Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Symphony #4 in D minor (1841 / 1851)

Schumann wrote the first version of his D minor Symphony in 1841, the same year in which he composed his First Symphony, his Piano Concerto (first movement) and several other orchestral works. It was performed by the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra soon after its completion, but it was not favorably received. Feeling, perhaps, that he had not achieved the goals he set himself, Schumann set the piece aside and returned to it only after he had written his Second Symphony (1846) and Third (“Rhenish”) Symphony (1851). In 1851 he revised the D minor symphony, thickening the orchestrations and adjusting the transitions between movements. It was performed that year in Düsseldorf, where Schumann was Music Director, and published as the Fourth Symphony, although it was actually the second symphony he had composed.

Schumann thought of the D-minor Symphony as a “symphonic fantasy” and called it this in letters and notes. By this he seems to have meant a symphony that would not be limited by traditional movement and key schemes but would be freer and more imaginative, but at the same time more tightly integrated by a single idea. (Schumann similarly called his Piano Concerto a “fantasy” it the early drafts.) The form is indeed unconventional. The piece has four movements, but they are played without break, each movement merging into the next by means of modulation of both key and tempo. All movements are based on the same thematic material, reworked, recalled and transformed. The legato d-minor theme of the slow introduction turns up again as the 2^nd theme in the 2^nd movement and (in inversion) at the beginning of the 3^rd. The allegro theme of the first movement becomes the theme of the fourth movement, and so on. The first movement purports to be in sonata-allegro form, but the development is abnormally long and the recapitulation so short as to be almost perfunctory. Only in the 4^th movement does Schumann fully recapitulate the themes from the first movement exposition, now transformed into a triumphant D major finale.