Loving Schumann

Loving Schumann is Éric Le Sage’s programme about love, loss and creative kinship, centred on a theme Robert Schumann attributed to Clara Wieck. It begins with Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9, and Clara Schumann’s own Op. 20, written for Robert’s birthday in 1853 on a theme from his Bunte Blätter. As Nicolas Derny’s liner essay traces, Clara’s cycle uses anxious triplets, harmonic unease and a darker key to convey the emotional insecurity of the moment, with only the conclusion hinting at light. Brahms, newly arrived in the Schumanns’ lives in September 1853, began his own set after hearing Clara play hers in May 1854 and finished it by mid-June. The loving homage is heard against the shadow of Robert’s confinement at Endenich.

Around them are Fauré’s Thème et variations, Op. 73 (1896), a Schumann-like study in C-sharp minor dedicated to the pianist and singer Thérèse Roger, and a group of Schumann transcriptions. These are Saint-Saëns’s Abendlied, Godowsky’s Du bist wie eine Blume, and Reinecke’s Von dem Rosenbusch, o Mutter. The set ends with the Andantino of the Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 14, “Concerto without orchestra,” whose theme Schumann attributed to Clara Wieck and which seems to mourn the story of their love. Recorded at the Grand Manège Concert Hall in Namur, the album sits between the Romantic and the French.

Éric Le Sage, piano