The
Romances for oboe, written at the end of that eventful year of 1849, would seem to have been inspired by Schumann’s increasing interest in old legends, which would culminate in his
Choral Ballades (including
Des Sängers Fluch—‘The singer’s curse’), written in the 1850s. There is something distinctly archaic about the narrator’s voice in this first
Romance, while the innocent melody that opens the second suggests the song of an unsullied maiden of yore; as for the third—could that be an ancient nightwatchman whom we hear, calling the town’s soldiers to action, while in the middle section an abandoned sweetheart grieves? Fanciful, perhaps—but then Schumann is occasionally just a touch fanciful …
from notes by Steven Isserlis © 2009
