Robert Schumann

By the autumn of 1853, Robert Schumann had already boarded the one-way express train to complete mental and emotional breakdown; but he had not yet actually reached the last stop on that unhappy trip, and so was still able, in October, to create and prepare for publication (the latter over several months, and with considerable difficulty -- his mental focus was dissolving quickly) a set of five character pieces for piano solo that he called Gesänge der Frühe , Op. 133. These five miniatures are dedicated to "the high poetess Bettina" and are Schumann's very last coherent solo piano music.

The composer's wife Clara, in her private diary, described the Gesänge der Frühe as, "dawn-songs, very original as always but hard to understand, their tone is so very strange." It isn't hard to hear what she meant -- the Op. 133 pieces are, to a one, straightforward in appearance and outward musical form, but complex, even conflicted, in expression; touching and lovely, but always winding and twisting from one subtly-inflected psychological region to another. This sometimes unsettling character is not evidence of the composer's coming mental collapse, but is rather the crescendo of an element that had been key to his craft for a long time. This is music that at first seems straightforward but never settles down, never stops groping in its own dark (or perhaps rather than dark, it is a blinding brilliance of middle-Romantic light); Schumann simply did not compose in two dimensions, so to speak.

The five pieces in Schumann's solo piano swan song cover the tonal ground defined by the notes of the D major triad. Pieces 1, 2, and 5 are actually in D major, while 3 an 4 are in A major and F sharp minor, respectively. Op. 133, No. 1 (Im ruhigen Tempo) is a plain-textured affair, two pages long, almost chorale-like in the quality of its rhythm and its sonority. No. 2 (Belebt, nicht zu rasch) is one of those wonderful pieces that doesn't actually give us the chord of the home key in a strong, stable form until near the end of the piece. Its graceful triplets are offset by the odd intrusion here and there of pointed dotted rhythms. No. 3 (Lebhaft) is the longest and fastest of the set and never once falters from its course of constant gallop rhythms, while No. 4 (Bewegt) unfolds in downward-cascading thirty-second notes. Both the chorale-like tone of No. 1 and the light-footed filigree of Nos. 2 an 4 are recaptured and then transfigured in No. 5.