Not many of Clara Schumann’s piano works lend themselves to solo guitar, but I recently came across one piece that does – the hauntingly beautiful Larghetto that begins her Quatre Pièces fugitives (Four Fleeting Pieces), op.15. Here is my transcription:

Clara Schumann, Larghetto, op.15 no.1: download the score in PDF (see resources for this and other scores)

IMSLP has the original piano score. It has been recorded a few times by pianists: YouTube has a beautiful live performance of the whole set by Michelle Cann:

In my last post, I focused on the transcription process in a piece by Mendelssohn. This time, let’s look at a couple of features of the piece and how they might shape your practice. Learning a piece of music is a creative activity – half system, half experimentation. But one principle is always worth bearing in mind: to learn a complex piece, first make it simpler. We’ll look at two ways of simplifying the music to aid learning: 

1. simplifying a passage to its basic harmonies
2. simplifying a passage to its basic motive

Harmony

Fleeting Pieces: with her title, Schumann invokes a key value of romantic art – the value of ephemeral inspiration, precious precisely because it is unbidden and unrepeatable. When she completed her opus 15 in 1835, Clara Schumann was just 21, yet she was already a celebrated pianist with a decade of concertizing under her belt. We have inherited an image of her as an austere and self-effacing performer. Liszt, for example, likened her to a priestess at the piano, in her devotion to the message of the music. But Liszt was describing the older Schumann. In her youth, she was noted for a sense of abandon: especially when playing for a small audience, she loved to improvise.¹

This Larghetto offers a glimpse of the unguarded spontaneity of the young Clara. Harmonically speaking, it begins like a Bach prelude, with a bass line that keeps descending by step, covering a whole octave and a fourth until it reaches the dominant (bars 4–8). The first four bars use another Baroque strategy: the basic chords over a tonic pedal (I-ii-V7-I). When you have these patterns under your fingers, as Schumann did, it’s much easier to improvise.²

Okay, but how do we get those patterns under our fingers? We can play the chords on their own, keeping the bass unchanged and reducing the melody to a simple outline: 

In our book, Richard Wright and I call these chordal outlines harmonic reductions (the usual term for them), praying that the term won’t attract negative – reductive – connotations. A harmonic reduction offers a powerful way to integrate our sense of harmony and voice-leading with our brain, fingers and ears. 

What a pleasure it is to play only the harmonies, basking in their resonance! But part of that pleasure is to return to the original afterwards. What has changed in your understanding of the musical flow? What do you do differently now, just because? 

When messing around with a harmonic reduction, the key is to go back and forth many times until you no longer need to play it. As you become familiar with the chords, you might try developing them into your own composition or improvisation. 

Motive

It’s not just in the harmonies that you sense Clara Schumann the improviser: it’s also in the way her melodies unfold. Take the middle section, which starts with a passionate ascending figure, passed between voices and registers:

And so to another learning tip. Make a copy of the score and mark the motive with brackets, labels or colors – yes, even if you find each instance obvious! This piece has an anatomy, and students of anatomy often use coloring books. When you label the motive, you start to notice other connections. For example, our motive x comes from the second gesture of the opening melody:

Schumann actually makes that connection more explicit in the reprise, when the melody is slightly varied and that same second gesture now matches the middle section exactly:

But wait – in that case, doesn’t the motive start life as the simple arpeggio figure that begins the piece? 

Evidently, the accompaniment does more than accompany: it contains the germ of the melody and so converses with it. Schumann often makes this relationship quite audible by making the melody continue the ascent of the arpeggios. The next excerpt shows you how the relationship works in the piano original, but I tried to maintain this feature as much as possible in my transcription.

In some bars, Schumann even emphasizes the seamless merging of accompaniment and melody by joining them with a single slur. Here’s part of the reprise as it appears in the first edition (again, the transcription includes the slurs):

Contrast and Continuity

That passionate outburst in the middle section exemplifies a principle that is especially useful in nineteenth-century music: 

Wherever you encounter a sudden contrast, look for something that continues

Or put differently, when you find something new, look for something else that repeats. Let’s apply this to the middle section. The contrasts are not hard to see, but let’s list them anyway: 

1. a surge in dynamics (mf is marked for the first time, soon rising to f)
2. the texture changes from melody and accompaniment (voice and harp) to agitated imitation among the voices
3. instead of a singing melody, there is development, with fragments of the melody
4. instead of tonal stability, there are abrupt changes of key
5. the tessitura reaches much higher (in the piano original, also lower) 

That’s a lot of change. Yet there is also continuity in the repetition of the ascending motive from the first section. 

So now, another practice strategy. When I encounter this kind of hidden repetition, I’ll often remove some of the contrasting elements so that I can hear the repeated element more clearly. This helps my fingers feel very directly the underlying logic that I can already hear with my ears. Then, when I go back to the original passage, with its new, complicating elements, I have a tactile sense of what exactly is being discussed and developed, and I get a feeling for how I want to underline the contrasts. 

In the example below, I’ve simplified the motive to make it more like the arpeggios at the beginning, so that the connection is obvious (the simplified motive is in small noteheads). If you play through it and then play the finished passage as Schumann wrote it, you’ll find yourself playing more persuasively without really thinking about it.

You can also try introducing a neighbor-note into some of the arpeggios in the outer sections, or putting triplets in. By the way, what happens to the music if you omit the arpeggio from the first bar, beginning with the melody? Or put a bass note on the opening downbeat? Does the piece immediately become more conventional in feel, less improvisational? Now return to the music as written: is your sense of rhythmic nuance refined by these experiments? One thing is sure: we mustn’t begin this piece with an accent.

