For Franz Liszt, reminiscence carries quite a different meaning: a paraphrase in all but name, it signifies a virtuoso work based on well-known tunes taken from popular operas. In these pieces, reminiscence is a means to portray and poeticise childhood through an adult’s eyes, and reassuringly to explain seemingly naive existential questions to young players. Whilst never naming a piece directly with the word, his Kinderszenen (1838) are a clear example of the characteristic. Reminiscence is an important stylistic trope in the work of Robert Schumann. Most likely it originated at the same time as the birth of musical Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. Reminiscence has a reasonably long musical history. The happy eagerness with which performers meet his music is rare in an industry in which composers can feel like a necessary evil, begrudgingly endured by both musicians and audiences alike. He has been championed by figures no less than Pierre Boulez, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Isabelle Faust, Mariss Jansons, Simon Rattle, Mitsuko Uchida and Tabea Zimmerman-in short, the leading lights of Western classical music. It is rare for a year to go by without performances of his music by the world’s leading orchestras: 2018, for example, sees premieres with the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. Whilst only 44, Widmann has swiftly defined himself as one of the major musical names of our time.
Two recent pieces even bear the word in their subtitles: Idyll and Abyss (2009), ‘six Schubert reminiscences for piano’ and Partita (2018), ‘five reminiscences for large orchestra’. Reminiscence is important to the German composer and clarinetist, Jörg Widmann (1973-). And in adverse times, we might reminisce and say, ’it all worked out in the end…’-thereby using the past to soothe our displeasure with the present and our fears for the future. Or we might say, ’it reminds me of the feeling I had when…’, taking us involuntarily into an intangible world of half-recollected emotions, feelings and senses. ‘It’s reminiscent of the time I…’, we might say, shedding a light on a current situation by drawing parallels between present and past. We all love to reminisce: we gain comfort by our efforts to recollect the pleasures of our pasts and to share our memories with friends.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘reminiscence’ as either ‘a story told about a past event remembered by the narrator’ or ‘a characteristic of one thing that is suggestive of another’.