Chamber Music of Mendelssohn and Schumann

Professor John Michael Cooper

When Gustav Mahler remarked in 1893 that “we modern composers” needed “a great apparatus in order to express our ideas, whether they be great or small,” he commented first and foremost on his generation’s penchant for expansiveness and grandeur. But his statement also gives voice to larger issues. Most obvious among these is a certain self-congratulatory historical chauvinism: chamber ensembles may have been sufficient for conveying the ideas of earlier composers, but they were inadequate for modern musical expression. More troubling is that Mahler’s assertion proceeds from a value system defined by public music-making and the concert hall. This view posits its own self-affirmative values – values defined not least of all by an emphasis on expansive and highly public music-making – as criteria for considering and evaluating the music of earlier generations. In such a system, the aesthetics and other artistic beauties that defined music created with an eye toward intimacy (among performers, and between performers and auditors) almost necessarily elude appreciation and attention. And in fact, the genres of instrumental chamber music posed formidable challenges for composers of the generation of composers who grew to maturity during the same decade that witnessed the creation of Beethoven’s late quartets, sonatas, and folksong arrangements as well as the proliferation of his middle-period chamber works (to say nothing of those works’ generic counterparts in the oeuvres of Weber, Spohr, and others).

Few composers from that troubled “romantic generation” grappled with the aesthetic challenges of instrumental chamber music more persistently and creatively than did Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-47) and Robert Schumann (1810-56). These two composers were friends, comrades-at-arms in the mid-nineteenth century’s aesthetic disputes, and influential advocates of artistic conscience in Leipzig, one of the German-speaking countries’ most prestigious musical cities. Both left much of their chamber-music output unpublished despite its artistic merits, and despite the generally warm reception it was accorded in performance. And both composers’ chamber works today remain awkwardly marginalized – at least in part because of the historical and aesthetic biases Mahler enunciated nearly a half-century later.

That repertoire is the focal point of this seminar. We will consider the ways in which Mendelssohn and Schumann addressed the artistic challenges posed by chamber music in that age of musical crisis and reform, the social and aesthetic implications of the various solutions they offered, and the compositional dialog in which they participated as they offered them. In addition to the course’s written component, students will be required to read primary sources and a few articles written in German.