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Audiophile Audition

It becomes obvious from pianist Burkard Schliessmann’s extensive liner notes and the nature of his selections that he regards Robert Schumann as a major Romantic figure; but more, Schumann emerges as a visionary, inspired purveyor of a literary-musical nexus that embraces a huge fund of cultural invention. Schliessmann addresses the mystical element in Schumann’s idiosyncratic synthesis of music and literature, which in a manner indebted to Schubert and Beethoven, explores aspects of Nature, mortality, and love, moving freely and passionately in decisive gestures. Without invoking the names of poets Coleridge and Poe, nor the contemporary musician Berlioz, Schliessmann raises the deliberate ambiguities, harmonic and structural, in Schumann’s oeuvre that invoke the darker hues of imaginative expression.  The lure of the irrational, which Schliessmann cites in Nerval, Lamb, and Hölderlin, finds parallels in Poe’s “imp of the perverse” and in Coleridge’s “esemplastic” notion of the Imagination, capable of the same, infinite varieties of creation attributed to God. Schliessmann’s realizations of the Schumann scores, therefore, bear the agogic and polyphonic textures that invoke menace and uncertainty, even while an otherwise placid surface presents itself, as in the familiar Arabeske in C. Like his contemporaries Liszt and Chopin, and the later Wagner, Schumann will dwell in sudden ecstasies of emotion, heavenly and infernal, as his volatile, often Manichéan, temperament permits. 

The allure of what might be termed “divine madness” begins with Schumann’s eight-section Op. 16 Kreisleriana of 1838, based on his reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann.The opening flourish, doubtless a series of whirling violin figures to invoke the devilry in Kreisler or that of Paganini, invokes what Schliessmann conceives as “twilight” gestures meant to realize a moral miasma. Recall the “disastrous twilight” Milton employs in his early depiction of the fallen Lucifer. The contradictions Schumann embraces involve an objective series centered in B-flat and the extreme, abstract subjectivity or innigkeit, of self-aggrandizement, the basis of most of Scriabin. Already in the Intermezzo appear those sudden rushes of emotion that threaten dissolution, except for their polyphony, which exert a yearning for comprehension. 

For Schumann, time and space have become measurements of longing. To combat merciless Time, Schumann resorts to Märchen, martial impulses that are the stuff of legend, a mode essential to the Schumann sensibility, especially, Schliessmann’s purposes, in the Op. 17 Fantasie. “In the style of a Legend,” the latter part of the Fantasie’s first movement, provokes us to ask, what or whose legend? The answer must lie in the assertion of selfhood, so we look beyond Florestan both to Wagner and Nietzsche, thinkers who posit the mythos of one’s own being. How else to combat the cold, grievous canter of the death-ride of Kreisleriana’s final section, reminiscent of those Medieval woodcuts that no less inspired the second movement of the Mahler G Major Symphony?  Fantasie in C, in which the secret of the cosmos, of universal harmony, is distilled into a single tone, understood by a receptive, enlightened soul. Dedicated to Liszt and conceived in the shadow of Beethoven, the work alternates huge gestures and tiny, even playful, personal mottos and musical anagrams. The later “Tristan chord” having been subsumed into the mix, the music urges the nexus of love and death, given Schumann’s grievous passion for Clara Wieck. The second movement rages at first, percussive in the manner of Beethoven’s Op. 101 A Major Sonata, the syncopations in martial array an assertion of personal power. The last movement Schliessmann takes at a deliberately slow tempo, paying debts to another sonata quasi fantasia in Beethoven’s “Moonlight.” But how much of the opening sequence belongs to Schubert! The great lyric composer perpetually celebrates and laments the sense of loss, and Schumann’s emergent melody resonates as a sustained hymn in the Schubert mode. The intensity and passion only increase, virtually collapsing into a sustained, then subdued, orison. 

