to the second F-minor sonata, he seems to have had a change of heart about continuing. The second one never received an opus number.

Now, considering the merit of all of the known Schumann piano sonatas, this mysterious hint that not everything was widely known was a most intriguing challenge that perhaps the fragment was worth finding and hearing.

At daughter Nancy’s suggestion I first tried the Library of Congress to see if they had it. The answer was: no, but if I looked in the catalog New Edition of the Collected Works of Schumann, by Margit McCorkle, I would find that there once had been a four-page [presumably four double-sided sheets] fragment of this piece described as entry F28, and would learn that “the fragment had been sold at auction to a private collector in December, 1997 by Sotheby’s in England”, and that “it currently resides in an unidentified archive in southern Germany”.

As our family’s German speaker, Nancy then emailed the Robert Schumann Gesellschaft in Düsseldorf where she used to live, and all they could tell us was that they didn’t know who had bought the fragment. Similarly, when Fred Moyer asked Sotheby’s who the purchaser had been, they declined to answer, but instead forwarded his inquiry to the purchaser, who never answered. Thus it was clear neither who had offered the fragment to Sotheby’s for auction nor who had bought it. At this point I sought the help of Diane Steinhaus of the UNC Music Library, and she pointed me to the McCorkle compendium. There I learned (from Anhang F38) that before the ms. was sold by Sotheby’s, it had been appraised for them by Ms. Linda Correll Roesner, of New York City. An email to Ms. Roesner elicited the information that she had had it in her hands for only about an hour, and had no idea who might have bought it at the auction, which might have taken place either in New York City or in Europe. That seemed to be that: a dead-end.

Historical and biographical background

I started reading up on Schumann in earnest, and discovered that his piano sonatas were all completed within months of each other, beginning at a time when he was alone, pining away for Clara Wieck, whom he was unable to marry until September, 1840. These sonatas are (Ref. iii, pp. 133-134)

Sonata 1, op. 11 in F-sharp minor completed – 8/1835

Sonata 2, op. 22 in G-minor – 10/1835

Sonata 3, op. 14 in F-minor (“Concert sans orchestre”) – 6/1836

Fantasie in C-major, op. 17 – 12/1836

Sonata fragment in F-minor (Anhang 28) abandoned – 2/1837

Opus 17 has a place on this list because it is as much a formal piano sonata as the others, but has this different name for a reason to be discussed shortly.

There are several remarkable things about this list, four of which I shall now enumerate. First of all, starting in early 1837, Schumann essentially abandoned the piano sonata vehicle for good, reserving the sonata format for symphonic and chamber music first movements and an occasional finale, as was the classical custom[iv]. His reason for abandoning piano sonatas is closely related to the second remarkable thing, the seemingly short period in his brief life into which he crammed intensive piano sonata composition (18 months out of his 46-year lifetime of 1810 to 1856).

He started out this year-and-one-half period in his life pining away for the astonishing Clara[v], whose own compositions are only now becoming adequately appreciated. In addition to mothering eight children (of whom three died during her lifetime), she was at various times pretty much the principal Schumann family wage-earner via her continued concert career. Robert was sometimes very efficient and articulate in writing, but at the verbal level, moody, psychotic and “strange,” not particularly well-fitted for the real world, but with an inner greatness well recognized by Clara, if not by her concerned father. For an entire year and a half around 1836 Robert and Clara were forcibly separated from one another by Clara’s father Friedrich Wieck, one of music history’s bad guys for sure. Yet, one has to remember that he had lavished most of his own life on the career of his genius daughter, and here comes this strange sphinx Robert – who could be confident about him? Wieck couldn’t see Robert’s greatness, but Clara could and did[vi].

By 1839 Robert and Clara had sued Wieck, and by 1840 had won the court case and married. But as compositional success came within his reach, Robert turned his back on the often-anguished piano sonatas of his most lonely years and began to take very seriously his forthcoming responsibilities as provider. He considered, in accordance with the musical tastes of his day, that he might be better off financially by composing orchestral works or the suites of miniatures we now know him best for, and leaving the more inaccessible keyboard forms like piano sonatas for future listeners (i.e., us). Actually, these suites didn’t work all that well for his career either, in spite of Clara’s heroic exertions to give them public performance as often as possible. The world was really ready to listen to Robert only late in his life, and even more so for decades after his death, when Clara performed his works all over Europe, almost to the end of the nineteenth century. Through all the years, both before and after his eighteen months of piano sonata composition in 1835-7, Robert never lost his respect for the sonata form, as attested by several of his writings, for example those given here in Appendix I. But, except for his Opus 118 late sonatas for three of his young daughters (perhaps more properly “sonatinas”?) he never attempted another serious keyboard sonata after the fragment that is the subject of this study.