Transcription

I first heard this piece played on two guitars by Marco Ramelli and Enrica Savigni in a magically immersive concert in Milan last year. They have recorded their version as part of an equally immersive new album called A tempo rubato, played on 19th-century guitars. You can hear it on all the major platforms, including YouTube:

Enrica’s transcription for the duo is in G, and after I heard them perform it, I became obsessed with playing it on solo guitar. First, though, I had to find a key that would work. D or E are obvious contenders, perfect for the opening tonic pedal, but in the end, C seemed to work best. For example, the pedal at the end of the middle section becomes a low E.

The principle here is that when you make an arrangement, the opening may work in several keys, but there’s often a passage later on that offers fewer good choices. In romantic pieces especially, it’s tempting to start with the most natural and easy key, accepting the struggle that comes later when the piece moves to a remote key. But you can do the opposite, making that later, remote key the most natural one, and working your way back to the beginning. In any case, C here is perfectly natural – and a much more beautiful key on the guitar than we often give it credit for.

The high C harmonic at the end is played by fingering F on string 1 (part of the bar chord) and making an artificial harmonic at fret 20 with the right hand. There’s some license in the voice-leading in that bar, in that the low bass note should be C, not F♯: on the guitar, we can get away with this sort of thing to a limited extent, but if you don’t like the way the low F♯ hangs unresolved, you can play it also as an artificial harmonic, so that C in the following chord becomes the sounding bass. I preferred to keep the gesture of bass + arpeggio, to the slight detriment of the voice-leading.

Style

What does it mean to play this piece in such a way that it sounds fleeting? 

Like many guitarists of my generation (I was born in 1970), I was steeped in a very rigorous way of treating rhythm, favoring a strict pulse to give structure to the music, relying on other aspects of the music (articulation, voicing, color) to express the feeling of the music. Well, that’s not entirely fair: I valued continuity of pulse and precision of small rhythmic subdivisions in part for the kind of sublime spirituality that it can lend to the music. Many guitarists of my generation learned this from pianists such as Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter. 

But when I wrote and played my own music, I couldn’t help noticing that I used that strict pulse much less often, or more as a tool among others. In general, I played with an extravagant rubato, and if someone else played my music without it, it sounded wrong to me. When I improvise, it’s the same thing.

I can imagine a performance of this Larghetto with an even, hypnotic pulse, leading perhaps to a Richterian, trance-like atmosphere. In that case, the fleeting inspiration might seem to emanate from a rather angelic realm. But there is much more mileage, it seems to me, in making this piece a study in rubato – in playing as though we were improvising, capturing the flow of ideas in a rush of inspiration. Don’t be afraid to vary the pulse not within and between phrases, but between sections: the middle section, surely, goes a little faster than the outer sections, and you should feel free to omit the odd inner voice if you need to. 

Notation

Your sense of your rubato will be intuitive and unique to you. But two elements of the notation might spur your imaginative use of timing: slurs and slur-and-staccato marks.

Slurs

In the first section, the arpeggios and the melodic gestures are generally slurred separately. As we’ve seen, these two elements are intimately linked, originating as they do in a single motive. How might you play around with the space between melody and accompaniment? Two slurs imply two separate gestures: the last note of each slur might be the gentlest, and you might sometimes take a tiny breath between slurs.

Of course, we mustn’t break the music up too much. It is crucially important to feel long phrases, thinking, for example, all the way from bar 1 to bar 9. But sometimes if you wait just the right amount, the phrase actually gains in tension and direction. The recording by the Ramelli-Savigni duo illustrates this exceptionally well. 

When Schumann brings the opening music back in bar 31, she introduces all kinds of subtle variations. As we saw above, she sometimes slurs arpeggios and melody together, merging the two into a single sweeping gesture (see again examples 6 and 7 above). Now, instead of breathing within the bar, you have to play through. This seems to match well the intensified rhythmic activity of the reprise, implying a more passionate delivery. 

But these are all just suggestions. I’m not sure you even have to be too literal about remembering which bars have two slurs and which have one (in the original, some even have both): better perhaps to remember that these different kinds of flow exist and play around with the options in performance on guitar. After all, we might discover a manuscript in which the slurs look different. But even if we did, the option to play creatively with the flow of the measure and the space between accompaniment and melody would still exist.

Slur-and-staccato marks

The piano original includes some staccato dots under slurs, and I have kept these in the transcription. I would not recommend trying to play these notes detached, however, not even minimally. In the 18th and 19th centuries, dots could have a variety of meanings, and here they might mean a slight weighting of the notes – even a slight lingering, so that they become separated a little in time, though not otherwise. The pianist Charles Rosen suggested that you can often get the sense of how this notation affects weight and timing by playing each note with a dot with the same finger, and this technique works equally well on the guitar.

I hope you enjoy playing this transcription and that it inspires you to listen to more of Clara Schumann’s music. Apart from larger scale works of hers, such as the Piano Concerto, there are her songs, such as ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’, from opus 12, on a text by Rückert that was later also set by Mahler. Here’s Barbara Bonney singing it, with Vladimir Ashkenazy at the piano:

1. See Amanda Lalonde, ‘The Young Prophetess in Performance,‘ in Clara Schumann Studies, edited by Joe Davies (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 187–201. ↩︎
2. For guitarists studying schemata, you’ll notice that after the tonic frame, the first six notes of the bass (C–E) describe a fauxbourdon, while the second six notes (E–G) follow the famous ‘rule of the octave’. ↩︎