As with so many other composers, Nikolaus Harnoncourt has found the key to interpreting Schumann's music in a detailed study of the autograph scores, as well as in the composer's letters and other contemporary documents. Simple though this approach may sound, Harnoncourt's method none the less has radical implications for his interpretation of the works in question. Margarete Zander visited Harnoncourt while he was preparing for performances of the Third and Fourth Symphonies and discovered a new Schumann.

Once the layers of dust that have accumulated over the years have been swept away; the works of every genius stand revealed in their most iridescent colours. Particularly exciting in this respect is the rediscovery of the l84l version of the Fourth Symphony (chronologically speaking, Schumann's second completed symphony). Its first performance passed largely unnoticed, overshadowed as it was by other works and by the joint presence on the concert platform of Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann, with the result that no publisher could be found to take on a work that failed to attract any further interest. It was in order to carve a niche for the symphony in the concert hall that Schumann set about revising it ten years later.
Clara Schumann declined to include the first version in her husband's official work-list, refusing to be swayed even hy the advocacy of so eloquent a champion as Johannes Brahms, who wrote to her: “Far more valuable to me is my ownership of the first version of the D minor Symphony. Everyone who sees it agrees with me that the score has not gained by being revised and that it has undoubtedly lost much of its charm, lightness of touch and clarity of expression."Harnoncourt is fond of quoting these lines and, like Brahms, regards the two symphonies as independent works. In his view the first version is particularly well suited to a chamber orchestra such as the Chamber Orchestra of Europe: “The first version differs frorn the second in its chamber-like style, its sirnpler, more transparent instrumentation and its more spontaneous ternpi.” The second version (which Brahms described as "over-dressed") is differently instrumented, has newly written bridge passages and is notable for its doublings in the wind department.
Harnoncourt is currently more fascinated, however, by the first version of what Schumann himself described as a "one-movement symphony”: "At the moment of composition each idea is entirely original. At the time when Schumann was writing this symphony - and he wrote very quickly - he lived and breathed the ideas involved, ideas inseparable from his biorhythms and from his spontaneous feelings at that time. It was evidently at the desire of his friends or perhaps merely at the desire of his wife, Clara, that he took out the work again ten years later and revised it. The spontaneity and idea were no longer there: what we have instead are composed motives which, as far as Schumann was concerned, already belonged to the past. He had to approach these things from without. its a revision of his own work, so to speak. This says nothing about the quality: I find the second version no less wonderful than the first, but it's essentially a different work, precisely because Schumann approached the symphony from the outside. He altered a lot of details that he certainly didn't want to be any different the first time round, since he'd lived and breathed every bar of the piece, as you can hear. The first version is that of the inventor at the moment of invention."
Harnoncourt studied a synoptic edition of the two symphonies that had formerly been owned by Brahms, a study that deepened his awareness of the differences between the two versions. Schumann's many corrections and deletions, especially when writing out the Fourth Symphony, made it difficult to decipher the autograph score. On completing this task, Harnoncourt remarked: "I`ve tried to distil something like a first version from the autograph, which is full of corrections. Whether it’s really the first version, as Schumann wanted, one can't of course say - but we've not played a single note that isn’t in the full score of the first version."
Harnoncourt is convinced that “Schumann wrote with tremendous speed and intensity. He began by sketching on two staves, since he simply couldn't write as fast as he was thinking. In other words, he wanted to capture as many of his ideas as possible and create an architectural structure - a single arching paragraph - over the work as a whole, before sitting down in peace and quiet and elaborating the sketch in the form of a full score. The speed is amazing." Harnoncourt describes Schumann's instrumentation as “uniqne’: “Schumann was a born orchestral composer, perfect instrumentation came easily to him. Almost all other composers have had to struggle to find the right choice of instruments and have composed at the piano. Schumann did this to perfection on the basis of instinct, talent and his own innate abilities. Far too often the opposite has been claimed."
These observations concerning the creative process and Schumann's instrumentation have revolutionary repercussions. For a long time musicologists and critics have cast doubt on Schumamn's abilities, as listed by Harnoncourt: the composer's genius was lost in a mass of musicological rules, whose criteria could not do justice to Schumann's works. Harnoncourt gives breathingspace to Schumann's genius.
In the Third Symphony, too, Harnoucourt does not have to transfer the emotional intensity of the fourth (interpolated) movement to the remaining movements. He emphasizes the flowing, ländler-like rhythms, the harmonic writing in the inner parts, the spirited finale and the piece’s much-discussed Rhenish character. From its lively first subject to its folksong-like finale, the Third Symphony contains biographical features. In 1850 Schumann had taken up a new appointment as director of music in Düsseldorf, an appointment that seemed to fill him with hope and optimism.
In the course of his rehearsals with the orchestra, Harnoncourt paints a vivid picture of Schumann’s new surroundings and tells the players about the Rheinland and its people. He describes the atmosphere of a great celebration in Cologne Cathedral. The fourth movement, which turns the work into a five-movement symphony, is said to have been written with the memory of the archbishop's recent elevation to the College of Cardinal's still fresh in Schumann's mind and is distinctively majestic in tone.
Listeners to the present CD will perhaps be struck by the unusual seating arrangement of the orchestra. Harnoncourt was anxious to reproduce the sort of seating arrangement that was usual in Schumann's day, although it was also important that the players should feel comfortable.
Harnoncourt has nothing but admiration for Schumann's genius. In answer to the question whether Schumann - who initially could not decide whether to become a writer or a composer - had in fact become a composer-poet, Harnoncourt replies: "If we’re going to make comparisons with a different form of expression from music, I'd be inclined to speak in Schumann's case of painting rather than language."