JAVIER PERIANES

piano

CLARA SCHUMANN (1819-1896)

Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann Op. 20
(approx. 13 minutes)

ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Sonata No. 3 in F minor Op. 14
III. Quasi variazioni. Andantino de Clara Wieck
(approx. 8 minutes)

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)

Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann Op. 9
Thema. Ziemlich langsam
Var. 1
Var. 2 Poco più moto
Var. 3 Tempo di tema
Var. 4 Poco più moto
Var. 5 Allegro capriccioso
Var. 6 Allegro
Var. 7 Andante
Var. 8 Andante (non troppo lento)
Var. 9 Schnell
Var. 10 Poco adagio
Var. 11 Un poco più animato
Var. 12 Allegretto, poco scherzando
Var. 13 Non troppo presto
Var. 14 Andante
Var. 15 Poco adagio
Var. 16 Adagio
(approx. 20 minutes)
Intermission
ENRIQUE GRANADOS (1867-1916)
Goyescas Op. 11
Los Requiebros
Coloquio en la reja
El Fandango de candil
Quejas, o La Maja y el ruiseñor
El Amor y la muerte (Balada)
Epílogo: Serenata del espectro
(approx. 60 minutes)
* * *

Clara Schumann
Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann Op. 20
In 1852 Robert Schumann published a collection of piano miniatures under the picturesque
title Bunte Blätter (colourful leaves). The reference was to the “leaves” (pages) of a picture
album, each small piano piece being conceived as a kind of casual sketch or watercolour from
the album of an amateur artist.
No. 4 in the collection, marked Ziemlich langsam (rather slowly), caught the attention of his
wife, the pianist-composer Clara Schumann, who composed a set of variations on it and
presented the work to her husband in June of 1853 as a present for his forty-third birthday.
The theme in F# minor on which this work is based is a curious one that hides many secrets in
its short 24-bar span. Barely rising above piano in its dynamic level, it traverses an emotional
mood somewhere between forlorn and resigned, struggling to find hope in an occasional
major-key cadence to relieve the pervasive sadness of its minor-mode tone colouring.
The three repeated notes of its opening phrase evoke a kind of numb bewilderment, an
inability to move on from grief, especially when they land on a heart-breaking dissonance in
the second bar:

The “static” quality of this theme — only partially mitigated by a recurring chromatic dotted
figure in the inner voices — is reinforced when the following phrases remain “stuck” in the key
of C# minor:
But there is a hypnotic eeriness about this theme that makes it an engaging point of
departure for a set of variations.
The first thing to remember about the set is that it was composed by a musical conservative
in an age of flashy pianism, and both tendencies are reflected in the layout of the work.
Clara Schumann keeps the original melody line clearly audible throughout, whether singing
out at the top of the texture in the right hand or nestled in the middle in the tenor range and
intoned by the left. The fundamental harmonic structure remains the same, and the bar
structure is not altered or extended until the coda in the last variation.
What does change is the keyboard texture within which the theme’s melody is swaddled. The
first variation merely adds a rippling elaboration of the bass, but the second puts on a display
of ringing piano tone in a continuing chatter of chordal staccatos, perhaps taking inspiration
from a similar texture in several of the variations in her husband Robert’s Symphonic Etudes:

This is immediately followed, however, by a chorale-type arrangement in the third variation

with slithering chromatic alterations to the harmony that showcase the composer’s
considerable compositional chops:

In this work, Clara Schumann is eager to show that she is both a piano virtuoso and a learned
composer, so she regularly alternates serious compositional “treatment” of the theme with
impressive keyboard “arrangements” of it.
What she accomplishes by the end is to show that this sad little theme deserves the happy
major-mode ending it receives in the long final variation.

* * *
Robert Schumann
Sonata No. 3 in F minor Op. 14
III. Quasi variazioni. Andantino de Clara Wieck
In the summer of 1836, Robert Schumann was pining for his new love — and future wife — the
sixteen-year-old piano prodigy Clara Wieck. Her father, Friedrich Wieck (Schumann's
erstwhile piano teacher), had arranged a concert tour for her, thinking to break up the
romance and avoid acquiring a son-in-law he considered too emotionally volatile and
psychologically unstable.
Schumann, of course, would not be so easily discouraged, and contrived to have his beloved
with him, at least in spirit, by sewing her into the very musical fabric of his Sonata in F minor,
Op. 14. Clara is represented by a five-note descending scale figure that opens the first
movement and appears in the other three, and in none so prominently as in the third
movement, which would later be called Variations on a Theme of Clara Wieck and become a
favourite encore piece of Vladimir Horowitz.

