3 Romanzen

Schumann developed the compositional habit of spending concentrated periods on single genres: 1840 was his “year of song”, in 1841 he turned to orchestral music and the following year was devoted to the sustained production of chamber music. In 1849, while revolution raged around him in Dresden, Schumann secluded himself from the outside world and composed a series of works for solo instruments with piano accompaniment. Clarinettists are eternally grateful for the three Fantasy Pieces, Op. 73, horn players for the Adagio and Allegro, Op. 70, cellists for the Five Pieces in Folk Style, Op. 102, and oboists for this delightful set of Three Romances, Op. 94. Such salon works as these were bound to appeal to the domestic market and bring in much-needed income, so Schumann maximised their saleability by offering the possibility of playing them on other instruments of similar range. Thus, while the Romances are naturally most effective on the prescribed oboe, they are often played by clarinettists, violinists and even cellists—there can barely be an instrumentalist who hasn’t spent many happy childhood hours practising this music. Schumann’s long experience as a composer of characteristic piano miniatures is supremely evident in all these works; the Romances also recall his lyric gift in a sequence of rhapsodic movements, in which the oboe’s song is by turns elegiac, playful and introspective.