SCHUMANN: WORKS FOR CELLO & PIANO - Jascha Bernstein, Jorg Demus

schumann CELLO MHS STEREO 3750 liner notes

The three works on this record all date from 1849. At that time Schumann was nearing the end of his “Dresden” period and was about to move to Düsseldorf for the last creative stage in his career. In the way of brief summary, Schumann‘s most productive, and probably also most inspired, years were those spent Leipzig, during the 1830s and early 1840s. He was busy with the newly founded Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a highly respected journal that exists still today. He was also busy writing one piano masterpiece after another—Carnaval, Symphonic Etudes, Kreisleriana, etc--and giving full reign to his highly-charged imagination, especially as personified in those familiar characters, Florestan and Eusebius. 1840 witnessed Schumann‘s marriage and new interest in other forms of musical composition: songs, symphonies (1841), chamber music (1842). By 1844 he had reached a state of nervous exhaustion and gave up editorship of the Journal, leaving Leipzig altogether by end of the year for Dresden. The next years brought such important works as the Piano Concerto, the opera Genoveva, incidental music to Byron’s Manfred, and the start of his Scenes from Goethe’s Faust. After the move to Düsseldorf in 1850 Schumann wrote relatively few major works; these include the Cello Concerto, “Rhenish” Symphony, and A Minor Violin Sonata. (There are many other compositions, some with moments of great beauty, but on the whole not on the level of the earlier masterpieces.)