The third remarkable thing about this list of piano sonatas is the choice of keys: all minor, except for the Fantasie, opus 17. Actually, as noted by Marston[vii] and others, the reason for the C-major choice for that composition is that it started out as a single movement to celebrate the unveiling of a statue of Beethoven and only later gained other movements and a spirit of longing for Clara. The composer just kept the first movement’s tonality that he had started with, but the listener will note that much, if not most of this Sonata is somewhat anguished.

Surely the choice of minor keys must have had something to do with the man’s moodiness, his loneliness and his distracted life during this sonata period.

But why these particular minor keys?

Perhaps something could be made of that fact reported by Ostwald [viii] and others, that during the period Schumann was writing his sonatas he was interested in the weird but widely-read theories of one Christian Schubart, who associated different keys with different psychological states in a most detailed way[ix]. The list of Schubart’s characterizations of the different keys is so crazy that I have been unable to resist the temptation to include an excerpt here (as Appendix II).

And it particularly remained a mystery why Schumann twice in succession picked F-minor, a key he otherwise visited occasionally, but seems not to have particularly favored or disfavored at any other time in his career. He himself claimed in correspondence that the fragment was “very different” from the Concerto without Orchestra, the other completed and published F-minor piano sonata. Different how?

And there is a fourth remarkable thing, which I learned from Reich’s Clara Schumann biography (Reference v). The first F-minor sonata, op. 14, seems never to have been performed in public by Clara during her long lifetime. To me it is remotely conceivable that the reason she only performed this sonata in private to one or two friends is that it was so obviously a very special piece of the couple’s private romantic life, apart and then together? The beautiful slow movement with its astonishing heart-rending ending, is explicitly entitled Variations on a theme of Clara Wieck, based on a (now lost) piece by Clara; no other of his sonatas has such an explicit sharing of musical creativity.

The search concluded

Back to the details on how I succeeded in obtaining this fragment, such an important document in Schumann’s on-and-then-off love affair with piano sonata form.

Enter Tim Carter, chair of the UNC Music Department, specialist in early music and a web super-sleuth. He and I were having dinner one evening and he was telling me about the many amazing new details he had uncovered concerning the 1936 music drama Johnny Johnson, written by our Dad, the playwright Paul Green; music by Kurt Weill. When I thought to mention my dead-end Schumann researches, Tim ventured the comment that maybe he could find out who had bought the autograph, and the next thing I knew he had located it. It was right here in the U. S. of A. – more specifically at Stanford University. Just to show you what Google plus Tim Carter could do with a slender clue, the smoking gun was 3 or 4 words buried in the many pages of vol. 13, no. 1 of the minutes of the Music Library Association, Northern California Chapter[x].It seems that the Hewlett Foundation had turned out to be the successful bidder on the mysterious fragment and had given it to the Stanford Library. At this point, all I had to do is send Stanford a check for $4.45 and, at long last, I had a photocopy.

I later learned through Prof. Jon Finson of the UNC Music Department that the autograph was a “gift of Walter B. Hewlett in honor of Condaleezza Rice, Provost of Stanford University, 1998.” Miss Rice was later the Secretary of State in the administration of the second Bush. The citation for this is http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/4084821 is http://jenson.stanford.edu/uhtbin/cgisirsi/oMSH5hmekW/GREEN/246260014/9

The autograph photocopy that I received from Stanford seems to be of the same ms. that departed Leipzig into the hands of the Sotheby auction house. Once I had the photocopy of the autograph, I got a copy of the Sibelius music scoring software, and after many days of gruesome input-check-alter-undo-redo-disrupt-redo-recheck, etc. the transcription of the entire two-movement fragment was now essentially complete. It only remained for Fred to debug this so as to fix certain errors..

