Robert Schumann
Symphony No. 1 in B flat major, op. 38 “Spring”

“Why summon tears into the eyes / And shadows into the soul’s light? / Turn back, oh turn and change your course – / For spring is blooming in the vale!” These final lines of a spring poem by Adolf Böttger (1815–1870) entitled Frühlingsgedicht inspired Robert Schumann to his First Symphony, which he himself called the “Spring Symphony” – a title that proves fitting in more than one respect.

The reversal of mood in the poem – out of the valley of tears into a colourful spring – mirrors Schumann’s own situation in life. For five years, the young composer and his fiancée Clara, the daughter of his piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, had been a couple, yet the obstinate prospective father-in-law stubbornly refused to consent to the marriage. Only a court ruling in 1840 cleared the way to matrimony – a drama that Schumann reflected in nearly 150 songs.

Professionally, too, he found himself at a crossroads. His ambitions as a concert pianist had collapsed after he damaged the tendons of his right hand through excessive practice. As a composer, he faced the same challenge as all his contemporaries: how to step out from the towering shadow of Ludwig van Beethoven. For more than a decade he had tried, despaired, and ultimately discarded everything he wrote. “If only you knew how it urges and rages within me, and how I might have reached Op. 100 in my symphonies, if I had only written them down,” he lamented to Clara.

The artistic spark came at last with the premiere of the hitherto unpublished “Great” C-major Symphony by the long-deceased Franz Schubert, which Schumann had discovered at the home of the composer’s brother. Shortly afterwards, he could report to a friend from his student days: “In these past days, I have completed a work (at least in outline) that has made me quite blissful. Just imagine, an entire symphony – and what’s more, a ‘Spring Symphony’! I can barely believe that it is finished.” In January 1841, he had drafted the entire work in just four days. “I wrote the symphony in that springlike urge that carries people away even into old age, returning anew each year.”

Swept up in enthusiasm, he even assigned programmatic titles to the four movements: “Spring’s Awakening,” “Evening,” “Merry Playmates,” and “Full Spring.” He later withdrew them, so as not to constrain the listener’s imagination: “I did not wish to depict or paint. But the season in which the symphony came into being left its mark on its shape – that I certainly believe.”

At the heart of the symphony lies the opening call for trumpets and horns, which reappears like a motto throughout the later movements. “The first trumpet call should sound as if coming from on high, like a summons to awaken,” Schumann wrote. Indeed, its rhythm corresponds exactly to Böttger’s line “Im Tale blüht der Frühling auf” (“For spring is blooming in the vale”). Yet this passage also revealed how much Schumann still had to learn as an orchestrator: in the first version, he chose a key that required the then valveless brass instruments to use “hand-stopping,” altering pitch by inserting the hand into the bell, but also dulling the sound. Mendelssohn drew his attention to the issue, and Schumann transposed the movement into a more practical key.

The lyrical second and the seamless, quick third movement lead into a final movement that is also driven by rhythm and crowned with triumphant energy. In Schumann’s own reading: “In what follows, I could then imagine how everything grows verdant, perhaps even how a butterfly rises, and how little by little everything comes together that makes up spring.”