There may be stranger tales in musical history than the rediscovery, in the 1930s, of the suppressed Violin Concerto in D minor by Robert Schumann – but probably not many. The circumstances that surrounded its unearthing were so bizarre that you simply couldn’t make them up.
The great Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi (pronounced ‘Yelly’; 1893-1966) has long been remembered for the new works she inspired, especially Ravel’s rhapsodic Tzigane; she also premiered both of Bartók’s violin sonatas. She was the youngest of three remarkably gifted musical sisters from Budapest, the great-nieces of the violinist and composer Joseph Joachim.
Several years before World War I, the young d’Arányis – Adila, Hortense and Jelly – left Hungary with their mother to settle in Britain, where their talent and the revered name of their great uncle propelled them into both fine musical company and high society. Here composers who wrote for Jelly included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Ethel Smyth and the Australian Frederick Septimus Kelly, who was killed at the Battle of the Somme. Jelly had hoped to marry him.
Enter the ouija board
One night in 1933, weeks after the Nazis took power in Germany, d’Arányi was staying with friends after a concert in Hastings. These friends enjoyed playing the ‘glass game’ – essentially a ouija board. The alphabet is arrayed on a table; participants each place one finger on a glass, which then slides from letter to letter, supposedly channelling messages from the spirit world.
A ‘message’ apparently arrived declaring that Adila – a stupendous violinist, formerly a pupil of Joachim – was at that very moment playing beautifully. Jelly d’Arányi, who never married, lived with Adila and her husband Alexander Fachiri. She thought her sister’s concert had been earlier. It turned out the glass was right.
Soon afterwards, d’Arányi and her secretary, Anna Robertson, tried the glass again, in private – only to find it bringing them a remarkable request. A composer wanted d’Arányi to find and perform a work of his that had not been played for many years. His name? Robert Schumann.
Now Adila Fachiri comes further into the spotlight. She had another talent besides music. She was exceptionally good at receiving and interpreting ‘glass game’ communications; so much so that her friend the Swedish Minister in London, Baron Erik Palmstierna, who was deeply involved in so-called ‘psychical research’, wrote three books based on messages that she had channelled. The first, Horizons of Immortality, suggests that it was only after the 1933 Schumann ‘message’ incident that Fachiri’s gift came to light.
A world of music, poetry, philosophy, literature… and ‘table-turning’
It probably all went back further. The contact point with Palmstierna appears to be the poet WB Yeats’s wife, ‘George’, who was a close friend of d’Arányi’s and had become friendly with the Baron as early as 1924. Besides, some salons that they frequented in the 1910s and ’20s (such as Eva Fowler’s) evinced a fascination with esoteric matters like the ouija board and ‘table-turning’, alongside music, poetry, philosophy and literature; spiritualism flourished after the First World War wrought such a legacy of destruction and grief.
D’Arányi’s initial enquiries revealed that a Schumann Violin Concerto was indeed noted in various books – it was written for Joachim in 1853. At first, letters to German archives produced no results.
But in August 1933 Palmstierna was in Berlin and went to explore the Musikhochschüle library, where a passer-by suggested he try the Staatsbibliothek. There he discovered one of the concerto’s manuscripts in a file marked ‘Joachim’.
The tale of the 100-year embargo
Now a further problem emerged: an embargo had been placed on the work, stipulating that it must not be played until 100 years after Schumann’s death in 1856. Stalemate resulted. Pleas to Joachim’s family seemed little help, while Eugenie Schumann (1851-1938), youngest daughter of Robert and Clara, insisted her mother had made it clear that the Violin Concerto was affected by their father’s last illness, and had instructed that it should never be played again.
D’Arányi asked the music publishers B Schott und Söhne from Mainz for help, on the basis that they might publish the work. Joachim’s son Johannes, who had deposited the manuscript in the library, had first met Willy Strecker, the head of Schott’s, when as Germans in Britain they were both incarcerated in an internment camp during World War I. This old association seems to have led Johannes to grant Schott’s the necessary permission.
It wasn’t so simple. In December 1935 an article appeared in the French magazine La Revue musicale exploring the concerto, including a photograph of the manuscript, and saying that it was to be published by Breitkopf & Härtel. The enquiries from the Londoners and Schott’s had clearly sparked interest from other quarters.
The Nazis enter the fray
By 1936, the works of Jewish composers had been banned in the Third Reich, including the ever-popular Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Hearing that an unknown violin concerto by a great ‘Aryan’ German was languishing in the Staatsbibliothek, the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels, spotted an opportunity. They conscripted the Schumann work, overriding everything and everyone, and planned its launch as the nation’s new favourite concerto.
Having won back the publication rights, Schott’s became still more embroiled. The concerto was a complex prospect; despite its beauties, it was still seen as flawed, and the Reich’s officials determined that it must be reworked to suit their purposes. Taking an enormous risk, Strecker entrusted the task to composer Paul Hindemith who by then was persona non grata to the Nazis.
