Robert Schumann wrote his Violin Concerto in 1853. Josef Kriehuber/Wikimedia Commons hide caption
Robert Schumann wrote his Violin Concerto in 1853.
Classical music meets Halloween and the paranormal Thursday night when the National Symphony Orchestra plays the Schumann Violin Concerto, a work buried for nearly a century and recovered — or so the story goes — by a message from the beyond.
In the summer of 1853, the young violinist Joseph Joachim asked a friend, pianist, composer and conductor Robert Schumann, to write a violin concerto for him. Schumann, though suffering from depression, went into a frenzy of activity, completing the Violin Concerto in D Minor (fully scored for all the different musical parts) within 13 days in late September and early October. Within months, however, the composer attempted suicide and was confined to an asylum until his death two years later at the age of 46.
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