Composer Robert Schumann frequently felt that the music of Felix Mendelssohn is filled with what Schumann envied as “ease” or “facility”. Schumann’s String Quartet no.1 in E flat major was written in the late summer of 1829, when the composer was not yet 20. There is a kind of cross-fertilization between the attention to detail and fresh approach taken by the Schumann Quartet and the modernity of the almost youthful Mendelssohn; the result is featured in the amazing joy of music-making in the fourth movement. Schumann and Mendelssohn provide the framework into which Aribert Reimann then sets “his” Schumann tribute.
Reimann is one of today’s most successful composers and is linked to the composer of the Romantic era born in Zwickau, Saxony, by more than music. He is in fact a direct descendant of the physician who treated Schumann at the psychiatric hospital in Endenich and has therefore had access to the patient file detailing the precarious balance of Schumann’s emotional state. His attitude to Schumann is therefore a reflection of those impressions. The ‘Adagio zum Gedenken an Robert Schumann’ (Adagio to the memory of Robert Schumann) based on two unfinished chorales without words was composed as a result of intensive and personal cooperation between the performing quartet and Reimann.
In Reimann’s arrangement of the 6 Gesänge op.107, the ensemble succeeds in fulfilling Schumann’s wish for an “additional, fully-formed accompanying instrument”. Reimann’s skill in handling the original brings out the fine features and nuances of the lyrics. The quartet and the singer complement each other so effortlessly that the unusual combination sounds like a quintet that has been working together for many years.
Here is the Schumann Quartet, performing the Quartet number 6 by Mendelssohn:
