Sir John Eliot Gardiner about Schumann // 10.02.2012
What drew you to Schumann's choral music in particular? I trace my love of Schumann's larger scale choral music back to the early 1980s when I first came across the score of his magnificent oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri in a secondhand bookshop in Leipzig. Schumann himself held that "the highest expression possible in music comes from chorus and orchestra" – and who are we to argue with that? – and he referred to his Peri as "my greatest work and I hope my best". Premiered in 1843, it did more than any other work to make his international reputation. I was completely smitten by its originality and the range of Schumann's imaginative response to Thomas Moore's exotic and Romantic tale that comes over as something from the Arabian Nights. When we first performed it in 1986 with the ORR and Monteverdi Choir and recorded it for Deutsche Grammophon it made an indelible impression on all the performers, so much so that some of the regular ORR players still refer to it as their favourite among our recordings. But it is still a comparative rarity in the concert hall, though it's encouraging that both Simon Rattle and Daniel Harding have performed the work recently.
Can you tell us more about the works in this programme? While none of these works quite reach the sublime heights of the Peri they are all three distinguished in their way and very appealing. The Nachtlied op. 108 is a haunting miniature – as evocative and Romantic as any Nocturne and with echoes of Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette, whereas the Requiem for Mignon op. 98b despite its title is not in the slightest bit churchy: Schumann sets Goethe's text (from his Wilhelm Meister) as six interrelated movements almost like a miniature opera. It is set in a pillared "Hall of the Past", with alternating utterances for invisible spirits and four boys "in feathered costumes". His brilliant musical adaptation of Byron's dramatic poem Manfred also features a group of spell-casting spirits and Schumann actually ends it with a genuine Latin Requiem intoned by a distant monastic choir high up in the Bernese Alps, suggesting that the hero, despite his noisy defiance of every authoritative power he comes across, is finally redeemed. Besides the great choral moments and wonderful orchestral writing that evokes the Alpine landscape Schumann's incidental music contains a lot of melodrama - signifying instrumental music woven together with a spoken, not a sung, text. Some of it is quite eerie - as in the well-known overture - and you hear a lot of protest, anger, and torment; but I think we need to be careful about seeing this as signs of Schumann's incipient mental disorders.
You will be working with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra for the first time. Are you looking forward to the collaboration? Does it excite you to team the Monteverdi with other ensembles? I have heard great things about the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and I am really looking forward to working with them for the first time. Yes, of course it's a pleasure when as a guest conductor the invitation is extended to the Monteverdi Choir to participate because of its international standing. That's recently been the case with the LSO with our pre-Christmas tour of Beethoven 9 (and caused much mutual admiration and delight in working together) though it actually goes back a long way - to the time when we performed and recorded Stravinsky's Rake's Progress and Symphony of Psalms in the 1990s, and to other collaborations with the Vienna Philharmonic (Lehár and Bruckner), the Philharmonia (Britten and Holst) and the Orchestre National de France (Duruflé, and later this year, Berlioz's Requiem). These encounters and collaborations are tremendously stimulating and I'm sure this Schumann project with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra will be no exception. The only sad thing is that we won't be performing the programme at home in London – so do come to Ferrara (7th February), Tenerife (10th February),Las Palmas(11th February),Barcelona (13th February) orMadrid(15th February).
