04/23/2025
A little post about Aldo Clementi’s piano concerto, which Argento is performing on April 26th, 2pm at the Dimenna Center.
Italian composer Aldo Clementi (1925-2011) took the opening section of Schumann’s Novelette #8, op. 21,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2Hh9rdl5Cg
and obsessively explores it in the piano part of his “Piano Concerto,” repeating it in fits and starts. Within the orchestra parts, small instrumental groups repeat riffs and patterns amongst themselves, gradually changing speeds. The players are within the small instrumental groups (usually trios), connected to each other, but often not to other things that are happening in the room. Argento performed this work twice in California, years ago, but in my experience, it’s not a work that succeeds within the frame of a proscenium stage, with all of its hierarchical and linear implications and expectations. It is a concerto that is not shaped by the orchestra’s interaction with the soloist. It’s not governed or led by a conductor’s interpretation or intentionality. Instead, it’s something that the listener needs to just inhabit. Clementi's concerto is a model of Schumann’s brain, obsessively repeating material in a way that is just out of control. (Schumann wrote about his earworms often). You hear the gears of Schumann’s brain turning. On April 26th, we are performing this work as an installation. We’ll start the piece before the audience enters the room. As they enter, we will continue it as the audience has a chance to make a little trip through Clementi’s image of Schumann’s brain.
Clementi reacted to something essential about Schumann’s 8th Novelette: within its discreet sections, it is a work of mind-blowing and indescribable inspiration, with flights of fantasy that bring the listener to extremes of full-blown desperation, to whimsical, charming, and disarming dance flirtation, to transcendent idealism on the other. But the overall form, or “storytelling” of the piece doesn’t add up. Each section is totally engrossing, but each distinctive section is also intransigent and unable to be forced into any overarching story. It’s as if you took 5 or 6 chapters of the most inspired novels you’ve ever read, and just randomly put those chapters into a book.
As a result of this, the 8th Novelette makes no sense in any rational or linear way. Schumann tries to make the piece “work” by repeating one section, and labeling other sections “Trio 1” and “Trio 2”, but by the time you get to the end of the piece, the listener has to concede that there’s no way to reconcile the various parts of the work, even though the discrete sections of the work are completely inspired. If you have any doubts about this accounting of the piece, go sit through the piece beginning to end.
As a listener, writer, and a music critic, Schumann understood form in the linear “storytelling” sense, and he tried very hard for his whole life (particularly in his Symphonies!) to tell coherent musical stories within classical structures. Sometimes he succeeded, like in the “Overture, Scherzo, and Finale, op. 52, which is his 2nd attempt at a symphony (although he wasn’t able to write a slow movement for this piece, which is why it never became a symphony by name). Schumann’s struggle to create “rational” forms was also a personal struggle to stay connected to a rational reality, which he was tragically unable to do, as he spent the last 2 years of his life in an insane asylum in Endenich.
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A separate subject: a little more detail about Clara and the 8th Novelette:
The YouTube excerpt below is the so-called “Trio 2” of the 8th Novelette. It starts with a dance that is exuberant, joyful, and slightly dry on its face, then introduces a “farewell” progression to transition into an indescribable melody with a soaring line that stops the listeners in their tracks. When this melody starts, he writes “Stimme aus der Ferne,” (a voice from afar).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWIgPJvFQVs
That melody belongs to world famous pianist Clara Wieck (later Clara Schumann), and opens her Romance variée, Op. 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-Dj7ugscv4
Robert and Clara could not see one another in 1838, despite the fact that they were madly in love. Clara’s father was dead set against their relationship. He took every means possible, including an army of lawyers, to prevent the two from communicating. It’s hard for us to imagine this situation in the era of FaceTime, but for many months during this period, they didn’t know if they would ever speak again. Clara lived at home, and was under KGB-level patriarchal control and surveillance of Clara’s father. Clara and Robert both wrote many letters during this period that were intercepted. Some could never even be sent or received. This inclusion of Clara’s melody within the 8th Novelette was Schumann’s way of trying to tell her, somehow, somewhere, about his love for her. And it was part of maintaining the artistic dialogue between them that was very much a part of that love. What’s interesting is that exterior circumstances could never defeat their love for one another. After this utterly miserable forced separation of 1838, they were ultimately married in 1840, and despite their incredibly stressful lives, against all odds, their love was not just an ideal or an abstraction. They had a love that was all-encompassing and full blown (actually, throughout their lives, despite living with 7 children and despite the constant pressures of touring, they were also very active sexual partners, as documented by an “X” that Schumann marked in his journal for every calendar date in which they made love – and yes! We have these journals today). Ultimately, it was not the difficulties of practical life, family, and careers, but Schumann’s mental illness that led to the “end” of their marriage.
And Schumann quotes Clara in a piece that has no context for it within the overall form. I think this is one of the reasons why Schumann’s music means so much to so many composers and so many musicians in general: Sometimes the very best parts of us, the most vivid dreams, the parts that really matter, make no sense, can be crazy and out-of-place, sometimes even laughable. Our most dearly-held aspirations are often not mighty, impressive, or success laden. More often they are quixotic, impractical, unrealizable, irrational, or unrequited. Sometimes, they just don’t work, except in our imaginations. Does that mean that we are dreamers, unable to face reality? Maybe. But couldn’t such a claim be made about anyone entering the professional music field today? Is this a rational choice that we’ve made?
I’m sure that if we asked the ever-practical Clara Schumann (who heroically took care of eight children on her own, while Schumann withered away in Endenich for the final 2 years of his life), she would have unhesitatingly expressed a wish for a husband who was a full grown man capable of protecting and providing for her and her family in the real world. Yet, rather than cursing her fate, she spent the last decades of her life devotedly performing Schumann’s still-unknown music, when we know from remaining correspondences, that tour managers requested music other than her husbands. She simply would have made more money by touring with Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto over and over again. For her own soul and spiritual nourishment (Robert was already dead), it appears that she wanted to live in her husband’s dreams too, with him, despite it all. Despite all the trauma of their unimaginably difficult life, I don’t think Robert Schumann ever lost Clara. And miraculously, Clara never lost him either, even today, as we still listen to this music. If that’s not utterly romantic, I don’t know what is.
Michel Galante
(the main source for this is Dr. Peter Oswald’s book “The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius.” This book also includes photos of Schumann’s journals that include the aforementioned “x.”)
