This long-neglected fairy folk-tale of self-sacrificing mother-love was first rescued by Chandos four years ago in an engagingly fresh and flowing ‘present-day’ performance from Denmark. Opus 111 then responded with a period-style version based on the autograph score used for the official public premiere in Dusseldorf in 1852. Now along comes Harmonia Mundi with a reminder of how the work was heard for the very first time – in the Schumanns’ own Dusseldorf home, from a small ‘singing-circle’ of friends accompanied by piano alone.
All three are more than welcome, not least because they’re undertaken with such patent love and care. But even though Schumann himself initially thought a solo piano sufficient support for so naively unassuming a subject, it soon becomes clear how immeasurably his subsequent orchestration enhances atmospheric evocation, whether with elves, foresters or angels, or with more personal expressions of grief or joy (for example, the sombre brass in the gravedigger’s scene towards the end of Part 1, or assuaging strings in later contexts of love).
That said, this keyboard version is by no means only of musicological interest. The rose herself, so briefly granted happiness in longed-for human guise, is sung with beguiling vocal purity and expressive vulnerability by Christiane Oelze without ever deceiving us as to her true operatic potential (she is Glyndebourne’s present Melisande). The tenor, Werner Gura (doubling the all-important role of narrator with that of the gamekeeper’s son loved by the rose), is also outstanding for hypersensitive response to verbal inflexion dissolved into so liquid a line. Nor are there disappointments in supporting roles, or the swift-changing transmogrifications of the chorus.
Despite some loss of textural transparency in Opus 111’s church acoustic, the recording quality is readily acceptable in all three versions. Each in its own way enhances respect for this endearing little work. But I must again remind prospective purchasers that Opus 111 also includes Schumann’s practically unknown late choral Nachtlied, Op. 108, which, brief as it is, surely ranks among this composer’s most visionary masterpieces.'