Clara’s Andantino

Clara’s initial theme, Op. 3, the Lento of the Romance variée in C Major, was written in 1833, when she was 14. The piece was to resound between her, her husband, Robert, and their young boarder, Johannes Brahms, for the rest of their lives. Robert wrote variations on it, then Clara wrote variations on those variations, then Brahms wrote variations on those variations, until finally Brahms embodied the five descending notes of the theme into almost every composition he wrote in the last few years of his life, as an apology to Clara. Despite leaving her at the altar (although he did provide financial help for her family), he loved her more than anyone in his life, and always had. It was that love which created many of Brahms’s best pieces—as Schumann’s love for Clara had created many of his own major works.

Clara’s Lento theme was in C major, an easy key for a young virtuoso. By the time it was later morphed by Robert into the Andantino, it was in F minor.

The lento theme was used by Robert in his Impromptus, Op.5 (specifically in No. 11), of 1833; by Clara herself in her set of Variationen über ein Thema von Robert Schumann, Op. 20 (the last variation); and in Brahms’s 1854 Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9 (Variation 15).

Schumann’s Grand Sonata No. 3, Opus 14 in F, the immensely complicated “Concerto without Orchestra” of 1836, has for its third movement Quasi variazione, “sort of” variations on Clara’s Andantino theme, which is turned by Robert from C Major into F Minor. Here the early Romance theme has become minor and grown enormously in dignity from Clara’s Czernyesque Op. 3 Lento. I suspect that Schumann rewrote it.

The key of C is very plain vanilla, easy for children, as it has no sharps or flats. C is, however, brittle, and lacks ambiance. The key of F is the next-easiest key. But it is warmer. When it becomes minor it ends up with four flats, which adds an enormous aura to it. It becomes twinned with D-flat, the ultimate key of repose and meditation.

Schumann’s second Romanze of his Drei Romanzen, Op. 28, of 1839, when he was 29 and Clara was 20, is in F-sharp minor. This is the piece Clara asked to hear on her deathbed. It is the ultimate incarnation of their tennis game of bandying the Lento theme back and forth. Here Robert has brought their more juvenile imitations to the point of genius. Surprisingly, this Romanze is one of the least known of Robert’s pieces, possibly because it is so short (only 34 measures).

F minor has become F-sharp minor, an immensely more complicated (six sharps) and intellectual key. As well, there are now three staffs, which provides a middle staff for the melody, shared between the two thumbs. This is a notation which stresses the singing quality of the thumbs.

This was the epitome of the Lento exchanges.

But Clara didn’t give up. When she was 34, she wrote variations on Robert’s version of her Andantino, which survives as her Op. 20 of 1853, Variationen über ein Thema von Robert Schumann. By now Clara’s variations, like Robert’s Romanze, are in F-sharp minor, which lends gravitas to the more juvenile Lento theme. These new variations were in the minor key, darkening them further.

This provides a clue as to how entwined they were, as lovers and as composers.

A year later, in 1854, Robert was in the asylum, and Clara had given birth to their eighth and last child. Clara wasn’t allowed to see her husband, but Brahms went back and forth between the Schumanns.

Brahms at that stage had been composing variations on Robert’s Bunte Blätter (Colored Leaves), Op. 99, which he brought one by one to Clara as he wrote them. They were eventually titled Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9, based primarily on the fourth variation of Bunte Blätter, which was also the variation on which Clara based her Op. 20 variations of the previous year.

Now three composers are using one another for inspiration, a seesaw with Clara’s theme as the fulcrum. Brahms’s first eight Op. 9 variations are in the F minor key of the Andantino. The final phrase of Variation 10 quotes the “Theme by Clara Wieck” on which Schumann based his Op. 5 Impromptus.

I play here the greatest survivors of this epic exchange, Schumann’s second Romanze and my favorites of Brahms’s last intermezzi.

A world of notes, of fantasies and concertos, of symphonies and chamber works by the greatest musicians of the age had been inspired by five notes from a 14-year-old.

And arguably the greatest works of the greatest composer, the intermezzi of Brahms, had evolved from those five notes.