Robert Schumann: Complete Piano Sonatas

What first drew me to the study of Schumann’s Sonatas, and not only from a strictly pianistic perspective, was the desire to understand why the German composer so often altered the first versions of his works. This line of enquiry began with Op. 14, which I studied as a boy, and gradually led me to search for the material connected with the many compositions written during the 1830s. It was a journey that brought me to pages whose very existence I had not known: the unfinished Sonata No. 4, for instance, of which only a few bars of a first movement survive, together with a somewhat more substantial fragment of a fourth movement, full of marvellous ideas but sadly left incomplete; or the first Finale of Op. 14, likewise unfinished; or again an earlier version, and one quite different from the version normally performed today, of the first movement of the Sonata in G minor.

To come across Schumann’s manuscripts or sketchbooks is to enter an endless world of fleeting, embryonic ideas: very short pieces begun and then forgotten, from which Schumann would often extract small fragments and insert them into other works. It is, in short, a kind of compositional workshop, extremely difficult to find one’s way through, but unquestionably fascinating. Comparing the first drafts with the published versions also brings to light, as in the case of the Sonata Op. 22, substantial differences in phrasing, rhythm, articulation and even dynamics that are literally “reversed”, differences that alter the character of the music itself.

In the end, what led me to this research was the unconditional love, Love with a capital L, that I feel for an extraordinary genius whose alleged madness has always enchanted and seduced us.

Massimiliano Motterle

The work that would eventually receive the title Fantasie in C major occupied Schumann from 1836 to 1839. The initial impulse came from the opportunity to contribute to the commemoration of Beethoven through the construction of a monument dedicated to him in Bonn. This was the outward occasion, for Schumann’s need to confront Beethoven’s work and thought had long been smouldering within him. He reconsidered the title of the work several times, and the final choice of Fantasie proved the most representative for a composition whose musical structure and conception are so highly original. Although it stands apart from the historical tradition of improvisatory fantasy, Schumann’s Fantasie shows a unique freedom in its way of engaging with compositional models and in its treatment of quotations and references. Stylistically, it moves away from the classical sonata, and especially from the Beethovenian model. Seen as a sonata, it would appear eccentric, insufficiently directed, capricious, unusual. As a fantasy, precisely because of its innovations, it is wholly convincing.

The ideal poles of the work are Beethoven and Clara Wieck, Schumann’s two great loves. Beethoven is seen as a spiritual and ideal father, the bearer of an artistic lesson that expresses the highest moral authority; Clara is the emotional heart of the work, because of the deep sentimental implications of all she represented for the composer’s heart.

Allusions, quotations, symbols, a complex network of relationships, echoes and intertexts course through the substance of the work.

The construction of the musical discourse, the harmony, the melody and the compositional strategies are all ambiguous; they reinforce, and are reinforced by, what comes from outside the work itself.

At the heart of the Fantasie lies a “secret sound”: the melody that appears at the end of the first movement and, in the original version, at the end of the third. It is the melody contained in the sixth Lied of Beethoven’s cycle An die ferne Geliebte, “To the Distant Beloved”, a true and heartfelt dedication to Clara, the beloved, “from Beethoven’s own hands”. This motif would acquire a “history” of its own: echoes, transformations, allusions.

These are intimate correspondences of “elective affinities”, as Goethe would have put it. The year 1836 was the time of greatest anguish in the tormented and obstructed love between Clara and Robert.

The first movement, initially entitled Ruinen, is the crucial movement of Op. 17. Its form is idiosyncratic, unique, surprising and unexpected. Through the dissolution and transfiguration of the constituent parts of classical Beethovenian sonata form, the “disintegrated” elements give rise to a new form.

Grand form and fragment coexist. Schumann renounces the formal and linguistic “pillars” of Beethoven’s monumental style, as well as the tonic-dominant polarity and the extensive use of the great crescendo towards a culmination.

