“Schumann – All Songs”: Christian Gerhaher’s exciting CD edition – Culture

The lied audience, it is said, is special – namely, the true audience. People who went to recitals were not looking for diversion and entertainment, but truthfulness, inwardness. They were not interested in outward appearances. The audience wanted consolation and was ready, at least for the length of the evening, to let go completely and to completely entrust themselves to the respective protagonists on the podium – a singer, a singer with a pianist. This is how Gerold Huber once put it when he was asked to describe the people for whom he and the baritone Christian Gerhaher have been the “protagonists” for three decades, and to whom one likes to confide, even when listening to the CDs have just appeared, including outside the concert hall.

Probably Huber, Gerhaher’s piano partner, intuitively chose the term protagonist, who is at home in Greek drama, in acting, in film. Singers in the recital are protagonists in the sense of the word, because they drive the many small, self-contained actions of the poems and ballads set to music, which are often dramas in their purest form, through their interpretation, the type of declamation.

Robert Schumann’s lieder, written in the “year of songs” in 1840 and between 1849 and 1852, shows this particularly nicely, because apart from the more well-known song cycles – “Dichterliebe”, “Frauenliebe und Leben”, and also the “Myrthen”, Schumann’s wedding present his bride, the pianist Clara Wieck – this composer has developed the cyclical idea, the conceptual in his song compositions much further than was possible until now.

Until now. That means up to these 627 grams of music that open your eyes and ears to wonderfully interwoven, small works of art. All of Robert Schumann’s songs are as heavy or as light, minus the 231 grams that the booklet weighs. A box with eleven CDs. “Schumann – All Songs” it means 299 are. Eleven hours of music. The recordings were made in collaboration with BR-Klassik. It took a good three years.

For everyone who is interested and curious to immerse themselves in the world of romantic poetry set in tones by Schumann, this box is a gift, a wild, absorbing adventure, and you don’t have to be a connoisseur to experience how incredibly modern Robert Schumann worked. Nothing is left to chance. One thinks of Wes Anderson films with their almost militant attention to detail. Schumann carefully selects the texts, puts them together, and lets them flow into one another. Every song “works” in itself like an individual, and yet it works beyond itself, ties in with the following, recurs on a preceding image, breaks it, confuses it, sends out signals, dissolves, redeems. What doesn’t seem to go together begins to talk to one another. It is as if Schumann had almost sought the incongruity, the superimposition of different levels of meanings, which creates a very specific kind of tension. That is exactly what has captivated Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber about this repertoire for years.

Two die for the emperor, two for love, one renounces for God – all of them little dramas

An example. Opus 49, “Romances and Ballads” from 1840. This mini-cycle is like an insane short film, written by Heinrich Heine and Abraham Emanuel Fröhlich. Two half-dead Napoleon grenadiers drag themselves back to France. Loyal to the imprisoned emperor even after death, they fantasize about how they want to protect their emperor with medals, swords and rifles from the afterlife. Cut. A castle high above the Rhine. Two brothers who let their swords decide who is allowed to lead “Countess Laura” to the altar. They both love this woman, but “no brooding can decide”, and so they fight until one falls “into the other’s steel” – like Eteocles and Polynices. Not a pretty picture. They too fight beyond death – like Napoleon’s two grenadiers. Centuries go by, the castle is in ruins, but at midnight you can still hear the clink of brother’s swords.

Cut. Zoom on a nun. She stands in the garden, watching a wedding. In the face of the bride, who only cools her cheeks from dancing wildly on the glass, she, the bride of Jesus, suddenly recognizes what her life decision will lead to: to bleak pale. “And under the red rose / I pale joyless”. Suddenly there is a woman who compares herself to another woman – and is jealous. In that one moment of encounter, the realization hits her like a sword: I am already buried out here, unlike her in there. And yet it remains open which of the ways is the right one, whether there is any right or wrong at all. Schumann weaves three life plans together here, although at first it seems as if the texts have nothing to do with one another. Die for the emperor. To die for love. Renunciation for God?

“Schumann – Alle Lieder” is full of these little experimental films, for whose listening viewing you don’t have to belong to the “true”, knowing audience. Whoever gets involved in these songs is touched in the moment, which also has to do with the fact that Christian Gerhaher articulates incredibly precisely, which is why you understand every word. This is one of the reasons why he succeeds in making this very direct, simple poetic communication, in realizing the lyrical self. Moments when you hold your breath because the voice hits the heart.

Because of house music! For Christian Gerhaher, Schumann is the first real concept artist

It is logical that he and Gerold Huber are now presenting a complete edition of Schumann’s lieder, because it corresponds to the artistic path they have been following together since their school days in Straubing, Lower Bavaria. Her beginnings – those were recitals with the “Dichterliebe”, with Schubert’s “Winterreise” in front of friends and relatives in the living room of the Gerhaher family. House music atmosphere, into which the German art song in the narrower sense was born in the 19th century. It was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau who, after the war, snatched it from this rather sentimental living room atmosphere, as one can best imagine using the “Schubertiade”, this picture by Moritz von Schwind. Everyone sits or stands around Franz Schubert at the piano, looks very important and very historical and can say: I was there. So not the “real” audience.

Fischer-Dieskau, with his formative voice, succeeded in placing the song in a larger, more intellectual context during the time of great cultural hunger, in making it a concert repertoire. This is how he invented “vocal chamber music”, as Christian Gerhaher once put it. A genre that he and Gerold Huber stand for with their unpretentious, crystalline, never intrusive or emotional presentation. For Christian Gerhaher, Robert Schumann is the composer who “continues to capture him completely from the beginning until today”. A solitaire in his radical search for the right expression, the first real concept artist.

Gerhaher is a Schumannian. Hence the wish to record all the songs, and he sings most of them himself. Julia Kleiter, Sibylla Rubens, Wiebke Lehmkuhl and Martin Mitterrutzner are among others for the women’s songs, duets and trios. The duets and trios in particular have long been regarded as secondary works. “All songs” turns them into discoveries. For example, the “Spanische Liederspiel” Opus 74 – the opera and oratorio shimmer through, the great form -, Schumann as the composer of “Genoveva”, “Das Paradies und die Peri” and the “Faust Scenes” are particularly captivating. /www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.”Schumann – Alle Lieder “is also a part of the preservation of cultural assets. It is high time to bring this wealth of topics, poetry and melody to the ear and the present day.