April 30, 2007

A landmark musical discovery made by a Lyon College professor last summer was announced April 20 to coincide with the 75th-anniversary of an annual Bach Festival held at the college in Ohio where he made his historic find.

Dr. Russell Stinson, Lyon’s Josephine Emily Brown Professor of Music, was doing research in the Riemenschneider Bach Institute at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio last June when his eyes saw something that was hard to believe.

He had gone to Baldwin-Wallace College to examine an anthology of Bach pieces that had once belonged to a 19th-century pianist, composer and wife of German composer Robert Schumann.

Stinson, author of the recent book "The Reception of Bach’s Organ Works From Mendelssohn to Brahms," was already well aware that that Clara Wieck Schumann’s handwritten markings appear throughout these piano reductions of Bach organ works.

But the handwritten notations made by Schumann’s own hand caught him by surprise. And Stinson’s discovery didn’t end there. Some of the notations may have been written by another legendary German composer and musician. Johannes Brahms, who befriended the Schumanns in the 1850s, may have authored some of the notations as well.

In a recent interview with the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, the state’s largest newspaper, Stinson said the Schumann discovery is an important development in Bach scholarship.

"We like to think we have here a major addition to our understanding of how three of the greatest musicians of the 19th century responded to the model of Bach," Stinson said in an article by Plain Dealer music critic Donald Rosenberg.

The Bach anthology consists of 11 items, including preludes, fugues, fantasies, toccatas and variations. The editions were printed from about 1815 to 1833 in Germany. Stinson believes Robert Schumann purchased them personally to continue his study of Bach’s organ music.

"Schumann was a frustrated organist," Stinson said. "As was Clara."

After Robert died in 1856, the collection remained with Clara until her death in 1896. The Schumanns’ daughters, Marie and Eugenie, inherited their possessions. When faced with financial hardships, they sold large parts of the library.

One of those buyers was Albert Riemenschneider, founder of the Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music and the Bach Festival. In 1937, he purchased the Schumann anthology.

Gustav Mensching, an associate at Hug & Co., a music publisher in Zurich, Switzerland, who owned the documents, told Riemenschneider that Marie Schumann had confirmed the markings in the documents to be her mother’s.

But Stinson recognized Robert Schumann’s handwriting, written in red, in observations about organ registrations, analytical markings and wrong notes.

Another direct connection between the anthology and Robert Schumann that Stinson found was an article published in the November 1841 issue of the journal Neue Zeitschift fur Musik describing typographical errors in the edition of the Toccata in F major included in the Baldwin-Wallace College collection.

Schumann served editor of the journal.

Last October at the Robert Schumann House, the composer’s birthplace museum in Zwickau, Germany, Stinson confirmed the authenticity of both of the Schumanns’ handwriting.

"They were floored that these materials had made it over to America," Stinson said in Rosenberg’s article. "We compared Clara’s performance markings in the ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ there with markings here. They are a perfect match."

Stinson isn’t as certain about the authenticity of the Brahms’ handwriting examples, but the professor’s gut tells him some of the notations belong to the famed musician.

Brahms became friends with the Schumanns in 1853 in Dusseldorf when the young pianist and composer performed his own piano arrangement of Bach’s Toccata in F major at a party the couple is likely to have attended.

Stinson believes vertical slashes and tiny writing he found on pages of the Fantasy in G major, which Brahms played often in concert, could be Brahms’.