Pietro Rigacci plays Robert Schumann

“Chopin is an artist, Schumann is a poet” – states André Gide in his Notes sur Chopin published in 1939. At first Gide planned to write an essay on both musicians, but then realized that his interest in Robert Schumann had much weakened and that he had little more to say about him. In the same essay he wrote: “I don’t need the filter of literature or painting to appreciate music and I worry little about the meaning of a piece. The meaning restrains it and troubles me. And it is exactly for this reason that notwithstanding the glamorous adaptations of Schumann, Schubert and Fauré. I am mostly fond of a music without words or that, at most, has the pretext of a liturgical mysticism.” In these words it is possible to find the key to the singular opposition artist vs poet through which Gide expressed the opposition between the two musicians.

Schumann’s personality is, in fact, a very complex one and clearly separated between the two poles of music and literature, which he tried to reconcile with a firm gesture of deep and absolute devotion. Schumann’s clear words contrast with Gide’s ambiguous distinctions: “The musician must necessarily be a poet, since the aesthetic of an art is that of the others, only the materials are different”. So, according to Schumann, maybe more than for any other Romantic composer, the composer is included in the circle of those who aim at the confluence of the arts in a whole unique to realize the reward of creativity, so that he doesn’t hesitate to state: “From Jean Paul Richter I learned more about counterpoint than from my master of composition”.

Pietro Rigacci – piano