Robert Schumann
Works for Oboe and Piano

Robert Schumann, let's admit it, was mad.

He saw angels, heard voices. He was delirious. He had tried to end his life by drowning in a river. Yet it hadn't always been like that. There had been serenity in his life. Love. Passion in composing.

"La mattina alle quattro, l'estate,
il sonno d'amore dura ancora.
Sotto i boschetti svapora
l'odore della sera festeggiata"

Schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder. It's not easy to determine what Schumann truly suffered from. And perhaps knowing isn't even important. It only serves to understand his suffering. His suffering as a man. The inexpressible pain of a great musician, prisoner of his madness and entangled in the quicksands of his art. An illuminated madman in his writing by the contrapuntal rigor of Bach and the teachings of late Beethoven.

"I dreamed of crusades, voyages of which there is no record, republics without history, stifled religious wars, revolutions of customs, shifts of races and continents"

But perhaps there's no trace of Schumann's madness yet, in these splendid, measured, "Works for Oboe and Piano". Or perhaps just a glimmer. A trace. The germ of something that cannot be expressed. And that then finds expression in silence, in escape, in composure, even. In contemplation.

"At first, it was an investigation. I wrote silences, nights, I noted the inexpressible, fixed vertigos"

There it is, the inexpressible, in the "Three Romances op. 94". The touch of melancholy without a reason. The frowning gaze of an angry child tearing primroses, in silence. That's the feeling conveyed by the first romance, which bears the indication "Nicht schnell" - not fast.

"I grew accustomed to simple hallucination: I frankly saw a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drummer boys held by angels, carriages in the sky's streets"

This is a performance by Heinz Holliger and Alfred Brendel, suspended between the dreamy lyricism of the Swiss oboist and the academic rigor and artistic "good sense" of the great Austrian pianist. It's as if the two soloists balance each other, in a delicate balance of opposites, acrobats on the enormous precipice this music marks in silence, like an abyss of the soul.

"I had to travel, distract the spells crowding my brain. On the sea, which I loved as though it had to cleanse me of some filth, I saw the comforting cross rise"

And it is the second romance, "Einfach, innig", certainly the most moving piece on this record. A sweet, childlike, lulling, dreamy theme, incredibly difficult in its apparent simplicity. And there is a point where one clearly hears Holliger's breath, inhaling air spasmodically, at the end of a too-long passage, in a legato, like a true artistic apnea, a sort of trance demanded by this music. Music that "asks", even physically, of the soloist. In an ever dense and elastic musical dynamic, expressed in rubatos, crescendos, sudden tempo changes.

"The wolf howled among the leaves
spitting out the graceful feathers
of his poultry feast:
like him I waste away"

But there are also clear, luminous pages on this record. Like the cuddly calm of "Abendlied op. 85 no.12", where, over a carpet of piano chords, the heartfelt and vibrant voice of Holliger's oboe emerges aerial, assured, and celestial, almost "to the last breath".

Or the exceptional virtuosity of "Adagio and Allegro in A-flat op. 70", where the technical capability of the oboe is pushed to the extreme, in high registers that leap among whirlwinds of semiquavers swirling like wind eddies. Or the rough vigor of "5 Pieces in Popular Style op. 102", with their simple and dance-like themes, secure and a bit self-contained, like peasants at the end of a workday.

But it is especially in the "Fantasiestücke op. 73" that Schumann's art rises and sublimates in a sacred fire of the soul. Three pieces in succession, each faster than the last, in a continuous crescendo of tensions and conflicts, not just musical. And it is strange to hear the version present on this record, with the remote and nasal timbre of the oboe d'amore, the Baroque ancestor of the modern oboe, instead of the clarinet with which this work is usually performed.

"Rasch und mit feuer", like "fast with fire", is the indication for the third piece of op. 73. A fire that burns without consuming, like a fire of love, always searching for that quiet and that belonging which is, deep within us, the true, tranquil happiness.

"O seasons, o castles!
Which soul is without error?

I conducted the magical investigation
of happiness, none evade it.

May everyone salute it, each time
the Celtic rooster crows"

 

[Arthur Rimbaud is the author of all the quotations in this review]