Schliessmann steps back in time for Schumann’s 1837 suite after E.T.A. Hoffmann, the eight Fantasiestücke, Op. 12. The programmatic titles offer an opportunity to commune with Schumann on the metaphorical level, since the composer appeals to Nature and the Cosmos for solace and justification. “Des Abends,” which Schliessmann performs twice, presents a drooping, seductive melodic line, captured immortally for my taste by Benno Moiseiwitsch and no less sensitive here in Schliessmann’s rendering. A more strident, hard patina emerges in “Aufschung,” as well it might, as the line soars in a gesture of (Florestan’s) assertiveness. “Warum?” asks an existential question in dialogue, the answer to which may lie in Beethoven’s “It must be!” from Op. 135. A moment of relative mirth in “Grillen” enjoys a songful secondary subject that soon gallops in fairy-tale narrative. But the ensuing “In der Nacht” counters with what suffices as Schumann’s most vehement, Lisztian foray, a rival to many of the more somber Chopin études. The swirling tropes, akin to Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom,” find a more agreeable tenor in the penultimate “Traumes Wirren,” a suggestion of Romantic, imaginative intoxication, immortalized in blazing speed by Horowitz, but here rendered in a more staid, controlled ecstasy. “Fabel” begs the question of whose myth evolves before us, and Nietzsche would claim the legend of the defined self. The piece opens quizzically but gathers syncopated speed and confidence, a sense of play, of the “glass bead game,” to paraphrase Hesse. A feeling of farewell opens the finale, Ende vom Lied, at first a stolid march but transforming its cadential tread into a hearty affirmation of conviction in the power of the enchantment of the poetic will. 

Schliessmann performs the familiar Arabeske in C of 1839 in two versions, the second a mite brisker than the first. A rondo with two minor key episodes, the piece embodies what I like to call Schumann’s “nostalgia for the dream” of idyllic bliss. That reverie is not without its dark hues and moments of meandering introspection. The recording from Berlin’s Teldex Studios, utilizing the Dolby Atmos process, has done Schliessmann’s keyboard good service.

The innate morbidity in Schumann’s soul informs his 1839 set of Vier Nachtstücke Op. 23, somber testimony to E.T.A. Hoffmann and to the death of a beloved brother, Eduard. A kind of ineluctable tread permeates the first number, followed by a feeling of contrapuntal rebellion in the second. The heroic impulse defines the third, although its syncopes and middle section betray unease. The last of the set proves the most overtly funereal, exerting a kind of kinship with John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” Schliessmann delivers a forceful tour of these disturbed visions, not so poetic as that of Emil Gilels but eminently thoughtful. 

The triptych of 1851, Drei Fantasiestücke Op. 111, has had few acolytes, but among them Grant Johannesen and Shura Cherkassky. Clara Schumann called the three pieces “grave and passionate,” and Schliessmann accords them a solemn dignity. The designation Attacca unites the three mood pieces in terms of flux and melodic fluidity. The middle piece appears as an oasis in the midst of a broil traceable both to Shakespeare via E.T.A. Hoffmann and, possibly, to Schumann’s admiration for the Beethoven Op. 111Sonata in C Minor.  The last chord of this third, impressive fantasy-march, resonates long after the double bar. 

Schliessmann concludes his grand tour of the Schumann ethos with the 1854 Gesänge der Frühe Op. 133, literally “Songs Before Morning.” These are five pieces, of which the third in A major forms a kind of crux or fulcrum, and all betray the manic urge to cyclicism that occupies Schumann’s late style, exemplified in the concertos for cello and violin. The thick textures for the keyboard, often in the four-part counterpoint of Bach and Handel, adds an antique dimension to the affekt. Valedictory bell tones infiltrate the last of the set, countered by lovely, liquid riffs. Come, sweet death – “Komm, süßerTod, komm selge Ruh” – isn’t that the most universal of all composers, J.S. Bach? 

Highly recommended, both to read and to audition.