Clara Wieck’s A Minor Piano Concerto: Formal innovation and the problem of parametric disconnect in early Romantic Music

Clara Wieck’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7 (1833–5), presents an intriguing example of the formal developments that were occurring within the genre of the Romantic concerto in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In line with a growing number of concertos from this period, Wieck’s work offers a number of “progressive” or non-classical traits: a unitary exposition, truncated first-movement form, run-on movements, and cyclic thematic links between movements. Such features that can be found individually or in conjunction in other concerted works from the preceding decade, but what distinguishes Wieck’s work is the extent to which she combines all these traits in a single piece. This article examines the formal procedures of Wieck’s Op. 7, which is taken as an exemplary case study of the development of Romantic form and syntax in the period after 1820. It argues that what is distinctive about this concerto is the extent to which parameters that were formerly closely coordinated – tonal structure, form-functional phrase type, thematic identity, topic and texture – now appear dissociated from their generically expected interrelation. This situation – what I term “parametric disconnect” – has far-reaching ramifications for how we are able to theorize Romantic form.