While my friend Amy was working with us a number of years back, she and I would occasionally indulge in an evening of exquisite musical geekery.
I'd love to say it was all very sophisticated, with us cooly sipping an expensive wine while comparing recordings by the great and mighty, making intelligent and high browed musical observations on the musical interpretation and the composers' vision, but that would be an utter barefaced lie.
Instead we would hopscotch from one favourite work to another, or works other people had recommended, before getting very overenthusiastic and doing our best Piña Bausch moves to the Rite of Spring. However, the most often used phrase of these evenings was "you have to hear this, it is so beautiful it made me WEEP".
In spite of now living in different cities, the tradition of informing each other of when we have fallen for another work has lived on, and so, a couple of weeks ago, I informed Amy that the slow movement of Schumann's Second Symphony was so beautiful it made me weep.
Sketched in 1845, but not completed until 1847 the Symphony No 2 in C major explicitly references both JS Bach's chorale and contrapuntal styles (not to mention the use of a B-A-C-H motif), and Beethoven's The Immortal Beloved. The work sounds quite Classical in style, and indeed, follows a very traditional structure.
The BBC National Orchestra performed Schumann's Symphony No 2 on Tuesday 23 April at BBC Hoddinott Hall, and it was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.
After the chorale-like opening, the listener is whisked headlong into swirling contrapuntal textures, declamatory rhythmic figures, and constant development of the opening motifs. The second movement scherzo is made of the stuff that makes violinists waken up in the middle of the night, bathed in cold sweat.
The third movement Adagio espressivo is as beautiful a melody as you could imagine Schumann writing; it is as though Florestan and Eusebius dance together. The finale's exuberant triumphalism belies the fact that this was a man coping with more temporal and spiritual anguish than one ever wishes to understand.
I find the tenderness and optimism of this work incredible. Schumann sketched this symphony during a very bleak period of his life. He was beset by mental health issues, physical pain, and a great disruption to his ability, not just to hear, but to abide the sound of music. Despite these things, the music speaks of such love and such joy in the simple act of being alive.
In some ways, this symphony, to me anyway, epitomises what would appear to have been Schumann's general attitude to life, and music.
There's a lovely selection of Schumann's writings translated and edited by Henry Pleasants for Dover, and in them you find a man, though often struggling with his own personal demons and illnesses, desiring little else than to be part of the rich European family tree.
He writes with such enthusiasm and warmth - I would thoroughly recommend reading this book if you want to know more about Schumann. Also, if you would like to read more detail about the Second Symphony, there is a fabulous Explore the Score article on conductor Kenneth Woods' site.
