Editorial

We are pleased to present you Volume 4 of the Schumann Journal, now even more extensive than its predecessors. The go-ahead for the publication of a separate Schumann Journal was given in 2011 thanks to the support of the then German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, when the project management of the Schumann Network, in existence since 2005, was able to start working, along with the new Schumann Forum, on the first Schumann Journal which was then presented as Volume 1 in the spring of 2012. The Schumann Journal has an international orientation, taking into consideration Schumann activities worldwide, and is therefore largely bilingual – in German and English. Our target group is primarily not a musicological specialist audience but artists, Schumann lovers and other interested non-professionals who are meant to be well and competently informed and be stimulated at the same time.

In Volume 4, with nearly 320 pages, you will find, along with a public interview conducted by Robert Aschemeier with the young Italian pianist Ottavia Maria Maceratini on the eve of the anniversary of Robert Schumann’s birth, another interview with the great conductor Bernard Haitink, whom the project management of the Schumann Network welcomed at the same time as a new member of the Schumann Forum, the Board of Artists of the Schumann Network, held by Erich Singer, on Haitink’s relationship and access to Robert Schumann, kindly left for publication to the Schumann Journal by both interlocutors. The interview was conducted by Erich Singer in Lucerne at the end of April 2014, during the “interval” between Haitink’s first and very successful Schumann concert at the LUCERNE FESTIVAL at Easter and a number of other forthcoming evenings of Haitink’s new Schumann Lucerne Cycle in the summer of 2014.

Professor Willnauer, the acknowledged Mahler expert, discusses Gustav Mahler’s nearly lifelong preoccupation with Robert Schumann’s work, at least with regard to the former’s life as an artist. Franz Willnauer describes Mahler’s relationship to Schumann in a both knowledgeable and instructive manner under the title “Bewunderung, Aneignung und Missverständnis [Admiration, adoption and misunderstanding]”.
As always, we present you an ample selection of the latest publications of the last year, many of them featuring detailed reviews and summaries in English, with 2014 bringing an astounding wealth of remarkable CD recordings and also sheet music editions and books, including, of course, new publications of the Complete Schumann Edition and the Schumann Letter Edition. A special article by Rainer Aschemeier is dedicated to the great number of recordings of Schumann’s symphonies presented which experienced a real boom in 2013/14: “Verwirrende Vielfalt [Bewildering variety]”.
Looking back and forward, we would like to draw your attention to some particular events relating to Robert and Clara Schumann or to artists of the Schumann Forum in the past and the current year.
Individual pages are dedicated, as always, to the artists belonging to the Schumann Forum which was newly established in 2011 and whose numbers we have, fortunately, been able to increase year after year.
Last but not least, the members and partners of the Schumann Network together with their contact details are, of course, listed also.

As always, we wish you much pleasure in reading the Schumann Journal.

Best wishes, Yours

Ingrid Bodsch & Irmgard Knechtges-Obrecht