At A Glance
What makes a great piano concerto? In 1893 Robert Schumann wrote: “We must await the genius who will show us in a newer and more brilliant way how orchestra and piano may be combined, how the soloist, dominant at the keyboard, may unfold the wealth of his instrument and his art, while the orchestra, no longer a mere spectator, may interweave its manifold facets into the scene.” That much-awaited genius would end up being Schumann himself. In1841, he composed a one-movement Concert Phantasie, and four years later went back and revised it into the first movement of his Piano Concerto.
Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony is the only one of his nine to which he gave a subtitle. The Romantic Symphony evokes German Romanticism in its allusions to the hunt and in its brilliant spotlighting of the instruments most associated with that pursuit, the horns. Quite a few years after he composed his Fourth Symphony, Bruckner penned a scenario for this symphony. He described the first movement as a “medieval city—dawn”; the second as a “rustic love-scene,” in which a “peasant boy woos his sweetheart, but she scorns him”; the third as “The Hunting of the Hare,” and a “Dance Melody During the Huntsmen’s Meal”; and the fourth as a “Folk Festival.”
Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony is the only one of his nine to which he gave a subtitle. The Romantic Symphony evokes German Romanticism in its allusions to the hunt and in its brilliant spotlighting of the instruments most associated with that pursuit, the horns. Quite a few years after he composed his Fourth Symphony, Bruckner penned a scenario for this symphony. He described the first movement as a “medieval city—dawn”; the second as a “rustic love-scene,” in which a “peasant boy woos his sweetheart, but she scorns him”; the third as “The Hunting of the Hare,” and a “Dance Melody During the Huntsmen’s Meal”; and the fourth as a “Folk Festival.”