The composer imitates the motion, the breathing of sonata form, yet contradicts its substance, its aesthetic premises and its symmetries.

Illuminating in this regard is Charles Rosen’s concept of an “architecture in waves”, waves that begin from a climax and gradually lose their impetus.

The passionate surge with which the movement opens is the epitome of the entire work: the greatest possible concentration of creative energy in a single, unforgettable melodic gesture, a wave of passionate ardour, uncontainable and overwhelming.

The central section, Im Legendenton, opens the music to mystery, to another order of time, in which an ancient consciousness, a voice of arcane wisdom, intones its song. This song becomes the medium of symbols and archetypal meanings which, like shadows awakened from an abyssal sleep, re-emerge from the remotest regions of the unconscious.

Regular phrases and precise harmonic cadences mark the discourse of this “mysterious supplicant”.

The reprise arrives ex abrupto, dissolving the dreamlike vision.

In the final bars of the movement, the theme drawn from Beethoven’s Lied appears three times. The intimate emotional force of this moment, in which one witnesses Schumann’s invocation and, at the same time, his request for blessing, is indescribable. Music as actio in distans finds here one of its most intense and elevated expressions: Beethoven is both father and brother to Schumann in the suffering caused by the distant beloved. He is called upon to be more than merely near to the suffering young man, he who, reborn from suffering, had composed the “Song of Thanksgiving in the Lydian mode” in the String Quartet Op. 132.

The second movement, placed as a broad caesura in the unfolding of the work, releases extraordinary energy from the very first monumental chords of the opening chorale. These chords set in motion a compositional process made up of motivic figures driven by dotted rhythms and syncopations, giving the music an extraordinary sense of inevitability and necessity. The ternary form, the feeling of “circularity” and continual return, ceaselessly reaffirm the joyful and exultant boldness which, in the reprise, leads to that vertiginous ending where the most unbridled frenzy, combined with the most reckless virtuoso daring, puts even the most distinguished pianistic careers to the severest test.

“Everything is organic, everything breathes the same life.” Thus the composer himself spoke of his work, and the last movement sets its poetic seal at the close of the Fantasie.

The marvellous speech-like tone that pervades this page, the Poet had already spoken in the admirable Kinderszenen, carries the music into a dimension of enchanted lightness. After the passionate flames of the first movement and the exultant celebrations of the second, the pace here slows almost to suspension, touching the ineffable, evoking it through the articulation of an “open”, ascending form, still mindful of the original idea of bearing the title Sternbild, “Constellation”. The triplets that curl upon themselves and enfold themes of infinite, sorrowful sweetness are arabesques that seem capable of tracing themselves forever. The reappearance of the beloved’s theme at the end, in the version presented here, closes a circle that could open again and again.

By adopting the art of ambiguity as the defining signature of his music-making, Schumann allowed himself the freedom to draw upon quotations from other music and to hybridise forms which, in apparent contradiction, express a kind of “illogicality” when read through the lens of traditional formal functions, functions that are here definitively called into question.

Through the category of humour, Schumann inherited from Jean Paul Richter and refined the art of unifying opposites, of harmonising life and art in a shifting and immensely complex play of mirrors, illusions and fragments, together forming a great, expansive, monumental form. He “dismantles” and deconstructs the Beethovenian “monument” in order to build his own, of an entirely different order.

This “formal game” is addressed to those who “listen in secret”, grasping the “revelations” that music bears. In temporal terms, the music inhabits a spiral-like process, tending towards dissolution and elusion at the close of the first and third movements.

Three concepts seem significant in relation to Schumann’s compositional procedure and its consequences for the psychology of listening. The first is Witz, the capacity to perceive analogies between distant elements, in an extended thematic relationship that runs from one end of the piece to the other, where everything is connected with everything else, forwards and backwards in time. The second is Tiefsinn, or “depth of meaning”: the identification, through the combination of contrasting characters, of factors of relationship and resemblance among things that the senses bring together but reason would keep apart. Finally there is Ferne, distance understood as historical dialectic, as remoteness from what precedes. The presence of absence. Schumann’s relationship with Beethoven and Schubert, another of his tutelary spirits, is thus expressed through a series of formal and expressive experiments in which he recognises latent possibilities still to be developed, through an analogical sensitivity and an instinct for physiognomic characterisation that are truly astonishing.

