Symphony No. 4 in D Minor

Until 1840, Schumann had primarily concentrated on the composition of piano miniatures and songs—he wrote an astonishing 138 songs in 1840 alone. The following year he turned to the orchestra, sketching the First Symphony in four days (and sleepless nights) in January, and subsequently producing the Overture, Scherzo & Finale, the first version of the Piano Concerto’s first movement and, finally, a symphony in D minor. This was to be the most radical creation of this protean burst of orchestral creativity: not a standard four-movement symphony after the Beethovenian model but a unified structure in which the movements dovetailed into one another, linked by a complex of recurring motifs. Two of the principal motifs are heard at the opening: the churning mid-register figure that pervades the slow introduction (“Ziemlich langsam”) and the driving violin melody of the ensuing Allegro. A sustained wind chord then ushers in the cello melody of the slow “Romanze”, which itself runs into the motoric “Scherzo” and its contrasting Trio, featuring a sweetly sinuous violin tune. The lively finale unwinds this web of motifs, accelerating to a euphoric conclusion. Initial reaction to the symphony’s innovative form was unenthusiastic, however, and Schumann laid the work aside for a decade before revising it, thickening its orchestration and tautening the argument of the finale. Brahms preferred the original version, Clara Schumann the 1851 revision in which the work has become best known—now misleadingly designated Symphony No. 4.