Holy Trust

Passionate, moody, poetic from his youth, Composer Robert Schumann in his 44th year was eccentric, on the verge of mental collapse. Living in Duesseldorf, he had for 13 years been the devoted husband of Pianist Clara Wieck, the friendly colleague of Joseph Joachim, greatest violinist of his time, and the admirer of young Composer Johannes Brahms. The works which were to make Schumann famed among Germans--songs, symphonies, piano works, pure, refined and free in form --he had written in the decade prior. In the early 1850s handsome Robert Schumann began fancying that he continually heard the musical note A, the note with which orchestras always tune up. One night it seemed to him that Schubert and Mendelssohn brought him a theme, which he wrote down and on which next day he began composing variations. In 1853, a year before he threw himself into the Rhine, only to be fished out and later sent to the asylum where he died, Schumann was writing music as usual. One day he sent Joachim a violin concerto, with a letter:

"Here is something new. ... It will give you a picture of sincere earnestness behind which often reigns a happy mood. . . . Often I saw you in my fancy when I wrote the concerto. Tell me everything that Unausfuehrbarkeit schmeckt."* Later, the concerto completely scored, Schumann wrote, "Oh, how happy I will be if we can perform it at the opening concert of the new season. ..." But the concerto was not performed in public during Schumann's or Joachim's lifetime. The bearded Hungarian violinist studied it, talked about it, but must have quietly thought it an inferior work. Joachim let the violin work be forgotten, lived out his long life, and upon his death in 1907 it was sent, along with papers and manuscript of his own, to the Berlin State Library. In his will Joachim stipulated that the Schumann concerto should not be performed until a century after the composer's death.

Last week from a mountain ranch in California came word that the violin concerto will be played 20 years before Joachim planned. This summer a German music publisher named Wilhelm Strecker had obtained access to the concerto, had it photostated and a copy sent to Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, now going on 21 and ending two years of restful "growing up" with his family at Los Gatos. Enthusiastically, Menuhin urged Strecker to get the concerto released. Strecker obtained permission from the State librarian, from Joachim's son, from Schumann's 86-year-old Daughter Eugenie in Switzerland, and from 18 Schumann kin who were promised a share in royalties from the concerto's publication and performances. Its world premiere will take place Oct. 6 in the famed Leipzig Gewandhaus. Violinist Menuhin will play it for the first time in the U. S. with Conductor Vladimir Golschmann and the St. Louis Symphony, on Nov. 12, during his grown-up series of 74 engagements in the U. S. and abroad.

"I feel as if I have a holy trust," exclaimed Yehudi Menuhin last week. "The work is so great and so beautiful." Papa Moshe Menuhin revealed that his son had dragged Sister Hephzibah Menuhin to the piano, mastered the concerto in a few days, and "wept with joy" to find that the work justified his faith in the sanity of Schumann's last years. In a lengthy press release Papa Menuhin said that Violinist Menuhin had insisted that nothing but the Urtext, the original unedited "pure Schumann, 100% of it," be printed, for "Yehudi said: 'I ask no special rights, no monopolies, let anyone play it who realizes the greatness of the work. . . . But, it must remain ... as it left the hands and soul of Schumann. No hyphens, no mutilations.' "

*Smells unperformable.

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