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00:03 MELISSA MOORE: Welcome to the Tippet Rise podcast, brought to you from Tippet Rise Art Center located on a 10,000 acre ranch in Fishtail, Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park. I’m Melissa Moore. At Tippet Rise we celebrate the synergy of art, architecture, music and nature, out of which we weave our identities. The Tippet Rise podcast explores these connections. In today’s episode, we’ll hear our co-founder Peter Halstead, at the piano, showcasing Robert Schumann’s Clara themes.
00:39 PETER HALSTEAD: When Robert Schumann, the great German composer met Clara Wieck, she was eight years old. When she turned 11, Robert moved into her house to study piano with her father. And there, began one of the great love stories, in music. Of course, they fell in love, her father disapproved. He felt Schumann was a penniless composer, which was true, although Schumann became one of the greatest critics and music writers of his age, founded a magazine in Leipzig, and of course, became one of the great composers of all time, but he did go mad.
01:18 PH: So possibly Clara Wieck’s father had a point. Not that he knew it, but nevertheless, they sued Herr Wieck so that they could marry. And a day before Clara turned 21, they married just to rub it in that they could do it even though you needed, at that time, your father’s permission to do that and she didn’t have it. So they sued successfully. Clara had written a theme that was very famous. It was known as the Clara theme and today everyone has a theme. I mean James Bond has a theme, the President of the United States has a theme, love story has a theme. There, are… I mean everyone has a kind of melody that follows them around, at least in movies and some people in real life.
02:10 PH: Though Clinton used to bring a ghetto blaster with his own personal Hail to the Chief theme, after he became president, ‘cause he felt he still needed entry music to make it important when he came into a room. And we all have our song that we, with our spouses, and our boyfriends and girlfriends that we love. So, Clara and Robert had a theme. They had their own song, and it was actually written by Clara and it was called Romance Varié, meaning maybe a Romance which really means nothing, means a piece with variations of varied romance. So she has this melody and then she writes a lot of fun variations on it.
02:58 PH: This is that melody.
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03:28 PH: So that is the famous Clara theme, which infused so much German music for so long. From that, Robert Schumann wrote variations based on a theme by Clara Wieck. And it was based on the andantino and that’s what that’s called, the andantino from the Romance Varié of Clare Wieck and this is the… This is Robert Schumann’s version of that.
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04:13 PH: That is the quasi variazioni from the andantino of Clara Wieck by Robert Schumann, and then he varies that. He writes his own variations on that. Schumann used it over and over again. He used an abbreviated version of it. Here is really a three note version of it in his piano concerto.
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04:42 PH: Just those three notes.
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04:46 PH: But then he does it backwards, he does it upside down.
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05:18 PH: And that’s really this…
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05:21 PH: And the beginning of the concerto is the same.
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05:28 PH: Do you hear that’s, those three notes…
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05:31 PH: Is a…
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05:38 PH: And then he plays it backwards. He plays it upside down.
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05:48 PH: So it goes backwards. It goes…
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05:52 PH: And that’s the passion note.
05:53 PH: So…
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06:00 PH: It’s a fifth apart. Any notes in between the first note and the fifth note are part of the Clara theme.
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06:07 PH: Now, Robert unfortunately went mad and tried to drown himself and spent the rest of his life in an asylum. At that time, two years before that, when he was 20, Brahms came to visit the Schumanns in Dusseldorf. He and Clara became very close because of course, Clara was at this stage a women alone with the five children and a husband in the asylum and the need to earn a living to support herself. Brahms helped the family earn a living and in fact, they really were a family unit until Schumann died.
06:45 PH: Unfortunately, Brahms had grown up in a brothel playing background music, and of course being the darling of all the demi-monde in the brothel. So he really had come to feel that women were either sex objects or women who were chaste and pure and with no hope of ever having any kind of physical romance with them. So when he came down to loving Clara, platonically, Brahms could do that, but when it came down to actually marrying her and living with her, he couldn’t do that. So after Robert died, basically Brahms disappeared and left Clara at the altar to support her family for the rest of her life, being the greatest virtuoso of her time.