The Sonata in F-sharp minor, Op. 11, written between 1833 and 1836 and published in that same year, is the most wayward of the three Sonatas. It begins with a tripartite Introduction, an intimate declaration to Clara made by Florestan and Eusebius.

The outstanding features of the work are its cyclic structure and its rhapsodic nature. It runs counter to the particular formal organisation associated with the opening and closing movements of the sonata genre, since it does not follow the canons inherited from tradition. By combining different stylistic elements within a single work, Schumann unexpectedly links the Sonata to the world of dance music, the Fandango, for instance. Examples of this may be found in the galloping rhythmic motif that constitutes the first theme of the first movement, introduced by leaps of three descending fifths and derived from the fourth piece of Clara Wieck’s Quatre pièces caractéristiques, Op. 5; and in the dance atmosphere of Papillons and Carnaval that we find in the third movement, sketched in with a parodic and burlesque attitude typical of Italian opera buffa.

The melody that unfolds in the second movement is taken from the Lied An Anna, one of Robert’s earliest songs, composed on poems by Justinus Kerner. It had already sounded as Eusebius’s theme in the central part of the Introduction to the first movement.

In the last movement, we witness a kind of procession of figures of the psyche rendered in music, each summoning the next by association and assonance, creating an iridescent mosaic.

Rhythmic drive and the most varied combinations of accentuation nourish the formal pathways, alternating impetuous waves with releases of exhausted pain, such as the one that appears at the end of the exposition. One seems to hear the breath of a Chopinesque soul come to comfort Schumann in a kind of most intimate, transfigured Mazurka: another expression and testimony of Schumann’s ability to make joy, passion and pain dance.

Then the Coda propels the Finale, and with it the entire work, one last time towards the final vertiginous whirls of this dancing Sonata of love.

Among the Sonatas, the one in G minor, Op. 22, had a particularly troubled gestation, occupying the composer for almost a decade. Two versions exist: one connected with the manuscript held in the Berlin State Library, which includes the Presto passionato as final movement; the other, far better known, is the version with the new Finale expressly requested by Clara from Robert.

The extreme concision of the musical thought is reflected, in the first movement, in the swift brushstrokes with which the first theme is drawn: sharp, clearly profiled and, as in a catabasis, instantly plunging into despair.

The greatest differences between the two versions are found in the different treatment of the exposition in the first movement. The “Berlin” version presents a longer transition between the first and second themes, in which a new thematic idea appears and gives the exposition greater breadth. The second theme, different from that of the published version, offers a cantabile line that is less Lied-like and more instrumental.

The printed version, by contrast, preserves an impressive and inexorable concision and synthesis.

The final stretto, first marked presto and then ancora più presto, leads to a final restatement of the first theme, closing the movement in Beethovenian fashion.

The Andantino, drawn from the Lied Im Herbste, written in 1828, is set apart from the impetus of the first movement. It presents the enchanting melody of the aforementioned Lied and reimagines it pianistically, subsequently unfolding in varied sequences of the theme, enriched by the refinement of Schumann’s piano writing.

The version preserved in the Berlin manuscript, lacking the first fourteen and a half bars, essentially maintains the same text as the version published in 1839. The subdued quiet is shaken by the violent percussive attack of the third movement, the Scherzo. Very brief in duration, this movement alternates sequences of repeated crushed chords with witty syncopated phrases, humorous and cantabile in character.

Opening the last movement is a taut, agitated theme, drawn in rapid strokes from broken figures, in which the indomitable Florestan comes to life again, accepting the challenge of fate and riding it onward. In contrast to the first, the second theme expresses all the enchanted and elusive poetic essence of Eusebius.

