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But back to Schumann: fifteen concerts and a summit to be conquered,
pitfalls to be avoided, a long inner journey. And a corpus of scores in which
it’s easy to go astray, so devoid are they of classical rules to hang on to. But
as you progress, you realise that they shed light on each other. That there
exists a body of hidden, encoded relationships that you have to decipher like
a detective. I tracked down the clues, drew the threads together, followed
first one lead, then another, losing the notion of time in the exhilaration
of my discoveries. The aim was to grasp the organic matter, the vibration,
those voices that run all through his œuvre. And, in the end, to attain the
Schumannesque state of trance. You can only get there at the price of a
titanic amount of work. You can’t tackle this music as the fancy takes you.
Singing his music was one thing that helped me to understand Schumann.
Another great difficulty lay in energy management. I was working without
a safety net. I couldn’t allow myself to get tired. Yet two months before the
concerts I was hardly sleeping any more, I was working frenetically. There’s a
very athletic aspect to this recording project, because of the extreme nature
of Schumann’s writing. I had the feeling I was taking part in the Olympic
Games every six months. But from a certain point in my work onwards, I
no longer felt physical fatigue. Recording live imposes a disciplined routine.
I needed that framework, that energy. The audience carried me along with
them, gave me élan, momentum, vitality. I don’t have the temperament of
someone like Glenn Gould, who entered a studio as if it were a laboratory. I
needed to accumulate everything and let it all go at once.
58 SCHUMANN_LIVE COMPLETE SOLO PIANOWORKS