There have been few, if any, complete recordings of Myrthen; at any rate none is at present available. Considered uneven in quality, singers have usually preferred to pick and choose the plums from it. The youthful Stutzmann steps in where others have feared to tread. With her instinctive understanding of the intimate drama of Lieder she gives to this highly diverse collection the benefit of her keen diction and natural musicality. Her tone is dark and very individual, a really old-fashioned contralto, and none the worse for that. She uses it to great advantage in the settings, in translation, of Burns, Moore and Byron, which are among the more neglected of the set. She thoroughly enjoys herself in unerringly projecting the sturdy vigour of Burns's extrovert verse and the charm of the two Venetian songs. She also does well by the declamation of the Goethe setting, ''Talismane'', and by the reticent emotions of ''Lied der Suleika''.
There are drawbacks to having such a low, rich voice. ''Der Nussbaum'', favoured by so many recitalists, really calls for a lighter sound, an airier style, than Stutzmann provides; it is also a shade too artful here. Two other favourites, possibly the greatest songs in the group, ''Die Lotosblume'' and ''Du bist wie eine Blume'', somehow just miss the mark, mainly I think because neither Stutzmann nor Dalberto, who is so admirable elsewhere, quite catches their mood of eloquent Innigkeit. Perhaps they are just a little awed by the heap of noted interpretations of the past, most recently Schreier and Eschenbach on their Schumann collection on Teldec ((CD) 2292-46154-2, 6/91).
Perhaps the most rewarding interpretations here are the settings of the poems attributed to Mary Queen of Scots. Here Stutzmann's grave utterance seems wholly appropriate and she catches perfectly the moving quality of the texts and Schumann's close identification with them. The recording has bags of presence and the balance between voice and piano is excellent.'