Schumann’s technique of carrying over large blocks of identical formal sections brings, in this final movement, a loss of direction and the consequent sensation of “going round in circles”, together with the listener’s perception of a certain illogicality. This is a new conception of musical time, one that would have extraordinary consequences in the music of Debussy, a great admirer of Schumann.

This highly personal compositional approach finds a striking outcome in the Presto passionato, the original Finale that Clara advised Robert not to use, since she considered it too forbidding for pianists and not easily comprehensible to the public. The piece is indeed extremely difficult, both because of its forbidding and virtuosic piano writing and because of the dense texture in which themes and motifs appear, assert themselves and follow one another almost without breath. They are driven to the limits of performability as well as perceptibility by an expressive urgency of rare propulsive force. The effect is astonishing: the music seems to twist and recoil upon itself, while at the same time unfolding and launching itself into a fatal race, subject to the imperious necessity of a higher force that compels it to advance at any cost, without choice, carrying it, stunned, to the epilogue marked by the four exhausted final chords.

The opening of the Sonata Op. 14, originally conceived as Concert sans Orchestre, plunges the listener straight in medias res with the motif derived from Clara’s Andantino theme, the true generative nucleus of all the thematic material of this monumental work. What follows is an inexhaustible succession of themes, motifs and connecting melodic fragments, each with its own distinctive character, all immersed in a continuous and dramatic climate of modulation. The pianistic temperament of this first movement evokes the grand gestures of Lisztian symphonic pianism, conferring upon it a dimension both virtuosic and expressive, of considerable breadth and challenge.

The Scherzo in D-flat major, broad in formal proportions and symphonic in character, is an uncanny, disorienting kaleidoscope. Its assertive, march-like character and metric contrasts give it momentum; the ceaseless and unpredictable modulations generate coups de théâtre, unexpected symmetries and asymmetries in the very density of their accumulation.

Schumann’s art of assemblage, applied to composition, finds here one of its most striking outcomes, for beneath the forceful opening stance this extraordinary movement conceals layered contradictions, articulated through compositional refinements of the highest order.

The second Scherzo, a posthumous movement discovered by Brahms in 1866 together with two Variations relating to the Andantino, is more compact and less elaborated than the preceding one, and presents features closer to an idea of classical cast.

The heart of the Sonata, the Quasi variazioni on Clara’s theme, is based on a sorrowful, afflicted theme. The qualifying word quasi, attached to variazioni, is emblematic: they seem to be an utterly private place, receiving both the inconsolable despondencies and the most hidden desires of Robert and Clara; a kind of sustained meditation unfolded in six stages, in which Schumann the wayfarer reflects musically upon the figure of Clara, embodied in her theme, with which he enters into total communion. Performer and listener alike pause on the threshold of this depth, as if fearful of invading a sphere so intimate that they are compelled to draw back, leaving the two lovers in the desperate solitude of their love.

“My darkest period!” This phrase of Schumann’s own is the impulse behind the genesis of the Prestissimo possibile, in which “figures of time gone mad” move in a delirious and hallucinatory unease. The Chinese-box formal conception completely disorients the listener, fusing in an extraordinary way the reiterations typical of rondo form with the more developmental procedures of sonata form.

The beloved, despair, psychic tension: all become musical figures of implacable suffering, and as such they seize the music, tightening their grip upon it to the very edge of suffocation.

“Schumann’s art brought to music an unprecedented complexity and a new unease: all this would lead to modernity. Schumann admired the monumental Beethovenian forms as unattainable; compared with them, his own works and those of his colleagues seemed frivolous to him. He believed that it was Symphonies, Sonatas and Quartets that expressed the sublime, not Dances, Nocturnes or character pieces. He did not realise, as no one did at the time, that his generation expressed the sublime through the futile.” Charles Rosen

Andrea Rosa © 2026