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Robert and Clara
It wasn’t the events of the relationship between Schumann and his wife that
guided me, but the symbol of the Romantic absolute to which their passion
rose. A passion so strong, so charged with genius and creative gifts, that it
has left particles, invisible traces, down to the present day. As an interpreter,
I reactivate these mysterious (energetic, magnetic?) traces by giving them a
body in which to express themselves.
Schumann’s music showed signs right from the start that it would deal in
emotionalextremes.I’mthinkingofthe
Intermezzi
andthe
Davidsbündlertänze
.
He had the good luck to find his Muse very early on, a stroke of luck not given
to all the great composers. It wouldn’t be true to say that Clara ‘created’ him,
but they met up in the way a lightning conductor attracts lightning. Clara
adopted the form of his dream: she embodied a key element in Robert’s
imaginative universe, which was also steeped in the aspirations of German
Romanticism. It’s no accident that the core of Myrthen, the cycle of ‘floral’
lieder he gave Clara as a wedding present, is ‘Die Lotosblume’, the lotus
flower.
SCHUMANN_LIVE COMPLETE SOLO PIANOWORKS