There is a ceremonial sadness to this haunting theme, rendered especially ghoulish by the
austere coldness and bare-bones texture of its second phrase, like footsteps echoing above
the tombs of the dead in an empty cathedral.
The first two variations let the theme speak out over the murmurings of gargoyle voices in the
bass below. Schumann’s penchant for rhythmic and metrical distortion come to the fore in the
antics of the third variation, which is peppered with constant syncopations.

The tragic heart of the movement, however, comes in the final variation, which pleads its case
in whimpering phrases and cries of heart-rending despair alternating with poetic daydreams
and expressions of intimate tenderness.

The movement ends with a sequence of repeated F-minor chords that fade into the distance,
leaving smoky echoes of the enigmatic theme lingering in the air.

Johannes Brahms
Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann Op. 9
Johannes Brahms was just 20 years old when in September of 1853 he paid a visit to Robert
and Clara Schumann at their home in Düsseldorf. Hearing later of Robert’s suicide attempt, he
returned the following year in March, staying for some time to help Clara with the children
and managing the household after her husband was admitted to a sanatorium.
During that time, he undoubtedly encountered Clara’s Variations on a Theme of Robert
Schumann and began his own set of 16 variations on the same theme.

Brahms’ youthful inventiveness and harmonic daring is at a peak in this work, in which he not
only displays his fascination with counterpoint — canonic imitation in particular — but also
manages to include personal references to Robert and Clara Schumann’s own published
works.
Variation 1 begins the set unpretentiously with a thin texture that inverts the original scoring,
putting the melody in the left hand and the accompaniment in the right.
The theme is hard to find in Variation 2, which changes the meter to 9/8 and pays tribute to
Schumann’s penchant for rhythmic anomalies. It features a jumpy dotted-rhythm ostinato in
the left hand, conspicuously mismatched with an ever-so-slightly off-kilter pattern of heavily
syncopated chords in the right.
Variation 3 ingeniously nestles the theme in the middle of the texture while triplet figures
both above and below constantly obsess over the sigh motive that begins the theme.
Variation 4 spins out long strands of seemingly carefree melody over a softly pulsing
accompaniment of repeated sixteenth notes in the left hand.
These repeated sixteenths — a speeded-up variant of the theme’s opening melody notes —
then take centre stage in the arresting opening of Variation 5, which features a recurring
sequence of these stuttering hammer blows tumbling down repeatedly from the high register
to the bass, sometimes creating some shocking harmonic surprises when they land.

Variation 6 changes the hammer blows to cascades of arpeggio figures kept harmonically on
track by leaping bass notes. The harmony veers far afield to C major (a tritone away from the
initial F# minor) only to return thrillingly to the fold in the final bars.
Variation 7 returns to the sigh motive with which the theme began, repeating it over and over
in a series of echoes between high and low registers. This variation seems almost motionless,
its forward progress limited to small semitone changes in harmony.
Variation 8 displays Brahms’ uncanny ability to artfully conceal his artfulness. While the
complete theme is serenely showcased in the top voice with its original harmonies, not far
below is a murmuring of tremolo octaves in the left hand’s tenor voice that repeats the same
melody two bars later in strict canon.
Variation 9 fixates repeatedly once again on the theme’s opening sigh motif, but Brahms puts
it in the middle of a whirling swirl of figuration with the two-note sighs offset from the strong
beats of the bar. This variation is a virtual copy of the texture of No. 5 in Schumann’s
Albumblatt, from which the set’s theme is taken.
Variation 10 is set in a peaceful and happy D major and is the most contrapuntally complex of
the set. It features a right-hand melody that is actually the bass line of the original theme,
with its own bass line as an inversion of itself!

This inverse imitation passes through other voices in the texture almost ‘incognito’ as a rich
carpet of rolling arpeggios in the bass soon soothe the ear with harmonic cover. To round out
this astounding display of compositional cleverness, Brahms includes a quote from the Clara
Wieck theme from the first of Schumann’s Op. 5 Impromptus as a tip-of-the-hat to both the
composer and his wife.
Variation 11 is equally gently paced and comforting in mood. With its long-held pedal points
in the bass it seems to have no particular harmonic agenda but merely muses in its right-hand
octaves over the theme’s opening sigh motive once again.
After sojourning in the major mode for some time, in Variation 12 Brahms returns to the
theme’s original key of F# minor to rough up the texture with a scherzando variation that
moves spasmodically forward in a series of chordal leaps. Perhaps in tribute to Schumann’s
trademark rhythmic “off-sets,” this variation prefers to land bizarrely on the second sixteenth
note of the bar.
Variation 13 channels the double-note chatter of Schumann’s Toccata, Op. 7, in an iridescent
display of the theme’s harmonies but without reference to its melody.
Variation 14 is contrapuntal puzzle masquerading as a Viennese waltz. The two voices in the
right hand are in canon while a trotting accompaniment of staccato arpeggios in the left hand
aerates the texture to make the counterpoint clear to the ear.

