On the night of 17 February 1854, Schumann, suffering from severe aural hallucinations, claimed that he heard angels dictating a theme to him. If Clara Schumann’s diary entries are to be believed, Schumann immediately wrote down the theme, and on either 22 or 23 February started writing variations on it. (All that survives of this first draft is a single page of music, and so we cannot know if at this stage Schumann completed work on the variations, though is likely he had not). At 2 in the afternoon of 27 February Schumann tried to drown himself in the icy Rhine; he was rescued by bargemen who dragged him ashore. The next day he returned to these variations and (it seems) completed them. He sent the work to Clara, but by then she had already left to stay with a friend at the advice of a doctor. On 4 March Schumann voluntarily committed himself to an asylum in Endenich, where he would die just a little over 2 years later.
The Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”) are Schumann’s last work. He did not seem to realise that the lovely chorale theme that he wrote down was one he had used several times before: in the 2nd mvt of his Violin Concerto in D min (in a fragmentary form), the 2nd mvt of his 2nd String Quartet, and the Lieder-Album für die Jugend (No.19, Frühlings Ankunft, with a different harmonic colour). Clara forbade the publication of the work (we don’t know why – possibly they were too personal, possibly she thought it was not musically up to par with Schumann’s earlier work), and it was only until 1939 that the work saw print, although Brahms wrote a set of 4-hand variations on Schumann’s theme in 1861.
The Ghost Variations are, like most of Schumann’s late work, extraordinarily intimate. All the variations cleave closely to the original theme, never quite departing its soundscape, and the original melody is always present. Rather than dissect the theme, the variations eavesdrop on it: Var. 1 adds triplet counterpoint in a middle voice; Var.2 unfolds as a touching canon; Var.3 opens the theme up just slightly by placing it in the LH and giving the RH gossamer-light triplet figuration; and Var.4 drains the theme of some of its warmth with intricate note placement, glacial and clear as ice. Var.5 represents something of a break from the earlier variations; it follows the harmony of the original theme exactly, but at first blush can be hard to recognise as related to the original theme. There is for the first time something disturbing here: both upper melody and middle-voice accompaniment are awash with chromatic grace notes, with the middle voice chromatic notes given to the LH in a way that just about suggests they have a separate life of their own. If emphasised, as Levit does (19:29), these LH nonharmonic notes create a gently dissonant haze in which the melody is nearly lost – kaleidoscopically beautiful and broken at the same time. Given what we know about the circumstances of this work’s composition, it is hard to be musically objective, but it seems that there is no more appropriate ending to a work that also bookended Schumann’s life. (We’re not even entirely certain if the work is complete – Schumann might have ended it where it did because he was unable to write more, and on purely intuitive grounds I’m inclined to believe this is the case.)