Overview
Introduction
In May 1854, Clara Schumann gave birth to her seventh child with her husband Robert, who was at the time an inmate at an insane asylum near Bonn. She was not permitted to visit him, so her only source of solace and companionship during her recovery was the young Brahms. As a gift, he began to bring her variations on Schumann's Albumblatt in F sharp minor from the Bunte Blätter, a piece which Clara herself had used as the basis for a set of variations (her Op. 20) in the previous year. Brahms' efforts to this end were eventually collected as the Schumann Variations, Op. 9.
Brahms' sixteen variations are grouped into two sets; the first eight are in F sharp minor, the remainder in various related keys. As an homage to Schumann's intensive counterpoint studies in 1840, Brahms devotes four of the variations (Nos. 8, 10, 14, and 15) to contrapuntal treatment. Brahms makes further allusions to the music of Schumann, referring in the ninth variation to Schumann's Albumblatt in B minor, in the tenth to the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, Op. 41/1, and in the fourteenth to the "Chopin" movement from Carnaval. In a sort of double homage in the tenth variation, Brahms quotes a theme from Schumann's Op. 5 Impromptus, which Schumann had in turn borrowed from Clara's Romanze. In sum, Brahms' effort constitutes a highly imaginative and effective set that combines the composer's structural instinct and skill for thematic and motivic manipulation with Schumann's love of quotation and allusion.
Parts/Movements
- Theme
- Variation 1
- Variation 2
- Variation 3
- Variation 4
- Variation 5
- Variation 6
- Variation 7
- Variation 8
- Variation 9
- Variation 10
- Variation 11
- Variation 12
- Variation 13
- Variation 14
- Variation 15
- Variation 16