MTT on Performing Schumann

MTT 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 6

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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 7

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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 through with an orchestra. That means a lot of advance preparation—preparing the parts from which musicians are playing, testing ideas in performance and discovering what works and what doesn’t work.

Shortly after my talk with Bernstein, I was rehearsing the Schumann Third with the Boston Symphony. Arthur Rubinstein stopped by for a moment.

Afterward, he told me that what I was doing with the music—the shapes and balances and rubatos I was asking for—wasn’t traditional. “I think some of it works,” he said. “I’m not sure all of it does yet. But the point is, what you’re doing is absolutely right—the way you’re searching. Keep doing that. When I started playing Chopin, everybody told me De Pachmann or Anton Rubinstein played it better. Suddenly, when I was fifty, people began saying I played Chopin 8

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the way it should be played. That’s how life goes. Meanwhile, if you want to pursue Romantic music, don’t forget to save plenty of time to travel, see great art in museums, read, drink great wine, eat wonderful food, meet fascinating people.” In other words, the interpretation of the music needs to be a reflection not only of the composer’s life, but also of your own life. Those things have to work together.

Like so much classical music, Schumann’s is a preserve for endangered emotions. He’s talking about wistfulness, whimsy, ardency, longing, setting off recklessly in conflicting directions, losing your way, or just mulling things over.

In his sincerity, Schumann stands out from other Romantic composers.

Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner—their lives were as much on public display as their music. They’re hedonists, always moving on to the next sensation, the next love affair. Schumann is the quiet guy. I like to imagine him on a date.

“Yes,” I hear him saying, “the next club is even wilder, and it’s still open, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could instead just go home. We could sit by the fire and appreciate one another’s company.” He invites you into his intimate world.

Schumann tried to lead a normal family life, concurrent with his artistic life.

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The irony is that those other wild Romantics ended up fine. Schumann, the family man, was the one who collapsed.

These emotional pulls are present in the symphonies. The introduction to the First Symphony, for example, begins confidently, with the brass intoning the rhythms of a line of poetry by Adolf Böttger: “O wende, wende Deinen Lauf— Im Thale blüht der Frühling auf ! ” (Oh turn, oh turn and change your course— Now in the valley blooms the spring!). Then come violent outbursts from the strings, then a delicate ballet-like flute solo, and other floating worlds. (This is all evocative of E.T.A. Hoffmann, one of Schumann’s favorite writers.) Then we go into the first movement, which sets out to do big things, as Beethoven might have done. Schumann was obsessed—as were all his musical contemporaries—with carrying Beethoven’s vision forward. Schumann’s approach to this is interesting.

In this movement, and in many of his other pieces, he sets out to make a big design. Then, when it’s time for the final intellectual summation of the piece— time to proceed to the coda, as Beethoven would—Schumann realizes he can’t quite do it. And so he adopts a different strategy, letting the music evaporate into little wisps of sound. Then comes what is essentially a beautiful song, a 10

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kind of epilogue. It’s as if he’s saying, This is what I can do. I can write a great song, and share who I really am, before going on to the big finish.

Schumann moves between many sound worlds in these symphonies. Some sections are truly massive and proclamatory. Other parts are soloistic or chamberlike, with suggestions of song or village music. So how can all these varied ideas be made to sound in something as thick and massive as a Romantic orchestra, especially the kind of orchestra Schumann uses?

My approach to Schumann—and to the whole standard repertoire—is to vary the number of musicians playing at any given time. According to the musical situation, the orchestra might morph from a large ensemble to a chamber orchestra, and vice versa. For example, in the Fourth Symphony, the Romanze movement begins with an oboe and cello duet. I reduce the number of people accompanying them, so the oboe and cello stand out in greater relief. In the serenade-like passage that follows, the solo violin is accompanied by a chambersized group. Later the whole orchestra joins in tenderly, and the music blooms into something grander.

In approaching the orchestra like this, I’ve also been influenced by 11

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cinematography. We’re all aware, when we see a film, of what kind of shot we’re seeing: a wide shot, a close-up, a pan, a dissolve. It seems to me that the same things can take place in a soundscape, in an orchestral performance. There’s a difference between hearing eighteen or twenty people playing in a relaxed, chamber-music kind of style, and hearing eighty people playing quietly. In this latter instance, the perspective of the sound is widescreen, as opposed to hearing something intimately, up close.

Schumann’s orchestration has always raised questions. Most conductors do something to make the music sound more transparent. Mahler completely re-orchestrated the symphonies. George Szell retouched them extensively. Most commonly today, string sections are asked to use a greater variety of strokes, most of them lighter. In changing the number of people playing from moment to moment, I’m guided by a number of things, most of all the musical mood.

But there are a number of far more specific issues to be considered, including such things as the number of octaves in which a melody is presented. For example, the melody might be played just by the first violins, or by the first and second violins in unison, or by the first and second violins in octaves. Or the first 12

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and second violins might play the melody in octaves and, an octave above the first violins, the flute is also playing it. If a melody is doubled in three octaves, and one person only is playing the top octave, with the vast number of people playing below, you must determine where the lead of the sound is supposed to be. Should it be a rich sound on the bottom, with just a wispiness on top? Or a passionate treble soaring over a lighter and smaller group below? These choices are affected by such things as the harmony and where we are inside the design of the piece. It’s a central principle of Romantic music that the same thematic material, the identical phrase shape, can appear in different parts of the piece and require a different interpretation, different kinds of sound and expression, according to what is happening in the larger design. Any inspired pianist does this, but few conductors do. In a solo work or a chamber piece, this principle would be applied spontaneously and naturally. With an orchestra of eighty people, it requires much more thought and many more decisions.

Such is my relationship with the members of the San Francisco Symphony that, with them, I can continue to ask questions, trying one thing and another, enlisting their artistry and their collaboration in figuring things out. Sometimes, 13

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in rehearsals, we have to de-program ourselves, think differently and explore a number of possible solutions, searching for the one that to us seems natural, authentic, easy. All of us together are searching, in the way Arthur Rubinstein suggested so many years ago. We approached these symphonies from the point of view of Schumann’s piano music, with all its color, unusual effects and voicings.

And I wanted these symphonies to sound as though they were being played on the piano, with free and spontaneous turns of phrase and color, and with the music’s wonderful sense of breathing—the way people breathe, sometimes deeply, sometimes with little emotional gasps.

I hope these performances suggest a different way of thinking about this repertoire, especially as it prioritizes the tender, simple, and vulnerable side of the music. Although the music is very personal, it feels universal. Schumann’s symphonies are about all of us.

—Michael Tilson Thomas

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