Lisa Batiashvili JOHANNES BRAHMS / CLARA SCHUMANN

Lisa Batiashvili begins by working on the notes on the printed page. It is as pure and simple as that. “I prefer scores that contain as little additional information as possible,” she says. “Ideally, no fingering, no commentaries – I want to work on a new piece myself; it has to grow and eventually to become a part of me.”

For the Georgian violinist, notes are the most perfect language, a language in which emotions, desires and states of mind are revealed, none of which can be expressed in words. Such thoughts take us beyond our historical knowledge of the works’ composers and their lives. “Only when you accept their music as art”, she says, “does it become possible to create a link between the composers and our own day – only then can you fill your own work with thoughts and ideas and associations.”

From a historical point of view, it is, of course, very tempting to speculate about Brahms’s Violin Concerto and Clara Schumann’s Three Romances. What was the relationship between their two composers? Did they use music to express their love for each other? What is beyond doubt is that Brahms and Clara Schumann were close. At least from the time that Robert Schumann was immured in an asylum at Endenich, their contacts grew more intense, and the formal “Sie” that they had previously used when addressing each other gave way to the informal “Du” used to imply greater tenderness between them. But most of their letters were destroyed by mutual consent. “We can only speculate on the details of their relationship,” says Batiashvili, “and perhaps this explains the appeal of the whole affair, namely, that we can only surmise what happened and must use their music to enter their emotional worlds.”

For Batiashvili, who herself combines the demands of a career and a family, Clara Schumann is an altogether exceptional figure in the history of music: “Clara is hard to fathom. On the one hand, she was a modern woman who loved her art and her family – an emancipated artist. On the other hand, I do not think that she was happy. She sacrificed her life to Robert Schumann.”

It makes sense to Batiashvili that Brahms should have been infatuated with Clara, who was 14 years older than he was: “Clara was a consummate artist, a corrective to his work and a self-evident part of the life of Robert Schumann, who was Brahms’s great model and champion.” The fact that Clara was inspired by Brahms is something that the violinist attributes to Brahms’s genius: “Living with Schumann, Clara saw how he struggled to produce every note and found the compositional process a source of torment. And suddenly Brahms came along, a musician for whom composition was terrifyingly straightforward and for whom music was not a struggle but a joy. She must have been fascinated by the facility and ease that she discovered here.”

And Batiashvili naturally feels that Brahms’s Violin Concerto reflects its composer’s emotional state: “First and foremost there is this very long opening movement in which Brahms finds room for so many different ideas and thoughts. The difficulty of interpreting it lies in the fact that this kind of composition follows the German language: every note must be held to its full length and played with a singing tone, nothing can be swept under the table. At the same time it is important to create a single overarching structure and maintain an epic approach to the work, rather than moving step by step from one piece in the mosaic to the next. This movement requires great physical and intellectual effort.” The second movement reveals even more about the composer and his longings: “For me, it is an incredibly impassioned declaration of his love – and the violin seems like a woman’s voice here.”

 (Axel Brüggemann)