1 Äuβerst bewegt (Extremely animated)
2 Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch (Introspective and not too fast)
3 Sehr aufgeregt (Very agitated)
4 Sehr langsam (Very slowly)
5 Sehr lebhaft (Very lively)
6 Sehr langsam (Very slowly)
7 Sehr rasch (Very fast)
8 Schnell und spielend (Fast and playful)

In 1835 Schumann fell in love with the budding piano virtuoso Clara Wieck. Clara returned his feelings, but her father was displeased with the attachment, and forbade the couple to meet. Schumann poured out his feelings in letters and piano compositions. He composed Kreisleriana in just four days in 1838. He wrote to Clara that it contained ‘a wild, unbridled love in places, together with your life and mine, and many of your glances’. Apparently, Clara was somewhat taken aback by the work’s wild inventiveness.

Kreisleriana’s title refers to Johannes Kreisler, the moody musical genius created by the writer ETA Hoffmann. The work also reflects Schumann’s sense that he had two compositional personalities, the impulsive Florestan and the dreamy Eusebius. Rather than tell a specific story, it depicts various moods. Its careful tonal structure and polyphonic (multi-voice) textures reflect Schumann’s studies of Bach’s keyboard music.

In the rapid first movement, stormy outer sections bookend a gentler central one. In the second, two passionate outbursts interrupt the calm principal theme. The lively third movement features a leaping motif and dialogue between the two hands. Low sonorities dominate the fourth movement, which has an improvisatory quality. In the fifth, playful outer sections characterised by dotted rhythms contrast with an expansive, impassioned central episode. The sixth begins as a tranquil lullaby but quickly loses equilibrium, only regaining it in the closing bars. Schumann’s love of Bach is most apparent in the bravura seventh movement with its fugato and closing chorale. The final movement’s predominantly light-hearted – though not wholly untroubled – music brings the work to a calm albeit enigmatic conclusion.

^{Note by Kate Hopkins}

Robert Schumann
^{1810 – 56 (Germany)}

Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Germany into a literary family. In 1829 he travelled to Leipzig to study law, but soon took instead to piano studies with the professor Friedrich Wieck – whose daughter, Clara, still a child, soon became famous as a virtuoso prodigy throughout Europe.

By the time Clara was 16, she and Schumann were deeply in love and wished to become engaged. Such was Wieck’s virulent opposition that after four hopeless years the young couple sued him for the right to marry – and won. It was for Clara, during the turbulent time preceding this happy outcome, that Schumann wrote a flood of piano music, often filled with musical messages to her. The couple subsequently had seven surviving children; Clara, as a celebrated pianist, remained the family’s chief breadwinner.

In his adult life, Schumann lived with mental ill health – possibly a bipolar disorder, probably syphilis, likely a combination of both – Schumann approached composition with obsessive energy. When depression struck him, however, he found it impossible to write at all. Starting out as an original, radical figure, he leaned towards experimental forms and groundbreaking expressive means, from which Clara sometimes tried to discourage him. He worked extremely fast, often devoting himself to creating works in one medium for a year or more. Arguments continue today about the effect of his worsening mental health upon his late works.

In 1854 Schumann suffered his ultimate breakdown, attempting suicide. Thereafter he entered a mental hospital at Endenich, near Bonn, where he died in July 1856, aged 46.

_{Profile by Jessica Duchen}

1 Danza del viejo boyero
2 Danza de la moza donosa
3 Danza del gaucho matrero

Alberto Ginastera is one of Argentina’s most famous composers. He composed Danzas Argentinas in 1937, while he was a student at the Buenos Aires Conservatory. The piece reveals his fascination with his native country’s traditional songs and dances.

Danza del viejo boyero (Dance of the old herdsman) has an especially striking feature: the piano left hand only plays black notes, and the right only plays white ones. Despite the resultant bitonal jangle, this dance is surprisingly melodious. It is also rhythmically lively – the old herdsman has energy! The final chord is made up of the notes that guitarists customarily use to tune.

Danza de la moza donosa (Dance of the lovely girl) is in a lilting 6/8 time, and ternary (A–B–A) form. The delicacy of the outer sections contrasts with the expansive passion of the central one, and the dance ends quizzically on a quiet atonal chord.

