Schumann Lieder Project Advances to Volume 9

courtesy of Naxos of America

Once again is has been a long wait for the Naxos project to record and release all of the songs composed by Robert Schumann to advance to its next album. Those that have been following this project know that the last release took place on February 8, 2019 with an album (the eighth in the series) entitled Spanisches Liederspiel. After another long wait, the ninth volume in the series, finally appeared a little over two weeks ago under the title Romances, Ballads and Melodramas. In all fairness, at least some of this particular long wait may have been due to the impact of COVID-19 on production and distribution processes.

All of the selections are sung by baritone Detlef Roth, accompanied at the piano by Ulrich Eisenlohr. As can be inferred from the title, these are all songs structured around narrative; and, given that the texts are all German, one can assume that, for the most part, those narratives are on the dark side. Surprisingly, none of the texts are drawn from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which tended to be Gustav Mahler’s preference for darkness. Wunderhorn texts appear in the Opus 79 Liederalbum für die Jugend (album of songs for the young), which can be found in Volume 3.

What struck me as particularly interesting In Volume 9 is that the second of the Opus 122 pair of ballads, “Die Flüchtlinge” (the fugitives), is the German translation by Julius Seybt of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Both of the Opus 122 ballads are also not strictly “songs,” since both of them involve expressive narration with piano accompaniment. From a personal point of view, the track on this album that I know best is the very first, “Die beiden Grenadiere” (the two grenadiers), the first of the three songs in Opus 49, which is the second of the Romanzen und Balladen (romances and ballads) books. Back when I lived in Los Angeles, I worked on this with a baritone colleague; and we were both amused by the interjection of “La Marseillaise” towards the conclusion of the song. Heine’s text is an ironic account of two French soldiers that have seen defeat in both Russia and Germany, and Schumann’s motivic insertion just provides another twist of the knife.