Respire #4 – Schumann, Beethoven

Schumann’s hypersensitive song cycle sets all layers of Heinrich Heine’s poetry to music with a fascinating virtuosity: the complexity concealed by the simple surface, the emotional world of Romanticism and Heine’s renowned irony. The cycle that covers the birth of romantic love, its peak and finally its tragic end, which is expressed by a grand-scale funeral march, is sung by Attila Erdős, the young baritone of the Hungarian State Opera and Péter Nagy, professor of the Liszt Academy and Musikhochschule Stuttgart. Beethoven’s voluminous chamber music composition, String Quartet in C major, written in his so-called „heroic” period is a just as weighty piece as Schumann’s song cycle. Beethoven dedicated this quartet, No 3 of op. 59, to Count Razumovsky. The piece was composed at the same time as Symphony No.5, and it therefore oozes similar energies, if it is interpreted by the excellent Kelemen–Rowland–Kokas–Bogdanovic quartet.