Danza del gaucho matrero (Dance of the outlaw cowboy) is a rondo, full of infectious syncopated rhythms. Dissonant chromatic episodes alternate with melodious tonal ones. Ginastera’s instructions include furiosamente (furiously), mordento (biting) and salvaggio (wild). The dance ends with a fortissimo flamboyant glissando.

^{Note by Kate Hopkins}

Alberto Ginastera
^{1916 (Argentina) – 1983 (Switzerland)}

One of Argentina’s musical royalty, Alberto Ginastera’s musical talents were spotted early and he won his first composition prize aged just 22. He came to prominence with his two ballet works, Panambi and Estancia, both of which highlight the composer’s immersion in folklore music, predominantly that of the Gaucho, the skilled nomadic horseman, an important part of the Argentine cultural tradition.

Ginastera became better-known through his international career. Like Dvořák before him, he lived for a while in the US, immersing himself in life at the famous music school Tanglewood, where he met and studied with Aaron Copland. On his return to Argentina the unstable Péron government – the reason he’d left Argentina in the first place – was still in power, a repressive regime that Ginestera did not agree with, that led to troubling arguments. He managed to stand his ground and wrote some of his most memorable compositions during this time, including Variaciones concertantes.

During the 1960s, Ginastera's music took on a more contemporary feel and he wrote a number of his most memorable works with significant folk influences during this time, such as his Harp Concerto (1965), Estudios sinfónicos (1963), and his opera Don Rodrigo. But wranglings with the government took their toll, with three years of nothing. All ended happily: he finally emigrated to Geneva with his second wife and muse, the cellist Aurora Natola, and found a new lease of life, composing works, many inspired by her, until his death in 1983.

_{Profile by Sarah Breeden}

1 Ondine
2 Le Gibet
3 Scarbo

Gaspard de la nuit is Ravel’s most challenging work for solo piano. He wrote it in 1908, and his friend Ricardo Viñes gave the premiere at Paris’s Salle Erard on 9 January 1909.

The three movements are each inspired by a prose-poem from Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit – Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot (1842). Ravel was drawn to the work because of its focus on the fantastic and the macabre. He was amused by the author’s claim that the devil had written the book, noting ‘Gaspard has been the very devil to finish, which is not surprising since he is the author of the poems’.

'Ondine' depicts the seductive legendary water-nymph. Its melodies gradually emerge from a cascade of accompanying acquatic figuration. The luminous textures are reminiscent of Ravel’s earlier Jeux d’eaux.

'Le Gibet' evokes a stark desert landscape. A man’s dead body hangs from a gibbet, illuminated by the setting sun. Chromatic chord progressions and fragmentary melodies unfold around the constant B-flat ostinato of a tolling bell, signifying death.

Scarbo portrays a malevolent nocturnal goblin who terrorises the sleepless. Dance rhythms feature prominently: pianist Roy Howat has noted the ‘mix of waltz and flamenco’. With its repeated notes, sudden dynamic contrasts, leaps, trills and rapid chords, 'Scarbo' is one of the hardest pieces in the piano repertory: another pianist, Steven Osborne, has likened playing it to solving multiple quadratic equations at speed. Ravel aimed to create a work as difficult as Balakirev’s piano showpiece Islamey – and he certainly succeeded.

^{Note by Kate Hopkins}

Maurice Ravel
^{1875 – 1937 (France)}

Ravel himself knew that he was not the most prolific of composers. ‘I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces,’ he said. There are no symphonies in Ravel’s oeuvre, and only two operas, and although we often think of his music as rich and picturesque like, say, Debussy, Ravel conceived most of his music on the smallest of scales. Even his orchestral works and ballets often grew out of pieces for piano.

But from these small kernels Ravel had the ability to create colour and texture like no other. He was a master of orchestration, with a fastidious eye for detail and a keen awareness of both the capabilities and the limitations of each instrument. Though he is often categorised as an ‘impressionist’ (a label he disputed), thanks to the sweeping colours and textures of his scores, and their shifting, ambiguous harmonies, there is nothing vague or imprecise about his music.

Ravel drew his inspiration from the likes of Rameau, Couperin, Mozart and Haydn, and considered himself first and foremost a Classicist, a master of precision and invention. He held melody in the highest regard, and whether composing his grand orchestral masterpieces like Daphnis et Chloé and Boléro, the fiendishly difficult solo piano works such as Gaspard de la nuit, or the deceptively simply Pavane pour une infante défunte, this unswerving commitment to melody shines through.

_{Profile by Jo Kirkbride}