07:40 PH: Brahms, needless to say, felt terrible about this and basically agonized over it his entire life and at the end of his life, really, I would say when Brahms was 59, which is in 1892, he began writing intermezzo to Clara, which he sent her, and they would often play them together and they had the greatest moments of their lives, playing those intermezzo.
08:10 PH: Clara died four years later after he started sending her these intermezzos. So they really, I think, brightened her sick days at the end of her life and in a way, they were Brahms’ penance for having left her. And I’d like to play a couple of the pieces of the intermezzo. Not the entire piece, but just the themes, so you can hear how Brahms varied that Clara theme of Robert Schumann.
08:40 PH: The one thing you could do, rather than just doing…
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08:45 PH: Five notes down. You could just do…
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08:53 PH: So here you have the sigh, which is this.
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09:06 PH: And you hear that last one.
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09:09 PH: That is…
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09:18 PH: That is the Robert Schumann’s Clara theme.
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09:25 PH: Made, if anything, more passionate. There’s a thing called really…Sehnsucht, in German, which means longing and yearning. And it’s a note that almost resolves, but doesn’t quite. You want it to be a…
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09:47 PH: There you see it resolved. But while it doesn’t resolve…
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09:54 PH: It’s lost love. It’s lost childhood. It’s the lost Viennese Empire, which was rapidly disintegrating in the time of Brahms and of course, he wrote it backwards too. Here’s that same thing backwards.
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10:13 PH: So that’s the Clara theme, but it’s just…
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10:30 PH: And here’s a way he expanded that theme. He put in five notes.
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10:38 PH: So it’s not…
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10:41 PH: But it’s…
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10:43 PH: But it’s still the Clara theme.
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11:01 PH: So you hear the… It’s everywhere. It’s this.
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11:05 PH: It’s this.
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11:07 PH: It’s this.
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11:09 PH: And then it’s this.
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11:13 PH: So it’s everywhere. So he basically is putting the Clara theme, four or five times. He’s doing the sigh.
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11:29 PH: And then he’s doing it upside down.
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11:43 PH: And then he’s doing this beautiful sigh with notes inside it.
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12:02 PH: This is one way Brahms does this. Here is another way, where he makes, in that same intermezzo, where he does this.
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12:29 PH: So, it’s a…
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12:32 PH: And it’s…
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12:37 PH: He’s even extended the Clara theme to be a little longer. And of course, that’s gorgeous, and it has other manifestations. Here is one that goes down the keyboard. Listen.
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13:11 PH: You see he’s just going down the keyboard for ever.
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13:23 PH: So, that’s an extended Clara theme that’s in the intermezzo, which is opus 116 number four. In the intermezzo of his 117 written around 1892, here’s a Scottish theme, which is actually that four-note Clara theme.
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13:53 PH: You see it turns around and then goes up again.
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13:57 PH: Now it’s coming down.
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14:00 PH: And so, he’s making this extraordinary, and it has all, here it is, again, in the minor.
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14:16 PH: That’s the minor Clara theme. Here is another example of a Clara theme.
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14:47 PH: So you see, he has it here.
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15:01 PH: And then it finally, and it comes back like this.
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15:12 PH: And so it goes even more one, two, three, four, five, six. He makes it even more passionate by adding more notes to it. This must have been extremely gratifying to Clara. I think that’s… And really, every single one of the extraordinary intermezzo has this theme to it with very few exceptions. So if you ever listen to one of the beautiful intermezzo of Brahms, think of how he was thinking of Clara and how that theme music has so much passion between the two of them, of lost and then fulfilled love, but also it has the entire passion of the end of the century of the twilight in Vienna, of the loss of the great intellectual kingdom in Austria, which was lost to the First World War and never really recovered and ended up in America. All the Germans eventually, all the Austrians were forced out by war and came to live mostly in America. So that we take our incredible musical culture and much of our literature as well because of the refugees from Europe during the first two… Well, the only two world wars. This is Peter Halstead for Tippet Rise saying thank you for listening.
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16:45 MM: I’m Melissa Moore and I’d like to thank you for listening to this podcast, brought to you by Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Montana. If you enjoyed this podcast, please visit tippetrise.org. To hear other episodes, read transcripts and listen to full recordings of the music featured on each podcast. We hope you’ll join us next month for another episode.
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