Schumann Lieder Project Advances to Volume 8

courtesy of Naxos of America

In 2003 Naxos began a major project to record and release all of the songs composed by Robert Schumann. By the summer of 2013, the project had released seven volumes, each consisting of a single CD. After that, the project seemed to go into hibernation, at least until the beginning of this month. On February 8 Naxos released the eighth volume in the series under the title Spanisches Liederspiel.

The primary text source for the songs on this album is the Spanisches Liederbuch, a collection of Spanish popular poetry translated into German by Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse. Schumann selected translations by Geibel for two song cycles, both of which were published in 1849. The Spanisches Liederspiel is his Opus 74, consisting of nine of Geibel’s translations with a piano intermezzo between the the first two songs. This was followed, in the same year, by the Opus 138 Spanische Liebeslieder, a collection of solo songs, duets, and quartets, all preceded by an instrumental prelude. Accompaniment is provided by a piano duet.

There is little in Schumann’s style that suggests that the sources of the texts he is using are Spanish. However, this hardly detracts from the appeal of the music itself. This is particularly the case when he is writing for more than one voice in a rich style that may well have influenced subsequent efforts by Johannes Brahms to write for multiple voices. On this recording those voices are provided by soprano Anna Palimina, contralto Marion Eckstein, tenor Simon Bode, and bass-baritone Matthias Hoffman, none of whom participated in any of the earlier volumes in the series. The same can be said of pianists Ulrich Eisenlohr and Stefan Irmer, who joins him for the duet work required by Opus 138.

If all the performers are new, there is still one way in which this new release ties up a loose end, so to speak. The first three tracks of the album are the fifth, seventh, and eighth songs from the Opus 101 Minnespiel, consisting of four solo songs, two duets, and two quartets. The other five songs from Opus 101 had been released in June of 2005 as part of the second volume of the series. That means that it took over a decade for my personal obsession with completeness to be assuaged. As a result, I found it both comforting and engaging to close off this collection, even if all of the performers were new to me. I just hope that the wait for the ninth volume in the series will not be so long!