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DANA CIOCARLIE
Schumann and
Sehnsucht
There are a certain number of words in the German language that defy
translation. And some of those apply to the music of Schumann – which
makes them all the more mysterious. For example, the word Sehnsucht,
which is often translated in a restrictive sense – at least in French – as
‘nostalgia’ or ‘wistful desire’. I view Sehnsucht as a yearning for another,
inaccessible world. The urge that prompts us to go beyond ourselves, an
attempt doomed to failure from the start. If there is an element of nostalgia
in Sehnsucht, it’s the notion of not being able to become what we would like
to be. It’s a longing for an alter ego.
This tension between the two parts of himself in the end split Schumann
completely in two. An existential anguish that is embodied in Eusebius the
gentle dreamer and Florestan the tempestuous firebrand, two personalities
who haunt his music and his ‘humours’ – which I use in the sense of German
Humor, another word contained in this lexicon of untranslatable terms . . .