Hyperion Records

In May 1849 in Dresden there was a resurgence of the revolutionary activity which had disrupted German life in 1848. The 1849 uprisings were less general and were the result of incitements by visionary intellectuals, enthusiastic students, radical politicians, and professional revolutionaries. Schumann, if he had more of an outgoing personality and had he not been tempered by Clara and a sense of family responsibility, might have been of their number, but in truth, like a great many liberal artists, he was little more than an armchair revolutionary. Wagner was much more actively involved in the struggle and was forced to flee Dresden where he was conductor at the opera house. To avoid Robert’s forceful enrolment in the street-guard the Schumanns left Dresden and took refuge in the country. The composer’s behaviour was typically indecisive, and he allowed the pregnant Clara to return alone to the besieged town to rescue their younger children abandoned in the initial flight. Prussian troops, loyal to princely authority, had little difficulty in defeating petty bourgeois democracy. By the summer of 1849 the revolution, which had begun a year earlier amid such extravagant expectations, was completely crushed. Schumann’s reaction to this was to return to the past and bury himself in literature. 1849 was the year of Goethe’s centenary and it was the year when Schumann seems to have re-discovered this poet. It is true that he had set four Goethe poems from the Westöstlicher Divan in 1840 as part of the Myrthen, his wedding present to Clara. But his real work on this poet came from his later years culminating in his remarkable Szenen aus Goethes Faust (1844–53), a large work for many soloists, chorus and orchestra. If Faust was a long-term preoccupation, 1849 was the year when Schumann composed nine settings from Wilhelm Meister, including all the lyrics of Mignon, Philine and the Harper (including Der Sänger). These songs for voice and piano were published as Op 98a. Linked with this was Requiem für Mignon (Op 98b) for choir, soloists and orchestra with words taken from Book 8 Chapter 8 of Wilhelm Meister which describes the funeral rites of Mignon; the antiphons of ‘Chorus’ and ‘Boys’ (‘dressed in silver and blue, fanning with sheaves of ostrich feathers a figure that lay on top of the sarcophogus’) show Goethe’s unconventional alternative to a Christian burial.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1996