More astonishing still, he sent a photostat to the young violinist Yehudi Menuhin – a Jewish American – for an opinion. Menuhin promptly fell in love with the work and wished to give the modern premiere as the centrepiece of his comeback after an 18-month sabbatical.
The three-way race to the premiere
The Nazis, meanwhile, selected the German violinist Georg Kulenkampff to unveil the concerto on 26 November 1937 – in the presence of Adolf Hitler. On their insistence, Menuhin could only ‘go’ second, in the US, while d’Arányi (who was at least partly Jewish) was relegated to third place for a UK premiere.
She, too, probably needed a comeback. In her early forties, a series of mishaps, injuries and illnesses had cast her formerly glittering career into decline. Everything came into parallel. The world had been tumbling from the vibrancy of the 1920s through depression into fascism; Schumann had written the concerto on the brink of mental collapse; and now d’Arányi found her peak days slipping away, her efforts on behalf of the concerto threatened by political machinations in Germany and the popularity of a younger, starrier new soloist. She, the concerto and the world were on the brink together, poised before the fall.
A Prime Minister intervenes
Yet she had moral authority since she had, after all, first drawn attention to the work’s existence, no matter how or why. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had been chancellor when d’Arányi in 1933 gave a series of charity concerts in nine British cathedrals to raise money for the unemployed; impressed, he had added a government grant of £1,000. She now appealed to him for support and apparently received a positive response.
Her UK premiere was scheduled for autumn 1937. But then, that September, Palmstierna’s book came out, containing the full story of the spirit messages. An article in The Listener recounted the incident under the headline ‘Finding a lost concerto’. A veritable storm ensued, involving much derision and letters to the press, mainly focusing on the issue that the concerto was not technically ‘lost’ – a few people knew it existed and where it was.
The headline ‘lost’ was misleading, but provided an excuse to haul d’Arányi unduly and horribly over the coals. She had never claimed that nobody knew of it, only that she had not known about it herself. Besides, even if the concerto was not ‘lost’, it still needed to be found. The situation was partially redeemed by the musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey, a close friend of the sisters, who wrote a substantial letter to The Times about the concerto and declared his confidence in d’Arányi.
‘An incendiary mix of hysteria, witch-hunting, injustice and irrationality’
The Nazis, meanwhile, kept changing the performance date, obliging Menuhin and d’Arányi both to follow suit; and by the time d’Arányi gave her performance of the Schumann at the Queen’s Hall, London, in February 1938, one by Menuhin in the self-same venue had been scheduled for just a few weeks later.
How to extrapolate something good and beautiful from a situation in which an incendiary mix of hysteria, witch-hunting, injustice, self-interest, propaganda and irrationality predominates? All this makes the story of d’Arányi and her Schumann one not only for the 1930s, but for our own times. Though the glory was snatched from under d’Arányi’s nose, ultimately her efforts had restored Schumann’s concerto to the world. Today it is enjoying its greatest popularity yet.
The spirit messages incident may have damaged her, and they may or may not have been what she and Fachiri believed (everyone I’ve talked to who knew them says the sisters believed it completely); but in the end, what mattered was that a great concerto – troubled, yet vital and, as Menuhin termed it, the ‘missing link’ in the Romantic concerto repertoire – was brought back to the public at last.
Schumann Violin Concerto: a guide to a masterpiece
The Violin Concerto in D minor was Schumann’s last completed orchestral work. He wrote it in 1853 for Joseph Joachim (pictured below), then a 22-year-old former prodigy, who that year introduced the Schumanns to his friend Johannes Brahms.
Schumann, his health ailing both mentally and physically (possibly syphilis, possibly a bipolar disorder, or both) finished the concerto that October, soon after meeting Brahms for the first time. But five months later he attempted suicide, throwing himself into the Rhine, and was subsequently sent to a mental hospital at Endenich, near Bonn. He died there in 1856.
When Breitkopf began to issue a complete Schumann edition, Clara had to decide whether or not to publish his late works that were still in manuscript form. After consultation with Joachim and Brahms she left the concerto unpublished, feeling it bore too many traces of his illness. Joachim kept the manuscript; on his death it passed to his son Johannes, who put it in the Prussian State Library with a 100-year embargo.
Groundbreaking… and fiendishly difficult
Whether the concerto does betray signs of Schumann’s malady is still a moot point. It is fiendishly difficult to play. It is also groundbreaking, with a cyclic structure (the first movement’s second subject is hinted at softly through the slow movement and then transforms into the main theme of the finale). The impression of the slow movement can be one of dislocation, of search rather than focus – yet therein also lies its heartbreaking beauty. Intriguingly, its cyclic theme puts in an appearance in Brahms’s Violin Concerto too.
The concerto has now been recorded by many advocates. The exquisite account by Yehudi Menuhin, in 1938 with the New York Philharmonic under Sir John Barbirolli, remains a favourite (Naxos 8.110966); but among modern versions, Christian Tetzlaff’s is outstanding, with the Frankfurt Radio SO under Paavo Järvi – delivered with all the fire and idealistic passion one could wish for (Ondine ODE11952).