The syphilitic sound of Schumann’s violin concerto is part of its genius

Robert Schumann met a wretched end. He died in a lunatic asylum where he thought the nurses were feeding him human faeces. Meanwhile he drove his fellow residents mad by sitting at the piano and bashing out nonsense-music until he had to be dragged away — a grotesque indignity for the creator of the most bewitching quicksilver fantasies in the history of the instrument.

After Schumann’s death in 1856, the violinist Joseph Joachim hid away the strange concerto that the composer had written for him in 1853 because it showed evidence of softening of the brain. Clara, Robert’s widow, agreed. That became the conventional wisdom. The violin concerto was suppressed until 1933 when — appropriately for such spectral music — the disembodied voice of Schumann contacted two of Joachim’s nieces during a séance and demanded its recovery. The work was fished out of the Prussian state library and championed by the Nazis, who saw it as an alternative to the devilishly hummable violin concerto by the Jew Mendelssohn.

The strategy didn’t work. Audiences had been told for so long that the Schumann violin concerto was a mess that they listened out of pity. The glassy, attenuated melodies; the chug-chug-chugging of the orchestral accompaniment in the first movement; a brutally repetitive polonaise instead of a virtuoso soufflé of a finale — what more evidence do you need of declining powers?

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True, some great violinists have recorded it in recent years — Gidon Kremer, Joshua Bell — but they face a problem: how do you make this awkward music flow? The finale’s the killer. Not only does the polonaise slide easily into a sedate minuet, but the poor violinist has to perform acrobatics that fly under rather than above the orchestra, so the audience hardly notices them.