Rededicated to Schumann

Robert Schumann serves, in music history, as the model of the early Romantic--dreamy, poetic, melancholic, impulsive, obsessive, besotted by love and a bit dotty. He split his personality and imagined himself as protagonist in some sprawling Romantic novel by Jean Paul or E.T.A. Hoffmann. Manic-depressive, he was restive, heroic Florestan one minute, ruminating Eusebius the next; it is with these character names that he sometimes signed his music, depending upon its mood.

Fascinated and haunted by madness from adolescence, Schumann actually ended up more than just a bit dotty. In 1854, a day after attempting to drown himself in the Rhine, he entered an asylum, and there, two years later, at age 46, he died in a delirium, his nervous system apparently destroyed by syphilis.

Schumann’s is a story much told. He kept diaries. He was a literary composer and used text and poetic allusion to expose, in his music, the state of his soul, and his infatuation with pianist Clara Wieck and the difficulty of marrying her over her father’s objections.

We also think we know his music well; audiences appreciate his lyric gift above all. Hardly a season goes by without a performance of his piano or cello concerto, a symphony or two, piano and chamber pieces. The list of recordings is long, and there are always new ones.

But the current crop of new Schumann CDs, along with the publication last year of John Daverio’s beautifully written and surprisingly relevant “Robert Schumann: Herald of a ‘New Poetic Age’ ” (Oxford), indicates that we may know Schumann less well than we think, and we certainly appreciate him less than we might.

The new recordings concentrate on the better-known Schumann--two performances of “Kreisleriana,” the solo piano suite; three of “Dichterliebe,” the song cycle to texts by the sour Romantic German poet Heinrich Heine and an integral set of the four symphonies. That alone indicates something about how much we really know of Schumann. Take a look at a work list. It is extensive, and much of it is music seldom heard in concert. The late music, in particular, is neglected, the notion that it is the product of a deranged mind still tenaciously grips concert presenters and performers. It’s a notion carefully refuted by Daverio.

The big dramatic pieces are also rarely performed. Have you ever encountered a production of Schumann’s opera “Genoveva”? I haven’t. Just about as uncommon are performances of the two big choral works, “Scenes From Goethe’s ‘Faust’ ” and “Das Paradies und die Peri.” Claudio Abbado’s excellent recording of the “Faust” came out a couple of years ago on Sony, but last year Deutsche Grammophon felt certain that we Americans wouldn’t be interested in Giuseppe Sinopoli’s gripping account of the magical oratorio about the fairy spirit or “Peri,” and it offered the set only in Europe and Japan.

The three new recordings of “Dichterliebe,” 16 songs about a poet pining for love, might seem less likely to produce revelation. This is very characteristic Schumann, the Schumann separated from and impatient to wed his Clara, the Schumann who is lustful, needy and insecure. The cycle includes, in fact, some of the composer’s most admired songs, and they have been recorded time and time again.

Yet these new recordings by tenor Ian Bostridge and baritones Thomas Hampson and Matthias Goerne are among the best in the catalog, which is, by itself, remarkable given that lieder singing is said to be a dying art with little audience. Hampson’s version on EMI is especially noteworthy because it is the first recording of an earlier edition of the cycle, with four additional songs, and it has the conductor, Wolfgang Sawallisch, as pianist. Goerne’s recording on London introduces a finished, highly communicative young singer who has been attracting attention in both opera and song lately, and he is paired with another distinguished accompanist, Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Bostridge’s recording, on EMI, stands out for another reason--it is unlike any other performance of Schumann’s songs. Bostridge is a downright eerie singer. He is an authority on witchcraft, and on the CD cover he looks otherworldly. He so cast a spell during a New York recital last season that one reviewer felt the singer had literally disappeared, leaving only the music behind, and suggested listening to this new recording only once, since the experience is too extraordinary to be repeatable.

My reaction to this disc is precisely the opposite. Bostridge’s voice--thin, pure, elegant--is not quite corporeal, but I am vividly aware of the tenor’s strange presence every second, even during the piano interludes, with Julian Drake’s appropriately ghostly accompaniment. For me, hearing this CD just once proved impossible; instead, I’ve had to play it over and over again compulsively, it’s so incredible.

Every word of text stands out meaningfully. Bostridge does not seem to need to make the drama of the songs overt, as Hampson’s powerful singing does. Nor does his have the cultivated quality of Goerne’s direct and radiant performance. But Bostridge sounds utterly possessed by the music and the poetry’s Romanticism. If there is such a thing as supernatural singing, of Schumann in the realm of “Twin Peaks,” this is it.

That Hampson and Goerne are more conventional than Bostridge does not, however, take away from their excellent accounts of the songs. Moreover, the earlier version of “Dichterliebe” that Hampson has uncovered, simply called “20 Songs,” is an interesting curiosity--more moonstruck, more vivid--although it hardly displaces the composer’s final polishing. All three recordings also include the shorter Heine cycle “Liederkreis.”

Schumann’s four symphonies don’t particularly need champions. Conductors no longer feel the need to freshen Schumann’s orchestrations the way Mahler and George Szell once did. Daverio’s cogent analyses of the symphonies undoes any lingering view in the music schools that Schumann had a weak sense of large-scale forms. Yet John Eliot Gardiner feels that there is still missionary work to be done, and he does manage to make the symphonies sound remarkably novel on his three-CD Deutsche Grammophon set.

Conducting his period-instrument Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, Gardiner emphasizes Beethovenian contrasts; he acutely brings out the composer’s mood swings; he intensifies the richness of orchestral colors; and he drives the symphonies with tremendous brilliance.

Gardiner, like Hampson, is impressed with the immediacy of Schumann’s first thoughts, and he presents the original version of the Fourth Symphony along with the revised one commonly performed. The symphony began as a more revolutionary work, rougher and less unified than in its best-known form. There is more shock value to the vivid harmonies and thinner textures the first time around, but, as with “Dichterliebe,” the final revisions make for richer and ultimately more satisfying results. Gardiner, though, makes both versions convincing. He is an invigorating Schumann conductor, and the excitement never wanes throughout the entire set.

The two new recordings of “Kreisleriana,” the eight character pieces that clearly delineate Schumann’s dual-sided personality, are by Murray Perahia on Sony and Andras Schiff on Teldec. Perahia plays with clarity and precision; the details are illuminating; the pianism, technically spectacular. But it is Schiff, more raucous and more personal, who accepts Schumann’s poetic challenge.

“Kreisleriana” is a piece that has been much recorded in the last 30 years, after Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz put out their competing renditions in the late ‘60s. But I don’t know of any performance bolder than Schiff’s. His disc is also attractive for its inclusion of some lesser-known works, including the eerie “Songs of Spring,” written shortly before Schumann’s death. Perahia opts for the sprawling First Sonata.

With this disc, in fact, Schiff has stepped out to the front rank of Schumann interpreters. And, with the likes of Schiff, Bostridge and Gardiner, we seem to be headed for a fuller appreciation of the composer.