Piano Concerto in A minor Opus 54

Allegro Affettuoso  
Intermezzo  (Andantino Grazioso)
Allegro Vivace

After university studies in law, Robert Schumann devoted himself to becoming a concert pianist. However, a self inflicted injury to his right hand cut short this plan He then turned his energies to composing, with little encouragement from those around him, and  journalism. In 1834, and for the next ten years he was editor of Das Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, (The New Journal of Music), which was, at the time one of the most influential and important publications  in music, Not only were his essays and reviews of great interest,  even to this day, but also, it was here that he championed the music of his young contemporaries , (the late) Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn,  Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms.

Most of his earliest compositions were for the piano. However, in 1840, the year he married Clara Weick  after a long and complicated battle with her father, he composed some one hundred a fifty songs. She was the most famous and influential female pianist of the era. All of his orchestral music was written in the 1840s with the Piano Concerto dating from 1845.  He also took on various conducting posts to a limited success. Fairly soon after his marriage he began to suffer from a chronic depression which hampered his creativity, especially from the early 1850’s. In 1854 he began to suffer hallucinations, and after attempting suicide, he was admitted to an asylum where he remained for his own safety until his death some two years later, almost certainly the result of syphilis, which some scholars suggest that he contracted some twenty years previously. There he was cared for by Clara and the young Johannes Brahms.

Despite being dedicated to the pianist Ferdinand Hiller, from the outset Schumann’s Piano Concerto (as with most of his other works) was very closely associated with Clara Schumann. The sequence of notes near the beginning  of the work after the initial flourish C-B (in German H) A-A might be a hidden cipher for “Chiara”  a pet name given by Robert to her. She played the piano in all the performances for the first five years. Indeed, she was the soloist in over half of the public performances across Europe before her death.