Robert Schumann's Five Pieces in Folk Style (German: Fünf Stücke im Volkston), Op.

102 is a set of five short pieces for cello and piano, composed in 1849 and published in 1851 with a dedication to cellist Andreas Grabau [de].

Schumann composed three duets, the first he ever completed, in 1849: the Five Pieces, the Adagio and Allegro for Horn and Piano and the Fantasiestücke for Clarinet, Op.

The period 1845–53 was also the time of the composition and premieres of all of Schumann's concerti and concertante works, beginning with the piano concerto, which appeared in 1845.

But in February and March, he completed the Fantasiestücke, the Adagio and Allegro for Horn and Piano, the Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra, and several choral works and cycles of Lieder including the Romanzen für Frauenstimmen, a set of part-songs, and the Spanisches Liederspiel of songs for four soloists.

[6] These meant income for Schumann (a priority for him in 1849, which ended in the publication of the lucrative Album für die Jugend) and also served to raise his profile amongst the genteel public of Dresden, where small-scale music in the home was more popular than concert works of the sort which had made Schumann famous elsewhere.

At the time Clara was pregnant with Ferdinand, their sixth child, but they were forced to flee the city in early May, and went to live in the nearby village of Kreischa.

The dedicatee of the work, Andreas Grabau, was a cellist in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and a celebrated chamber musician.

A year before their publication in 1851, Grabau performed the Five Pieces with Clara in private, in honour of Schumann's fortieth birthday.

Consider the first part of the main theme of number one (Vanitas vanitatum), stated here in the opening four bars of the cello part: This excerpt is built upon the rhythmic motif which appears in bars 2, 3 and 4 (semiquaver-semiquaver-quaver), the inclusion of jabbing, characterful rhythms like these being a typically Schumannesque device; the third movement waltz of the Op.

The main theme of the second piece is lyrical and slow, but has some of the same repetitive and rhythmically curious character of number one: The theme begins with a three-bar melody containing an arpeggio rising to the tonic, descent by an octave, then an ornamented three-note descent from B♭ to G; then the melody is repeated exactly, and a final bar provides a cadence.

The single-bar cadence appended to the melody gives the whole theme a duration of seven bars, an irregular length for a piece which was the product of the early Romantic movement in music, dominated by the balanced four-bar phrases which are typical of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and even Schumann in the greater part of his output.

They are certainly not for thoughtless players; as is generally the case with our master's tone poems, not every person uncovers the vastness of the terrain the first time he has a go.