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Michael Tilson Thomas on Performing Schumann Robert Schumann’s wife, Clara, one of the great virtuoso pianists of her day, encouraged her husband to move beyond his early keyboard compositions and write for the orchestra. Schumann was a self-taught orchestrator and has been faulted for being essentially a piano composer with an imperfect grasp of large symphonic forces. But for Michael Tilson Thomas, the pianistic foundation of Schumann’s music is its strength, and he approaches the symphonies not just as a conductor, but also as a pianist. Here he discusses how he and the San Francisco Symphony perform Schumann, how together they grasp and communicate the music’s essence. As a student, I enjoyed playing Schumann’s piano pieces. They are such an evocative mix of sensitivity and eccentricity. To me, the sensibilities of Schumann’s symphonies and his piano music are closely linked. It was probably in 1968 that I heard a performance of Schumann’s Third Symphony. I was struck by it, and it became the first orchestral piece of Schumann’s I took up. Around the time I started studying it, I met Leonard Bernstein. In our conversations about music, he always asked me a lot of questions. One day we looked over the Schumann Third Symphony. We turned to the second movement, to a beautiful little passage marked poco rallentando. He asked me what that instruction meant. “It means ‘go a little slower,’” I said. “Right. But why go a little slower? Give me some motivations.” “OK. I go slower because I don’t know where I’m going.” “Give me another.” “I’m scared about what’s coming next.” “Another.” “It’s so beautiful, I don’t want it to end.” He kept asking. Finally he asked, “Of all those, which do you feel is the most authentic and appropriate motivation for this particular moment?” This motivational approach was the same thing I’d learned from the great cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and other musicians I worked with early in my career. What is the music actually about? And what, for you, can it be about? Maybe it’s different for you than it would be for someone else. What are you able to do, just because of who you are, at a particular time in your life? In a solo piece, or a chamber piece, the motivations can be communicated very naturally. What was important about the conversation with Bernstein was that it suggested this idea of motivation could be applied to an orchestral piece. Naturally, when you’re working with an orchestra, motivation is more difficult to project, because so many people are involved. A lot of things that would happen simultaneously in solo or chamber music must be completely thought