Serenade in C Op 41 (1979) for clarinet, bassoon, horn, string quartet and double bass
This piece, for the same instrumentation as the Schubert Octet, was commissioned by The Nash Ensemble in 1978, sketched out in part that summer, then written in full early the next year as relaxation from concurrent work on the complex Second Concerto for Orchestra. Though ‘relaxation’ isn’t quite the right word! I remember how, as the deadlines for both pieces neared, I’d concentrate on the enormous orchestral pages during weekdays and work up a further complete brief movement for the octet over the weekends, to be posted off to Boosey and Hawkes first thing every Monday. There was never time or occasion to make a fair copy. Nor to think overmuch about what I was doing in giving an affectionate twist to tonal common practice and light-music clichés all the way from Biedermeier Vienna to Southend Pier.

There are five movements: an opening Marcia, with a trio stringing together some well-known phrases over a stereotyped chord sequence, then a Menuetto alla tarantella which whirls along in a kaleidoscope of displaced bar lines and phrase-lengths. The gaunt opening of the Andante is given harmony and melody in four modulating variations and climaxes in a fifth, which opens out into a heartfelt dying rise and fades away on distant roundabouts. The second Menuetto, unlike the first, is a stolid affair, ostensibly neo-Classical except that the ‘repeats’ take different turnings; its Trio is a tender hybrid of Schubert and Poulenc, both ‘cubistified’. The Finale is really another tarantella in which a few scraps of silly tune are put through the textural, tonal and rhythmic mincer. Again, after the climax it fades away, this time into a sort of ‘haunted ballroom’.

The Serenade in C is dedicated with pleasure to six (by splitting the minuet and trio of the fourth movement) of my colleagues at Caius College, Cambridge.

Fantasy-Pieces on the Heine ‘Liederkreis’ of Schumann Op 16 (1971) for piano and twelve instruments
In my twenties (1963-1973) I composed myself into an impasse and then, with the help of Schumann, composed myself out of it. The way out, towards the end of the 1960s, came via an intense absorbtion with his songs. For months I’d doodle at the piano around the handful of favourites, isolating and abstracting their constituents, especially intervallic, in a trance of fascination. There was no idea of what might come of this even after I began to jot down sketches – extensions, descants, reharmonizations, rhythmic shifts and so forth.

Suddenly something had to come of it, quick. In response to a commission from the 1970 Cheltenham Festival these vague gropings focused into seven paraphrases for orchestra upon six well-loved songs (one is used twice) from disparate cycles, eventually entitled Scenes from Schumann and given its premiere in Cheltenham Town Hall on 10 July.

Checking out of the hotel the morning after, I was addressed by a stranger who soon became a friend. Michael Graham-Jones had liked Scenes, and fancied the idea of a follow-up to be based on Frauenliebe und -leben, a particular favourite of his and his wife’s, to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1971. I was doubtful, because Scenes seemed such a one-off; also because Frauenliebe und -leben, though of course like everyone else I adored the work, didn’t seem to have the same openness to extension and play. But I did feel these possibilities with another Schumann cycle, his first, the nine settings of Heine that broke the succession of twenty-three solo piano works and inaugurated his glorious ‘year of song’, 1840 – the Liederkreis, Op 24. Partly because it was (and regrettably remains) relatively unfamiliar; partly because I’d already toyed with one of its songs, but not used it in the end, for Scenes. And mainly because it came as an entity, full of internal relationships, rather than a bouquet of miscellaneous favourites, which suggested a different approach, not merely more-of-the-same. Fortunately my patron accepted the idea; and in the composition I was able to slip in references to Frauenliebe und -leben (also to the tenderest love-song in Dichterliebe) that exactly fitted his commission’s circumstances.

The poems were printed already as a set in Heine’s Buch der Lieder (1827). From the start Schumann, with such elaborate structures as Kreisleriana behind him, was thinking of a unity; unlike Schubert, the cycle is linked by motivic connections explicit or implicit, in a coherent key-structure that is brutally dislocated by inconsistent transposition. But individually the songs, mostly strophic, are far simpler in texture and language than Opp 1 to 23. No 1, Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage, is a song of wondering and wandering, all night awake, all day half asleep, dreaming of love and sorrow. No 2 (Es treibt mich hin), fast and impetuous, berates the hours for passing so slowly, lacking love to spur them on. Its wild coda contrasts totally with No 3 (Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen), a tranced adagio; alone under the trees with his woe, the poet is not comforted by the birds’ song, and reproaches them for repeating the golden words his girl had sung to them. No 4, Lieb Liebchen, is tiny and gaunt; the beating of his heart is likened to the hammering of his coffin-maker. No 5, Schöne Wiege, again makes contrast in flowing warm cantabile with more turbulent episodes. The hero parts with passionate regret from the places where he has suffered so for his love. She herself seems to drive him off; his only rest will be the grave. No 6, Warte, warte, wilder Schiffmann, is a wild explosion of accusation as he takes ship: the girl is his destruction, the serpent in Paradise, the flames of Troy. A piano ostinato drives the voice forward, and at one point words fail altogether, and he can only moan ‘Oh!’. The climax of the last stanza is the cycle’s high point in volume and tessitura. In No 7, Berg’ und Burgen, the mood calms as he sails down the Rhine, hypnotized by the romantic scenery and its mirror in the river; but under the water’s smiling surface lie night and death, just as his girl’s lovely face conceals her treacherous heart. Nos 8 and 9 are linked. No 8, Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen, is a chorale-like preparation – ‘At first I thought I could never bear it; in the end I have borne it; but at what cost?’. This cadences into the final song (Mit Myrthen und Rosen), more elaborate than the others, and retrospective in mood – from these sufferings, once fierce as Etna’s lava but now fast congealing, will be born the book of poems; when she receives it she will read the message right; and again the piano has the last word, brief but eloquent.