Schumann’s musical script is surprisingly neat and legible (compare Beethoven), and there are only a very few places where it is unclear what a given mark might mean. (The distinction between sharps and naturals is one). Much of the material that survives, particularly the Finale fragment, exhibits a good state of detail: expression marks, tempo changes, etc. are all there.

What does it sound like?

Because the Sibelius software allows one to hear what one has notated, one can get an impression of it, once the piece is entered as a Sibelius file. Is it a great masterwork? It sounds pretty vigorous, even dramatic to me, but not up to his best (but after all, it is simply an early draft). I can’t believe that the reason Schumann failed to resume work (after a many-months’ interruption due to journalistic obligations) was because the musical inspiration was insufficient. I prefer to believe in the idea cited earlier and widely held by his biographers, that at that time piano sonatas had lost their attraction for him for economic reasons – his particular audiences seemed no longer to care for them. This makes me wish that he really had been less, not more practically-minded, so that the world would now have the entire second F-minor sonata to enjoy, and maybe others too.

What does it look like, and why?

In the first movement (Allegro molto), there are 66 measures, in two seemingly disconnected pieces, but clearly written on opposite sides of the same sheet. This can be proved because the irregular tearing pattern at the right side of page 1 and that at the left side of page 3 match exactly. Schumann apparently had a stock of music sheets, each with 10 staves, each page encompassing up to 40 or so measures, and when he got going, he’d just rip off another sheet from the pad, with the tear side at the right, and then turn it over sideways to continue. The bottom of each page also shows similar irregularities.

Prof. Finson tells me that in Schumann’s day, music paper often had one or more irregular edges, and that it was rare for all these edges to be straight unless or until they had been bound into a book.

My initial reaction to the first movement autograph is that this is just a few ideas thrown down indiscriminately on two successive sheets. Page 1 (bars 1 through 31) is the more finished of the two, complete with expression marks and other details only for the first 25 or so bars. Page 2 may or may not be related material.

The other movement (Finale: Agitato) must be taken somewhat more seriously. It consists of 166 measures across five pages: 1, 2?, 3, 4, and 5. The “?” that I put for page 2 is because someone has written over the real page number, to the point of illegibility. Possibly, an IR camera could read through it. That pages 3, 4, and 5 are assuredly continuous can be substantiated, not just from the continuity of the note patterns, but also by looking at the match between torn edges of pages 3 and 4 of the sheets of music paper that Schumann used.

In transcribing this autograph using Sibelius, I made no attempt to rectify any material or add to it. This has been undertaken by Fred Moyer, with great success, as I’m sure you’ll agree from comparing the autograph with the Sibelius transcription, and from listening to the composition. Perhaps others who will read this can contribute their thoughts.

Assuming that what I think is page 2 of the Finale is exactly that, then we are likely to be looking at everything Schumann wrote of the Allegro (66 measures) and Finale (166 measures) with nothing missing in the middle. I shall now try to make a case that this is so.

Are there other versions out there?

The manuscript I have (identified on my 1/14/2009 order, number 2005-2061 to the Stanford University Library, as “MSS Codex 1000F – Schumann – Sonate IV – entire”) was bought from Sotheby’s auction house by someone in 1997, and given by the Hewlett Foundation to Stanford in 1998[xi]. Linda Roesner [xii] had appraised it for the Sotheby auction catalog number 194 of 5 December 1997, having been told that it had come as number 11/288 from the Alfred Wiede collection at Weissenborn, a suburb of Zwickau, Schumann’s birthplace. Dr. Wiede, who died some time before 1940, was an important collector of Schumann autographs. Roesner’s description of the names of the two movements, the number of pages, sheets and movement designations tallies exactly with what I have: “4 sheets (8 pages), about 230 measures total“.  I count 232 measures, 66 in the first movement and 166 in the Finale.

However, this does not prove that there are not other versions of the second F-minor sonata floating around, perhaps even more complete than what I have.

To dig further into this question, we can start with the massive 688-page ten-pound doctorate thesis of Wolfgang Boetticher [xiii], written in 1940, just as World War II was beginning to reach its most physically destructive period, with many European cities about to be heavily damaged and many collections scattered. This volume is the Dead Sea Scrolls for Schumann archaeologists, and lists no fewer than four citations of what might once have been part or all of the present document, or which may have became unwittingly conflated with one another to form the present document. The question is: are there differences between any of these and the Stanford document and are they big?