Schumann: Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, Op. 135 (Mary Stuart Lieder)

The larger-than-life Régine Crespin, made only one song recital record for Decca, of music by Schumann, Wolf, Debussy and Poulenc. This is the first time the entire recital has been made available on CD.

As her career progressed, Crespin became associated with certain roles – Kundry, Sieglinde, Brünnhilde, Tosca, the Marschallin – but she was prodigiously versatile, thanks to her years in the French provinces. An intelligent singer who understood how to make the texts count, Crespin also had tremendous success in non-operatic repertory. Her 1963 Decca recording, with conductor Ernest Ansermet, of Berlioz’s Les Nuits d'été and Ravel’s Shéhérazade, is regarded as among the best available. In its original French, her candid and entertaining autobiography is called La vie et l'amour d'une femme, which is also the French translation of Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben. Indeed, Lieder by Schumann and Wolf were important parts of her recital repertory, and she brought the same depth of meaning to their German texts as she did to her Wagnerian roles. Of course French, being her native language, evoked a most immediate and intimate response from this singer.

This release marks the launch of an Eloquence series of notable recitals of songs and opera arias by some of the great voices of Decca and Deutsche Grammophon.

“I would like to sing myself to death like a nightingale”, wrote Schumann in 1840, revealing a sudden passion for the lied, a genre he had hitherto disdained. Written in 1852 in a period of intense nervous suffering, the cycle of Poems of Queen Mary Stuart stands out for its austerity and exceptional concentration of resources; it might be seen as Schumann’s testament.

"it's hard to think of a more consistently pleasing example of this voice category recording today" International Record Review, February 2009

Robert Schumann was a romantic par excellence. His life was nomadic, with longed-for fulfilment always elusively out of reach. For Schumann life, love and creative energy rolled themselves together in an unfolding drama, causing together with his long struggle with syphilis – moments of euphoria amidst constant anxiety and self-doubt. His wife and longest love Clara Wieck, though today a ‘moon in eclipse’, was during their lifetimes very much the celebrity of the pair. The three song cycles in this recital reveal Schumann’s deep sensitivity both to poetry heightened as sung melody, and to the piano, supplying its non-verbal accompaniment. It has always been a delicate balance for any composer: maintaining a piano party that is never banal or formulaic, yet not overwhelming. Schumann’s song-writing supports the voice, or more importantly the poetic gesture, with the native virtuosity of Carnaval or the Dävidsbundlertänze, but turned into the most exquisite commentary beneath the vocal line

Women in love, in pain and in emotional turmoil – such is the subject matter of most of the songs that Swedish soprano Miah Persson and pianist Joseph Breinl have chosen for this recital of works by Robert and Clara Schumann.

The year of Robert and Clara’s wedding is often called Schumann’s Liederjahr; during this ‘year of song’ he composed more than 150 songs, and his wedding gift to Clara was in fact a song cycle, Myrthen, Op. 25. Sixteen songs dated 1840 can be found here, including the Frauenliebe und Leben cycle, the crowning achievement of the year.

But Robert also encouraged Clara to write songs and in 1841 they jointly published a collection entitled The Spring of Love. Clara had composed three of the songs (the 3 Lieder, Op. 12) and Robert the remaining nine, including Der Himmel hat eine Träne geweint

This disc also features Robert’s final song cycle – composed in 1852 and focussing on the life and tragic end of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots – along with four of Clara’s last songs.

As well as being well-known in opera houses across the world, Miah Persson is increasingly in demand as a recitalist, performing regularly with Joseph Breinl.

The British mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, twice nominated for a Grammy, here performs a collection of songs by Robert Schumann, which combines two song cycles from the extremely prolific song year 1840 with several songs from the composer’s last years. She is accompanied by Eugene Asti.

Sarah Connolly fell in love with Schumann’s songs in her youth. She has sung them since her early days as a performer and in the booklet she and Eugene Asti write, ‘at the heart of Schumann’s music on this recording lie a profound melancholy and a personal and completely honest, open-hearted empathy for the poetry, which is totally disarming. All the stories and situations depicted in these songs were so much a part of the composer’s own life experience that we just cannot help but be touched and moved by them. Perhaps it is for these reasons that our love for Schumann is especially great, and we feel privileged to be able to share this extraordinary music with you’.

It is often claimed that Schumann’s late songs, which include the first seven on this CD, show a composer in decline – a charge that is refuted by such wonderful Lieder as the Wilhelm Meister settings and ‘Nachtlied’ (Goethe), ‘Der Einsiedler’ (Eichendorff), ‘Aufträge’ (L’Egru), ‘Mein schöner Stern!’ (Rückert), ‘Requiem’ (Dreves), the Lenau settings of Op. 90 and the Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, all of which are as fine as anything Schumann wrote in 1840, his great ‘song’ year.

The album’s key work is the rarely recorded Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, songs on five poems attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots. They were his last Lieder and the most austere that Schumann ever wrote. He composed the set in 1852 during a period of deep depression and offered the work as a Christmas present to his wife, Clara. It is also matched here by ‘Requiem’, setting a translation by Leberecht Blücher Dreves of an old sacred Latin text. This requiem, from Op. 90, was one of four that Schumann composed in the last years of his creative life, and it seems likely that the proliferation of such settings around 1850 had symbolic import – ‘requiems, after all, are written for oneself’, as Schumann once confided to a friend.

This fifth disc in the Naxos series of the complete Schumann Lieder features one of the key works of the entire 19th century song repertoire, Frauenliebe und -leben (Awoman’s Love and Life).

Written during the summer of 1840, at a time when Schumann and his wife-to-be Clara Wieck were fighting her father in court over their right to marry, these bitter-sweet, passionate yet intimate settings embody a nineteenth-century patriarchal conception of love and marriage, when a woman was expected to be submissive and deferential.

For all the sexist overtones, however, the sincerity of feeling expressed in these songs is never in doubt and Frauenliebe und -leben continues to number among Schumann’s most popular works.

"Sibylla Rubens [is] an artist of whom more and more should be heard.” MusicWeb International on a previous lieder disc