In turning to Schumann’s Op 24 as the basis for the new composition I had one large positive and one large negative. The former was the work on the haunting No 7 when it had been a candidate for Scenes. The latter was the length and complexity of No 9: so complete a statement seemed to preclude further ‘treatment’. Scenes had yielded no method, and I was as bemused afterwards as before what to do next. The only directive was rather modernist – not to do again what had already been done, rather to find a new perspective or technique. Every number in Scenes was a paraphrase that clung closely to the original song-shape however altered its actual constituents. Except for the last (Frühlingsnacht), which took wing, producing from the brief original a rondo-mosaic many times longer and with its own shape. Doing this had also necessitated a higher proportion of newly-invented material. And this proved the fruitful pointer for a second go. I soon noticed that in Schumann’s Op 24 songs Nos 1, 2 and 4 are closely related, which suggested a composite or palimpsest, a superimposition with holes where difffering layers would show through. Similarly the main melody of Schöne Wiege (No 5) rhymes with that of Berg’ und Burgen (No 7), which was destined from the start to be harbour since the closing Mit Myrthen und Rosen just would not fit. So Nos 5 and 7 could be twinned. No 8, the upbeat to the omitted close in its home D major, suggested a solemn prelude to the whole piece beginning with No 1, also in D. And thus the entity began to focus; ideally, as here, the Schumann cycle would be included complete, contained within the instrumental ‘commentary’ it inspired, thus allowing the climactic song, only heard once, to hold the very centre of the design.

The Praeludium consists of question-and-answer intonations between trumpet and horn on the chorale-like voice part of Liederkreis No 8. It ends on the question – ‘wie?’ – as cadencing upbeat to the complete song-cycle at its original pitch, the first and last songs in D major.

As Mit Myrthen und Rosen fades, Half asleep starts. Liederkreis Nos 1, 2 and 4 are layered in different instrumental groups, keys and speeds; then towards the end the continuations of all three songs are intercrossed with their renewed beginnings. The effect is of a brief phantasmagorical collage, as upbeat to the definite outlines of the second movement, an Adagio on Liederkreis No 3. This is a paraphrase; beneath the wealth of florid dissonant ornament the original song-structure remains intact, though scale and pace are gigantified and the piano’s beautiful opening-and-close broken up to provide punctuation and renewed starts throughout. The main key remains B major, and Schumann’s shift to G for the golden word that the girl sang to the birds is retained for the middle section. The horn melody here, however, is new. This middle is followed by an extra section which loosens concentration, a recitativo where the strings hold on to the opening bar, the piano carries the melody, and solo viola and clarinet play quasi-improvisatory snatches which only grow to full melodic status in the next movement. Across all this, two quotations from more famous Schumann cycles flicker subliminally – the first bar of Frauenliebe und -leben and the phrase from Dichterliebe No 4 – that will flower eventually in the Finale. This very secret and hübsche section is followed by its opposite, a grandiose coda that blows the original song’s opening/close up into something grand and heroic.

Its resounding B major is treated as dominant of the E that persists for the entire duration of the third movement, Scherzo ostinato. The obstinate shape is the thirteen-note pattern driving Liederkreis No 6 on its violent course. It is present somewhere in the texture throughout, usually as a very audible ground bass, and always at the same pitch (beginning on E). The surrounding material comes from a Wallace Stevens song with piano written just before, a miniature whirlwind to the words: ‘In Oklahoma / Bonnie and Josie / Dressed in calico / Danced around a stump’. Another Stevens song, ‘Remus, blow your horn! / I’m plowing on Sunday, / Plowing North America, / Blow your horn’, provides sustenance for a rustic tutti.

The trio section is slower. The ostinato is fragmented, diminuted, augmented, inverted, as background to broader melodies taken from the non-Schumann material in the Adagio. The Scherzo returns, in ever-different rhythmic and tonal alignments, till finally the ostinato is heard simultaneously in three speeds, mirror and hocket; only when the resulting racket reaches bursting point is the ostinato E (which could be held like an organ cipher for the entire movement) allowed to escape deadlock and rise up a fourth to the return of the Praeludium in A. This is the hinge of the whole composite work; after the brief triple forte, volume as well as momentum rapidly disappear, and amidst gentle cries of ‘Oh!’ and wide-held chords, horn and trumpet speak softly to each other with motifs from the wedding-song in Frauenliebe und -leben (end of its No 5). The horn’s final note is ‘off colour’. Against it the piano shyly proposes the epilogue/stanza-link from Berg’ und Burgen (Liederkreis No 7) cadencing into A major for Finale: Roses – thorns and flowers. It is built cubistically from some of the original’s most affecting music. Against a continuous background of the accompaniment to Berg’ und Burgen the successive lines of its melody are given different textural and harmonic characters, interlocking and interchanging from stanza to stanza like an intricate verse-form: a phantoum or ghazel. Gradually the ‘rhyme’ with the melody of Schöne Wiege (Liederkreis No 5) is allowed to come to the fore. Ultimately, after a stanza of storm and stress, the two melodies intertwine as asymmetrical mirrors of each other. The closing section in also supercharged with the allusions to other Schumann cycles heard only subliminally in the Adagio: the opening bar of Frauenliebe und -leben underpins the harmony in ever broader durations; the phrase from Dichterliebe floats in and out in polytonal polyrhythms; and in the final pages all the various levels of tension resolve from many directions upon a pure A major from which every extraneous note has been composed out.

Robin Holloway © 1998