Schumann never quite trusted himself in large forms, and the larger musical world has never quite trusted him in them either. The choral works of his final years — the Missa Sacra in c minor, op. 147, the Scenes from Faust, the later part songs — tend to get bundled under that convenient critical rubric, “the shadow of mental illness,” which functions more as an excuse not to listen carefully than as actual analysis. Convenient, and mostly wrong.
What Geoffroy Jourdain and his Les Cris de Paris forces reveal on this new recording is something simpler and more startling: the Missa Sacra is a genuinely alive piece, and it has been waiting patiently for someone to treat it that way.
The Sawallisch disc from 1987 — with Bavarian Radio, for EMI, still surfacing occasionally in budget reissues — set the template for how this music tends to get performed: broad, massive, reverberant, the chorus pushed back into a kind of institutional distance. Sawallisch was a superb performer, and nobody conducted the German choral tradition with more natural authority. But there is a real difference between authority and weight, and in the Missa Sacra he chose weight. The opening of the Gloria in that recording sounds like an official occasion. Here it bubbles — that is not too light a word — with something almost impulsive, forward-moving, as though the singers are discovering the music’s momentum rather than executing a predetermined architecture.
Jourdain uses smaller forces, and the acoustic he has chosen suits them perfectly: close enough to give the sound warmth and presence, spacious enough that the choral textures breathe. This matters enormously in Schumann, whose choral writing, whatever its detractors say, is rarely primitive — it is, more precisely, dense, and it requires air.
The Sanctus stops you cold. There is a quality of rapt attention in the way Jourdain shapes those opening bars — hushed, inward, not in the least churchy — that feels almost private, like eavesdropping on someone’s actual devotion rather than watching a liturgical reading. Schumann was not, by temperament, a church composer. He was a romantic ironist who happened also to be, in his best moments, a profound one. The Missa Sacra was completed in 1852, when the mental deterioration that would lead to his attempted suicide in the Rhine two years later was already quietly underway. You can hear, if you listen for it, something both fervent and unguarded in the writing — not the stability of Brahms’s sacred music, nothing like the architectonic serenity of the B Minor Mass, but something rawer and stranger. The solo bass trombone that emerges briefly in the fifth movement recalls the Berlioz Requiem, which Schumann is likely to have encountered during Berlioz’s German tours of the late 1840s. Whether the resemblance is deliberate or unconscious hardly matters; what matters is that Jourdain’s players honor the passage’s peculiar, almost hallucinatory coloring.
Soloists. The three singers here — soprano Amandine Trenc, mezzo Marianne Crebassa, tenor Cyrille Dubois — are not the names Sawallisch had at his disposal. But names are not voices, and voices are what the music needs. Crebassa sings the offertorium Tota pulchra es — the piece Schumann added for the published version, originally with organ — with a warmth that the soprano timbre of Sawallisch’s Mitsuko Shirai, lovely as Shirai always was, doesn’t quite reach. The part sits low, never climbing above an F, and Crebassa finds in that constraint something genuinely romantic, genuinely felt.
The four part songs for double chorus, op. 141, complete the program. They are rarely performed, rarely recorded, and they are exactly the kind of music that gets dismissed as “late Schumann” with a knowing sigh. Listen to them here without prejudice. The writing for two independent choral bodies has a spatial imagination that anticipates things Brahms would do — and a harmonic restlessness that is unmistakably Schumann’s alone.
None of this displaces the Sawallisch as a historical document. But as an argument for what this music can be, and perhaps always was, the Jourdain recording is not merely competitive — it is revelatory. Strongly recommended.
