Schumann

It becomes more difficult to understand the reception, during his life, of Schumann. There were so many of him -- and that is not a crack at the facile third-hand diagnoses of mental illness that have always clouded his reputation. Rather, it refers to his styles or style-periods, and to the geographical aspects of his reception.

I have a box-set of his chamber music played by French artists. They make him sound very French. Certainly his chamber style was most influential in France: without Schumann, no Saint-Saëns, no Fauré. The pivotal work here is the first piano trio (D minor, Op. 63), and specifically its dense and virtuosic keyboard part, which is really a solecism and which stands in glaring contrast to the piano part of the Quintet, which is -- as it properly should be -- within the reach of many amateur pianists.

This trio can also be taken as the beginning of "late Schumann", a period during which he became more productive, but of works that posterity has tended to deprecate in favor of his early piano music and Lieder. His later focus upon large and established genres creates a superficial appearance that he was trying to "get serious" after his juvenile oversharing of such fantastic conceits as the Davidsbund, but his late music is also experimental, in different ways. Times, to be sure, he talks to himself -- but he always did that. Where would we place Schumann today without the implacable advocacy of Brahms? But even Brahms could not follow Schumann to the end, notoriously rejecting the violin concerto, which stands high among "last" works.