Performance Today®

Here on PT, we often talk about the meaning of music, what the composer was trying to say. Robert Schumann made it easy for us. He spelled it out, literally, in his music. In today's show, host Fred Child sits down at the PT piano, and demonstrates some of the hidden meanings in Schumann's music, where he used the notes of the scale to spell out words and names in his melodies. Plus, a string quartet by Schumann written during a creative outburst in the summer of 1842. The Takacs Quartet performs at the Aspen Music Festival.

Today, we're continuing our PT party for Robert Schumann's 200th birthday. There's much about his life that's worthy of a Gothic novel: passion, romance, madness, death. If you add in a seance and a brush with Hitler's Nazi Germany, it could be a summer blockbuster. The funny thing is, it's all true. The seance and the Nazis don't enter the picture until 80 years after Schumann's death, and all center around the premiere of his violin concerto. All the details are in hour one, plus a performance by violinist Thomas Zehetmair and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

The young Robert Schumann wanted to be the greatest pianist in the world. And he had hopes of getting there, until the middle finger of his right hand went numb. We'll hear about the various therapies he tried(including a mechanical finger stretcher that did further damage, and holding his hand in the abdominal cavity of a freshly slaughtered calf) and then we'll revel in a piece he would never have written if his piano dreams had been realized: his Cello Concerto. Maria Kliegel solos with the RTE National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, in concert in Dublin.

Today, the world is celebrating the 200th birthday of composer Robert Schumann. We know him as a great composer, perhaps the most Romantic of all the Romantic composers. But early in his life, he wandered a bit. He tried writing, he tried going to law school, he tried being a pianist - all before ultimately settling on composing. Our show is all-Schumann today, including a performance of his rarely-played Konzertstuck for four horns and orchestra, in a classic recording by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Plus, one of his unfinished symphonies, performed by conductor Roberto Abbado and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Music of the morning and the night, in today's show. Ravel's second suite from "Daphnis and Chloe" begins just before dawn, to the gentle sounds of dew dripping off leaves and birds twittering in the trees. The Radio France Philharmonic performs this sumptuous ballet music in Paris. And pianists Jeffrey Kahane and David Riley play an intermezzo from Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Oregon Bach Festival.

Most of us have any number of unfinished projects around the house or at work. Empty photo albums, unwritten family histories, that pile of junk mail on the desk. Before you tackle any of it, tune into today's show and hear Franz Schubert's most famous loose end. Lorin Maazel leads the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony, from a recent concert in Munich.

In 1925, composer Leos Janacek was commissioned to write a fanfare for a gymnastics society. When he started working on it, his fanfare quickly grew into a full-blown orchestral work. But he kept the original brassiness: the work calls for 14 trumpets. We'll hear Janacek's Sinfonietta, from a concert by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Plus, great Spanish music by a Frenchman: Maurice Ravel's "Rhapsodie Espagnole."

For the past 34 years, the Spoleto Festival USA has been one of the greatest summer arts festivals in the world. Host Fred Child is there, broadcasting from Charleston, South Carolina. He'll be bringing us great performances from Spoleto, and the stories behind them. One of those stories: the connection between Charleston and the Pachelbel Canon. Plus a terrific performance of a Haydn string quartet.

For Ludwig van Beethoven, the year 1802 was a year of both confidence and despair. He was on a creative high, composing almost non-stop. And yet, he knew he was going deaf. He wrote, "As the leaves of autumn fall and are withered, so has my hope been blighted." Out of that mix came the second symphony, full of audacity and wit. We'll hear a recent concert performance by Christoph von Dohnanyi and the North German Radio Symphony.