Schumann — Symphony No.3 ‘Rhenish’ and Symphony No.4
A tortured Romantic genius — destined to die young — celebrates the beauty of nature and the majesty of a medieval cathedral.
When?
Schumann composed his Third Symphony, inspired by a trip to Germany’s Rhineland, in 1850, the same year that:
- The McClure Arctic Expedition sets sail from Plymouth, England, in a bid to discover the fate of the Franklin Expedition, which had set out five years earlier. Whilst unsuccessful in their stated task, McClure becomes the first person to successfully navigate the Northwest Passage (which connects the Atlantic and Pacific via the Arctic Ocean) by sledge and boat.
- American Express is founded in New York. Initially an express mail business, it will move into financial services some 30 years later. Currently, around a quarter of the credit card transactions in the US are made on Amex cards.
- Postage stamps with perforations begin to be issued, after trials commissioned by the British government. Hitherto imperforate stamps had been the norm, which meant that stamps had to be cut from a single sheet — a time-consuming and error-prone process.
- Ireland is in the midst of the Great Famine — caused by a potato blight which decimates the crop on which one fifth of the population depends for food. When the seven-year famine ends in 1852, a million people will have died, a further one million emigrated, and Ireland’s population fallen by over 20%.
Fast Facts
- Schumann was a leading composer of the Romantic era, and his life matched the tortured spirit of the age. His early aspirations to be a virtuoso pianist were thwarted by a hand injury, and mental illness dogged his life: he died in a mental asylum at the age of 46. As well as numerous compositions — especially for solo piano, piano and voice, and orchestra — he was also a prolific music critic.
- His Symphony No. 3 was written in 1850, shortly after he had moved to the Rhineland town of Düsseldorf. The second movement was originally entitled ‘Morning life on the Rhine’, and it’s clear that Schumann was inspired by his new surroundings — both the majestic river and the magnificent cathedral of Cologne.
- Symphony No. 4 was originally written nine years earlier in 1841, in the first flush of happiness after Schumann’s marriage to Clara — a marriage which had been opposed by Clara’s father, to the point of a court challenge. Dissatisfied with the first version of the work, Schumann revised it extensively in 1852.
- Schumann wrote his first symphony with a quill pen that he had found near Beethoven’s grave, and the influence of the master symphonist was clearly large in Schumann’s mind. But he broke new ground by introducing previously unknown orchestral colours, and by experimenting with the symphonic form — for example, eliding the movements into one another in his Fourth Symphony.