Variation 15 is set in G-flat major, to prepare us for a major-mode ending. It features a slow-
moving canon between treble and bass with a pervasive undulating ripple of arpeggiated
chords in the middle. Because of small melodic inflections in these arpeggios in the medium
to low register, this variation is exceptionally tricky to pedal.
Variation 16 concludes the set with an extremely bare-bones rendition of the theme’s bass
line (from Variation 10) in solemn passacaglia style against throbbing syncopated chordal
resolutions above.

Like Clara, Brahms eschews a triumphalist ending in favour of a quiet one, in a sign of
reverential respect for her husband Robert.

Enrique Granados
Goyescas Op. 11
The immensely gifted Spanish pianist and composer Enrique Granados expressed his
admiration for the starkly emotional canvasses and etchings of Francisco de Goya (1746-
1828) in a suite of evocative piano pieces that he called Goyescas (1911). The work's subtitle,
Los Majos Enamorados (The Young Lovers), indicates an intention to depict the amorous
adventures of the lower classes of Spanish society. Its subject matter is the courting rituals
and social interactions of the swains (majos) and the maids (majas) inhabiting the working-
class neighbourhoods of Madrid in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Granados’ piano style is among the most flamboyant in the repertoire, so fulsome that it is
often written on three staves to accommodate sonorities extending over four to five octaves
in a single phrase. The style of writing is also very sensual from a harmonic point of view:
virtually every important chord seems to be a dominant seventh, symbolic of yearning.
The first piece in the set, Los Requiebros (Flirtatious compliments), begins with the tale of a
pick-up line and its reception. A guitar-like flourish opens the work:

The opening has the eight-syllable rhythm of the jota, a form of Spanish popular music
danced and sung to the accompaniment of castanets. These latter are picturesquely
represented in the score by means of twinkling mordents, snappy triplet figures and scurrying
inner voices, the throw-away character of which figures among the major technical challenges
of the work as a whole. Tempo changes of a stop-and-start character mark the various stages
of the negotiation, but the sumptuous tonal banquet offered on the last page of the score
leaves listeners in no doubt as to just how rapturously the flattering initiatives referred to in
the title were welcomed.
Coloquio en la reja (Conversation at the window grill) is a love duet that pictures the young
couple speaking through the iron grill of a window. The conversation opens slowly but soon
turns to confessions of love, symbolized by this dreamy melody of affectionate embrace
constructed from wide-ranging chordal arpeggios:
A different love theme then takes over, a rising scale of rising hopes decorated with
quintuplets:

These two themes, repeated and re-phrased in various guises — but always sounding fresh
and sensuous — drive this movement to a series of passionate climaxes in its second half
before they settle into a quiet reverie of mutual adoration.
El Fandango de candil (Fandango by candlelight) presents a more advanced stage of the
relationship, in which the couple are presented as dancing at night by candlelight to the
infectious, ever-present rhythm of the fandango.

The not-too-fast pace of this dance allows you to imagine the courting couple slowly circling
round each other as they stare into each other’s eyes, to the insistent accompaniment of
clacking castanets. That is, until the candles go out, at which point, it is implied, the dance
continues…by other means.
Quejas, o la Maja y el ruiseñor (Lament, or the maid and the nightingale) is based on a
Valencian folk tune and is the best-known piece in the suite.
Its sad theme may be intuited from the scene in which it is used in the opera that Granados
composed from the Goyescas suite: a young woman fears for the life of her jealous lover who
has gone off to fight a duel and pours out her soul to the nightingale.
Her lament is presented in the simplest possible form at first, then in five voluptuous
variations. The nightingale has the last word in a coda replete with warbling trills and bird
calls.
The scene depicted in El Amor y la muerte (Love and death) derives from an etching by
Goya featuring a young woman holding in her arms the limp body of her dead young lover.
This movement is starkly emotional, savagely raw and wondrously mysterious. It opens with
cruel parodies of both the quintuplet-ornamented love theme and the arpeggiated love
theme, heard before in the happier days of the Coloquio en la reja movement:

This movement paints its two protagonists in vivid contrasts of register, the inevitability of
death resonating up from deep in the bass, the pleadings of love shimmering down from the
high treble. Granados said that all of the themes of the entire suite are united in this piece,
“intense pain, nostalgic love and final tragedy — death.”
Epílogo: Serenate del espectro (Epilogue: the ghost’s serenade) features the spirit of the
dead lover returning to serenade his beloved from the grave. The movement is filled with the
idiomatic sounds of guitar-playing, both plucked and strummed.
And so ends this musical tale of love won in life and love lost to death.

Program notes by Donald G. Gíslason 2024