Stella Doufexis / Daniel Heide / Peter Lodahl / Horenstein Ensemble ROBERT SCHUMANN - CHRISTIAN JOST Dichterliebe

Jointly commissioned by the Konzerthaus Berlin and the Copenhagen Opera Festival, Christian Jost’s reinterpretation of Schumann’s Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love) was first performed in Berlin in October 2017 by the artists who appear on this Deutsche Grammophon world premiere recording: Danish tenor Peter Lodahl and the Konzerthaus Berlin’s own Horenstein Ensemble.

In Jost’s Dichterliebe, the Romantic art song is fused with elements of the composer’s own contemporary style. The solo piano accompaniment is transformed into writing for a nine-piece chamber ensemble and Schumann’s cycle is doubled in length, thanks to the addition of newly-composed instrumental passages that link together the sixteen originally self-contained songs. As Jost explains, these transitions form “a harmonic sea, in which the songs are individual islands woven organically into a larger, newly created composition”.

One of those islands, “Hör ich das Liedchen klingen” (“When I hear the sound of the song”), disrupts the cycle’s initial flow of hope and optimism, emerging as the recomposition’s central meditation on the nature of existence. The song is followed here by the postlude from Schumann’s original score, repositioned and reworked to evoke the “dark longing” of Heine’s text.

“It is very clear that the loved one is lost, crazy, under a spell, and in a totally different sphere,” observes Christian Jost. “And from that point onwards in my piece, the instrumentation is also much more fragmented. The sounds are more fragile, and are played with more fragility.” In an act of great courage he also confronts the fragility of life and the sting of death in “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” (“I wept in my dreams”).

Jost originally came up with the idea of reworking Dichterliebe for his wife to perform. As it turned out, the writing process, charged with the pain of her death in December 2015, raised essential questions about the nature of creativity and the role played by suffering in art.

“There were moments when due to my personal crisis, or the tragic events in my life and the loss of my beloved wife, composing led me to what was preserved in myself,” he observes. “With ‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet’ I wanted to enter, even drill a way into a particular state in myself.” The recycling of part of Schumann’s accompaniment as a rhythmic riff enabled Jost to penetrate the song’s heart. “The violence of this piece is the pain,” he explains. “Even if it is a very personal concern, in the end, the personal life and biography of the composer shouldn’t necessarily be decisive factors when it comes to the quality of a piece. But then again, none of us lives in a vacuum, uninfluenced by things that, existentially, are deeply moving, destructive and totally incomprehensible.”

Jost’s late wife Stella Doufexis recorded Schumann’s Dichterliebe and the Liederkreis op.39, just over a year before her death, and her moving performances appear on this album alongside his recomposition. Both works are more commonly associated with the male voice, and it is fascinating to hear the different expressive nuances brought to the music and to Eichendorff’s poetry by Doufexis. She and Jost worked intensively on both cycles before the recording, and had many a discussion about how to interpret them. “She approached these Lieder as if they were French chansons,” recalls the composer. “Because of that, and because her readings avoid pathos, the songs acquire incredible depth.”