A fascinating concept album circling around the fragility of artistic sensibilities in German musical and literary romanticism. Two important pieces by Swiss composer Heinz Holliger (born 1939), both of them inspired by Robert Schumann, are combined with a chamber work by Clara Schumann. They all intersect in the year 1853, when 20-year-old Johannes Brahms first visited the Schumann couple in Düsseldorf. The initial piece, Clara’s three wonderfully melodic romances for cello and piano, is followed by Holliger’s imaginative and multi-faceted hommage to Robert’s “Romances” in the same scoring. Much to Brahms’ approbation they were burnt by Clara in 1893 as she feared her late husband’s reputation could suffer if compositions from the onset of his mental illness would be publicised. All that survives is a vivid description by violinist Joseph Joachim. Holliger takes this verbal account as a starting point for a music that subtly meditates upon the double character of love and death, music and silence, romances and cinders. “Gesänge der Frühe” first performed in 1988 is scored for choir, orchestra and tape. Schumann’s last piano work of the same title from 1853 is superimposed in a most visionary way with texts from the late period of Friedrich Hölderlin – another romantic genius who fell prey to mental illness.
Heinz Holliger / Clara Schumann: Romancendres
Christoph Richter, Dénes Várjon, SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR, Heinz Holliger
- Drei Romanzen, op. 22
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- 2II Allegretto02:54
- 3III Leidenschaftlich schnell03:46
- Romancendres
- 4Kondukt I (C.S. - R.S.)02:47
- 5I Aurora (Nachts)05:58
- 6II R(asche)S Flügelschlagen05:21
- 7III "Der Würgengel der Gegenwart"03:06
- 8IV "heiter bewegt" - ("Es wehet ein Schatten darin")02:09
- 9Kondukt II ("Der bleiche Engel der Zukunft")02:02
- Gesänge der Frühe
- 10I Der Frühling - "Die Sonne kehrt zu neuen Freuden wieder"08:29
- 11II An - "Elysium"09:40
- 12III An Diotima - "Schönes Leben!"04:41
- 13IV "Geh unter, schöne Sonne..."05:26
Two years ago, in an interviews with the Zurich Tages-Anzeiger, Holliger confessed that his enthusiasm for Schumann had became “worse and worse”. Even as a teenager he had been moved by the difficult and still partly controversial late works. Later he was enthralled by their structure, their “labyrinthine” quality, which unfolds, he maintained, not in lines but in “spirals”. In his album “Romancendres” (the title combines the French words for 'romance' and 'ashes') the spirals receive a number of aesthetic and biographical twists. It all began in the year 1853, when the 20-year-old Brahms paid his first visit to the Schumanns in Düsseldorf and Robert Schumann was dismissed from his post as director of the city's musical society. As the symptoms of his encroaching madness became increasingly obvious, he finally stopped composing altogether.
Clara Schumann, toward the end of her life, is known to have burnt several of her husband's last works – with the express approval of Brahms. Believing that they were of inferior quality, she feared that they might damage her husband's posthumous reputation. One victim of the flames was the Five Romances for cello and piano, whose existence only became known in greater detail in 1971. Holliger has written a fascinating meditation on these pieces and their fate – an 'interpretative composition' based on revealing descriptions of them left behind in a letter from Joseph Joachim. Holliger's music harbours a variety of hidden allusions and references. The opening dirge, for example, presents Clara Schumann's initials C and S (E-flat in German letter notation). The final figure in the concluding section is formed of notes representing Schumann's place of death, EnDEniCH (E-D-E-C-B).
The “Romancendres” are preceded by Clara's own Three Romances of 1853, performed with diaphanous tone, pliant rhythm and voluptuous abandon by the German cellist Christoph Richter and the Hungarian pianist Dénes Várjon, whose performance of Schumann's late violin sonatas with Carolin Widmann attracted great attention last autumn.
The “Gesänge der Frühe” ('Songs of Dawn'), for chorus, orchestra and pre-recorded tape, was completed in 1987 and alludes in complex ways to Schumann's final piano pieces of the same title. The recording's intellectual radius is further enlarged by the fact that Schumann's pieces were inspired by Hölderlin, a poet much on Holliger's mind at a time when he was deeply engrossed in his Scardanelli Cycle (ECM 1472-73). Holliger described his Gesänge in the aforementioned Tages-Anzeiger interview with Susanne Kübler: “The piece has what might be called a documentary level in that letters from its dedicatee, Bettina von Arnim, are included on the tape along with the autopsy reports on Schumann and Hölderlin. To this I've added an almost hallucinatory music. After all, I don't want to imitate Schumann as a composer; I seek inspiration from his compositional technique, even his cryptograms.” At the end, to the scratching of his quill, Bruno Ganz speaks the portentous words from Schumann's letter to Joseph Joachim: "... I will stop now, it is getting dark."
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