Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 12pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in January are:
2-6 January Max Richter
9-13 January Mozart
16-20 January Shostakovich
23-27 January Mel Bonis
30 January – 3 February Vivaldi
On 27 February 1854, in the middle of carnival season in Düsseldorf, Robert Schumann leapt off a bridge into the river Rhine. He then spent the last two-and-a-half years of his life in a mental hospital at Endenich, near Bonn. The medical records demonstrate that he was suffering mental disintegration caused by tertiary syphilis. There is evidence, too, that he had suffered episodes of mental ill health across his whole adult life. The perennial question is, of course, about how these conditions impacted upon his music.
The Violin Concerto of 1853 is one of the works most prone to the misapprehensions, contradictions and general uncertainty that surrounds all this. Joseph Joachim, the violinist for whom it was written, played it once and found it unsatisfactory (to be fair, Joachim half-destroyed Dvořák and Bruch by being hypercritical of their concertos). After the composer’s death, when a complete Robert Schumann edition was being prepared, his widow Clara and her close advisers – Joachim and Brahms – left the Violin Concerto unpublished, considering it unworthy. Suppressed for 80 years, the manuscript
