Listeners expecting Nikolaus Harnoncourt to court publicity with headline-grabbing revelations about Schumann as a symphonist may well be disappointed. Shortly before conducting the composer's First and Second Symphonies at the 1995 Styriarte Festival, he confided in a journalist: "Even now I still suffer from the fact that each time a player strikes his timpani with his wooden sticks, there are people who immediately think that it's the result of extensive research on my part, whereas they take absolutely no notice of all the things that I've spent literally hours working on." As with other composers, Harnoncourt discovered the key to interpreting Schumann by studying the autograph scores. No less important a source were letters and other documents by the composer and his contemporaries. But Harnoncourt is not interested in interpreting Schumann's music as though it were a series of diary entries or a private atmospheric portrait. His principal point of reference remains the actual score. "Of course, I try to convey the contents of a piece in such a way that it gets under the listener's skin." But Harnoncourt is keen not to confuse "contents" with "programme", even if titles like "Spring Symphony" and "Rhenish Symphony" - to say nothing of Schumann's sensitive soul - have often misled writers into interpreting these works from an autobiographical standpoint and treating them as examples of programme music. Ronny Dietrich observed the conductor at work.

Even today there is a persistent belief that although Schumann wrote brilliantly for the piano, he showed no particular instrumentational skills in his orchestral works. Extensive retouchings in his scores are felt to bear this out. Nikolaus Harnoncourt believes exactly the opposite, arguing that Schumann must have "thought in terms of orchestral sonorities" right from the outset, even in his piano pieces, which “nearly always suggest a piano reduction of an orchestral score". Harnoncourt's recording of Schumann's first two symphonies is designed to demonstrate this thesis, inasmuch as he conducts the scores as written, with no attempt to conceal anything. Instead, he tewals what, for the 19th century, were the novel features of these works, features that are bound to strike 20th-century listeners' ears with equal freshness. Schumann's allegedly weak orchestration emerges as part of a coherent and organic, if unconventional, message that ts placed in the service of the compositional idea.
Schumann's First Symphony in B flat major op. 38 ("Spring Symphony") was sketched in a matter of only four days, a period whose brevity was not only typical of the spontaneity of his invention in general but almost a precondition of the poetic idea that Schumann demanded a work should encompass. In contrast to what might be called the processual nature of the compositional technique underlying Beethoven's symphonies, with their long and laborious genesis, unrfonnity of mood was central to Schumann's symphonic conception. Among the features that guarantee this unity are the thematic links between individual movements. In the ctne of the B flat major Symphony it is the initial motif on horns and trumpets whose melodic and rhythmic potential is explored in the later movements. Rhythmically, this motif is based on the metre of the final line of a poem by one of Schumann’s contemporaries, Adolf Böttger, "Im Tale zieht der Frühling auf" (Spring marches into the valley), a poem that is believed to have inspired Schumann to write the work and to have given it its sobriquet. And yet, its subtitle notwithstanding, the "Spring Symphony" is anything but an example of programme music: "I wrote the symphony at the end of the winter of 1841 [23-26 January 1841]," Schumann informed Louis Spohr in a letter of 23 November 1842. “It was inspired, if I may say so, by the spirit of spring which seems to possess us all anew every year irrespective of age. The music is not intended to describe or paint anything definite, but I believe the season did much to shape the particular form it took." In order to preempt all possible misundeistandings, Schumann deleted the movement headings in the autograph score shortly before the symphony went to press: "Spring's Awakening / Evening / Merry Playmates / Mid-Spring." Conversely, it seems legitimate to regard spring as synonymous with new departures, not least because, in his letter to Spohr; Schumann refers specifically to the significance of the time at which the work was written in September 1840, after endless struggles, he had finally surmounted the last remaining obstacle that stood in the way of his marriage to Clara Wieck. And whereas his creative abilities had threatened for a time to desert him as a result of the ugly scenes with Clara’s father, the new year brought with it a new-found interest in the symphony as a genre This sense of a new departure is rendered explicit in the present recording not only by its daring directness and often insanely encircling figures in the symphony's outer movements but also by a dramaturgical approach to tempo relationships that reflects its cyclical structure. Harnoncourt refuses, for example, to allow the Larghetto to degenerate into a Largo and, by distinguishing between the precisely differentiated allegro markings, gives ample scope to points of contemplative repose - the symphony`s overriding sense of brio notwithstanding.
The Second Symphony in C major op. 61 was sketched five years later - again within the space of only a few days. “I wrote the symphony in December 1845, when I was still ill; I feel that people are bound to notice this when they hear the work,” Schumann wrote to the Hamburg director of music, Georg Dietrich Otten. "Only in the final movement did I begin to feel my old self again, but it was only after I had completed the whole work that I really felt any better. Otherwise, as I say, it reminds me of a black period. The fact that such strains of anguish can none the less arouse interest is clear to me from your sympathetic comments. Everything you say about it shows me how well you know this music." The "black period” to which Schumann refers here was 1844, a time of severe depression and panic attacks. The composer suffered a total physical and mental breakdown that made composition almost impossible. Not until 1845 did he begin to recover and use the time to study Bach's works in detail. One of the fruits of this period of intense interest in the Thomaskantor’s music was his Second Symphony. Both in his First Symphony and in the preliminary version of his Fourth Symphony in D minor of 1841, Schumann had already found away forward in his approach to the symphony as a genre. Concerned as he was to uphold existing traditions and adapt them to his own ends, he could now fall back on his great predecessors, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, without forfeiting his own sense of identity, and even went so far as to include recognisable musical quotations: in the third movement of the Second Symphony (an Adagio espressivo) we hear the opening phrase of the Trio Sonata from Bach's Musical Offering, while the final movement contains a line - “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder” - from Beethoven's song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte, that had already been quoted in the composer's Phantasie in C maior op. 17 (with its explicit dedication to his wife, Clara) and in the final movement of his String Quartet op. 41 no. 2. (In the case of the present movement, the quotation is heard after the development section, with its three culminatory Generalpausen.) Characteristic of the Second Symphony, as it was of the First, is the gradual unfolding of a poetic idea first heard in the brass in the introduction to the opening movement. A triadic figure, it expresses what Schumann, in a conversation recorded by Joseph von Wasielewski, described as "the resistance of the spirit, a sense of resistance which exerted a visible influence here and through which I sought to counter my state of mind at that time. The first movement is full of this sense of struggle and is very capricious and refractory in character."