Schumann: Requiem, Op. 90 No. 7

‘The value of Schumann’s songs lies chiefly in their spiritual depth, and in this respect they belong with the greatest and most magnificent inexistence; indeed on can say, with regard to the finest of them, that there are few creative works that can be placed quite beside them.’ Franz Brendel

The American baritone Barry McDaniel was one of the outstanding singers of the post-war era. As a successful opera singer and Lieder interpreter, he enjoyed a long and eventful career, both in Germany and abroad. Despite numerous performances and many recordings for radio and television, he nonetheless remained largely unnoticed by the media, partly because his name almost vanished in the shadow of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who was five years his senior. Unjustly so, since the two singers were equals as artists, albeit with different characters. Today, Barry McDaniel is hardly mentioned in specialist literature and one searches in vain for CDs since, until now, recordings from radio archives have not been phonographically processed. However, Audite now presents a première double CD of Lieder sung by Barry McDaniel. These studio recordings from the archives of Radio Berlin-Brandenburg (formally Sender Freies Berlin) were made between 1963 and 1974 with Hertha Klust and Aribert Reimann as accompanists.

This selection of songs by Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Duparc, Ravel and Debussy reveals diverse facets of McDaniel’s artistic personality. His interpretations are characterised by an interleaving of knowledge and naivety, feeling and craftsmanship, expression and impeccable singing. Apart from his immaculate technique, his accent-free German is particularly remarkable.

Barry McDaniel moved from the USA to Germany in 1953 in order to further his studies. He then gave his first song recitals, together with Hermann Reutter, and later began a career as an opera singer. In 1961 he was engaged at the newly re-opened Deutsche Oper Berlin, where he remained for thirty-seven years. At the same time, he gave guest performances at the Vienna Staatsoper, the Metropolitan Opera New York, the Frankfurt Opera and the Munich Opera Festival, as well as broadcasting for radio and television. In addition, Barry McDaniel gave numerous song recitals, for example in Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Hanover, Brunswick and Berlin, including, in the latter city, the first ever song recital at the newly built Philharmonie in 1963. Today, the 81-year-old baritone declares: “Whatever I sing, I have to believe in it.” That is exactly how these recordings sound.

This sixth disc in the Naxos series of the complete Schumann Lieder features the 26 songs of Myrthen (Myrtles), which date from February of that year.

Robert Schumann’s literary interests influenced his choice of the poems he used for his songs, many of which were composed in a burst of activity during the ‘Year of Song’ 1840. Dedicated to his beloved Clara (myrtles were used for bridal wreaths), this album of exquisite songs explores themes of devotion, longing, loneliness, matrimony and maternity. His Six Poems and Requiem of August 1850 set mournful texts by Lenau, concluding with an anonymous Medieval poem ‘Héloïse's lament for Abelard’.

The only piece in this collection originally composed for cello and piano is Op.102. Schumann’s first editions were accompanied by versions for violin or cello and these were just as excellent as the original.

Nathan Berg is already well known to audiences from his many recordings in operas, cantatas, masses and symphonies working with conductors such as Rene Jacob, William Christie and Robert Shaw. He has recorded for Harmonia Mundi, Telarc, Philips and Erato. On Hyperion he has recently appeared with Marjana Lipovsek in Graham Johnson’s complete Schubert series, and with Sophie Daneman in Mendelssohn. For his debut solo disc on ATMA Nathan Berg has selected a programme covering more than a century of romantic German lieder, including some of the best-loved songs of the genre by Schumann, Brahms, Strauss and Schubert.

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.

Schumann’s passionate, hypersensitive nature makes him one of the great romantic German composers. He created a body of work that reveals, according to Gilles Cantagrel, "a world of dusk and twilight where reason topples into madness, of tragic nuptials, of sating yet wretched love affairs, of soul carnivals and noxious dreams and vistas." This inspired pair of artists is totally committed to sharing an offering of Schumann’s “lyrical poetry.”