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My first experience of playing Schumann was the
Album für die Jugend
, but it
was around the age of fourteen that I really immersed myself in his world,
with the
Études Symphoniques
, the First Sonata,
Carnaval
and
Kinderszenen
,
among others. I felt in phase with him. Little by little, I realised that his
inner world, his emotional landscape was very familiar to me. It was as if I
were entering a country whose language I already knew. His music seemed
muchmore natural tome than that of Chopin, which I found very classical in
comparison. There’s a perfection in Chopin that doesn’t exist in Schumann.
But Schumann has a momentum that sweeps all before it, a raw sincerity,
an urgency. He jumps from one mood to another without transition, quite
anarchically. I felt in tune with this rugged, capricious aspect of him. His
polyphony can be harsh, difficult to listen to. Schumann, unlike Liszt, is not
a seducer.
When I was a teenager, I travelled to East Germany, to Zwickau in Saxony,
the composer’s home town, to enter the Schumann Competition. It wasn’t
a very hospitable place: it had been devastated during the war, and looked
like a barracks. But Schumann’s soul is still very present. The house where
he was born is still standing, a concert hall bears his name, and there’s a
local fervour for his music. When I got there, I had the feeling I was being
vampirised by Schumann’s presence. I got the impression that I could feel
his physical and psychological illnesses, that I was making his sufferings my
own. Admittedly, I had had to assimilate something like twenty works from
his corpus! He haunted me. I left Zwickau with the Grand Prix.
SCHUMANN_LIVE COMPLETE SOLO PIANOWORKS