261. Near the End

The Concert - Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Works by Schumann performed by Miriam Fried, violin and Jonathan Biss, piano on January 15, 2017.

• Schumann, Robert: Sonata No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 121
• Schumann, Robert: Gesange der Fruhe, Op. 133

For many years, musicologists and music-lovers have tried to understand what it was that led to Robert Schumann’s troubling symptoms and ultimate death at age 46 in a psychiatric hospital. And for years, writers dismissed many of his later works as the incoherent products of a mind in decline.

But, more recently, many have come to appreciate Schumann’s later works—two of which we’ll hear on this podcast: his second violin sonata, in D minor, and “Gesänge der Frühe,” or “Songs of Dawn,” a five-movement work for piano—and one of the last pieces Schumann published before admitting himself to the psychiatric hospital where he ultimately died.

On this recording, we’ll heard pianist Jonathan Biss in both works. In the sonata, he is joined by violinist Miriam Fried.