Heinz Holliger, Clara Schumann, Christoph Richter, Dénes Várjon, SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR

This album is built around one year, 1853, when the young Johannes Brahms first visited Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf and Robert was close to his final collapse. It sets Clara's Drei Romanzen Op. 22 beside two works by the Swiss composer Heinz Holliger (born 1939), both drawn from Robert's music of that year. The result is a concept album about Romantic fragility, madness and loss, heard through the ears of a modern composer.

Cellist Christoph Richter and pianist Dénes Várjon recorded the Romances and Romancendres in February 2008 at the Auditorio Radio Svizzera in Lugano, produced by Manfred Eicher. Gesänge der Frühe comes from a Südwestrundfunk production made in July 2007 at the Stadthalle Sindelfingen. Holliger conducts the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart and the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR, and plays piano on the tape part. The recorded voices include the actor Bruno Ganz as Robert Schumann. Roman Brotbeck wrote the booklet essay.

Clara's Romances, written for violin and piano, are heard here in a version for cello. Romancendres (2003) answers the romances for cello and piano that Robert wrote in 1853, which Clara burned decades later for fear they would harm his reputation. Only a description by Joseph Joachim survives. Holliger takes that account as his starting point, framing the piece with two funeral marches, Kondukt I and Kondukt II, and using muted and plucked piano strings and other extended techniques. Gesänge der Frühe (1987), for choir, orchestra and tape, borrows the title of Schumann's last piano cycle. It sets late poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, another poet lost to mental illness, and lays over them spoken documents from the period of Schumann's death, including the autopsy report.

In The Guardian Andrew Clements called Gesänge der Frühe "an immensely powerful, multilayered work, full of dense orchestral writing and highly wrought climaxes." Catherine Nelson of The Strad (2009) found Richter and Várjon "adept at capturing Holliger's neurotic sound world" and described the melodies of Romancendres as "gossamer and fine-textured as ashes". Dominy Clements, writing for MusicWeb International in 2009, judged the choral work one of those pieces "which you just have to experience, rather than describe."

CD edition, ECM New Series 2055, first released in May 2009.