Brett Dean
“Conversations with Schumann” Brett Dean “Conversations with Schumann”

A former member of the Berliner Philharmoniker and an active violist, Brett Dean makes a point of engaging as a composer with music from the established repertoire. Robert and Clara Schumann are part of his creative orbit. In his ensemble piece Recollections, a Romance by Clara Schumann is inlaid like an intarsia, and the Violin Concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing plays with quotations from Johannes Brahms and from the Schumanns.

His new work Conversations with Schumann takes Robert Schumann’s self-created identities Florestan and Eusebius, which expressed his bipolar psychological state, as a starting point. As he himself wrote to Clara: “Florestan the wild, / Eusebius the mild, / Tears and flames / Take them together / In me both / Pain and joy.” The “wild” and the “mild” appear in Dean’s third movement, “Wild child, mild child”, which draws on motifs from Schumann’s Fantasiestücke Op. 12, and the Davidsbündlertänze Op. 6. Schumann’s “Vogel als Prophet” from Waldszenen Op. 82, can be heard in the first movement, always embedded within Dean’s personal, distinctive commentary. The second movement, dedicated to the choreographer Jiří Kylián, creates an ethereal bridge. The final movement is a sonically sensitive transcription from Schumann’s late, austere Sechs Gesänge Op. 107: the fate of Ophelia, Hamlet’s beloved who sings as she drowns herself, darkly foreshadows Schumann’s own attempted suicide in the Rhine.