Schumann: Ghost Variations, WoO 24 (Anderszewski, Levit)

On the night of 17 February 1854, Schumann, suffering from severe aural hallucinations, claimed that he heard angels dictating a theme to him. If Clara Schumann’s diary entries are to be believed, Schumann immediately wrote down the theme, and on either 22 or 23 February started writing variations on it. (All that survives of this first draft is a single page of music, and so we cannot know if at this stage Schumann completed work on the variations, though is likely he had not). At 2 in the afternoon of 27 February Schumann tried to drown himself in the icy Rhine; he was rescued by bargemen who dragged him ashore. The next day he returned to these variations and (it seems) completed them. He sent the work to Clara, but by then she had already left to stay with a friend at the advice of a doctor. On 4 March Schumann voluntarily committed himself to an asylum in Endenich, where he would die just a little over 2 years later. The Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”) are Schumann’s last work. He did not seem to realise that the lovely chorale theme that he wrote down was one he had used several times before: in the 2nd mvt of his Violin Concerto in D min (in a fragmentary form), the 2nd mvt of his 2nd String Quartet, and the Lieder-Album für die Jugend (No.19, Frühlings Ankunft, with a different harmonic colour). Clara forbade the publication of the work (we don’t know why – possibly they were too personal, possibly she thought it was not musically up to par with Schumann’s...