A spectacular play dedicated to a spectacular
man.
"Schumann's music goes beyond the ear, it penetrates
into muscles by the pounds of its own beat, breaking further
into human organs; by the lavish rapture of his melodies,
as if each time music was composed for a single soul."
Rolan Barthes
Project “Schumann” is a music and drama reconstruction
of the last hours of composer Robert Schumann, which he spent
in Endenich, an asylum for mental patients, and of his last
meeting with his wife, a pianist Klara Schumann.
Their meeting is in order to evoke Robert's love for Klara,
his greatest and probably the only inspiration for his
piano opus, and reveal his inner world...
The mental illness of Robert Schumann is only an outer
symbol of his tragedy. Nightmares, dreams, visions, and identification
with literature fantasies becoming his only reality.
Robert is torn between painful demonic hallucinations,
wearing his life out, and his craving for Klara, who appears
in front of him as an illusion, reviving his poetic intimate
world of sounds through the interpretation of his unique
piano music.
Schumann, a composer with a lonely and caged soul that
talks to itself, has more than any other composer embellished
the profoundness, contradictions, and tensions of the Romantic
time spirit.
In his introspective subjectivity lies the reason for which
he confided his deepest emotions, his deepest individuality,
and the blood of his soul to the piano.
The piano is in his room in the Endenich asylum and he
keeps trying to play it, without success.
The last meeting with Klara is at the same time the final
moment of his life.
Music is the only thing left.
The text is composed like a fiction but fully relies on
biographic data, music essays, literature influences,
and private correspondence between Klara and Robert Schumann.
The atmosphere of this music drama is inspired by the literature
of German Romantic writer E. T. Hoffmann, who had a strong
influence on the work of Robert Schumann.
As is case with Hoffmann, Schumann’s music vibrates with
something supernatural, extraordinary and unreal.
The authors used music and drama to disclose sources, motives,
and the basic inspiration and thereby provide the audience
with a new and different sensation of Schumann’s music.
Goran Susljik
"Schumann - a poet of sound."
Franz Liszt
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