We would like to invite you to celebrate the two-hundredth birthday of Robert Schumann. Presiding over the festivities will be Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, whose great tradition goes back to Schumann’s own time.

Robert Schumann is the most popular and yet most enigmatic of the Romantics. His music encourages children taking piano lessons (as in “Fröhlicher Landmann”) but also causes connoisseurs in the concert hall to brood—as, for example, when listening to his mysterious late works. Schumann was born 200 years ago, on June 8, 1810, in the Saxon city of Zwickau, the son of a bookseller. No-one in the history of music is as familiar with and connected to his art as the musicians of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, which is devoting its LUCERNE FESTIVAL concerts to this great anniversary: This is first-hand Schumann.

And for the occasion, Riccardo Chailly, who became the 19th music director of the Gewandhaus in 2005 and heads this tradition-rich orchestra, has planned something special. He will conduct the players in special editions of the Second and Fourth Symphonies prepared by Gustav Mahler when he conducted his own interpretations of the Schumann cycle. Part of the interpretative history of these works will thus come to life once more, making for a double birthday salute—as 2010 marks the 150th anniversary of Mahler as well. 

The musicians from Leipzig will of course also play Schumann in the original. On August 29, Frank Peter Zimmermann performs the seldom-heard Violin Concerto, which had to wait 85 years after its composition to receive its first performance; and on August 30 the Cello Concerto will be interpreted by Enrico Dindo, whose playing the great Mstislav Rostropovich once compared to “a wonderfully flowing Italian voice.” The idea that even Schumann’s early piano works were basically already conceived as orchestral in dimension will be put to the test when Chailly conducts a transcription by Danish composer Karl Aage Rasmussen, who has prepared an orchestrated version of the cycle “Papillons.”

And if you’d like to hear still more Schumann this summer, we have additional tips: Why not try the famous song cycle “Dichterliebe,” as sung by Thomas Quasthoff on August 18? Or the Piano Concerto, which our “artiste étoile” Hélène Grimaud will perform on September 8?