Ruines. Il primo movimento della Fantasie op. 17 di Schumann nelle registrazioni dal 1905 al 1953
Abstract
This article reconstructs the early reception history of Robert Schumann’s Fantasie op. 17 and examines almost the entire body of its known recordings produced up to 1953. The study analyses eleven performances of the first movement, including two reproducing piano rolls: the Welte-Mignon roll recorded by Teresa Carreño in 1905 and an unpublished roll by Ossip Gabrilowitsch, recorded for Hupfeld between 1913 and 1921 and preserved in the collection of the Department of Musicology at the University of Pavia-Cremona. The selected interpretations span several generations of pianists, from early figures such as Carreño, Gabrilowitsch, and Adelina De Lara, to performers born in the late nineteenth century (Backhaus, Fischer, Nat, Mojsejevič), around the turn of the century (Judina, Rehberg, Horowitz), and into the early twentieth century (Richter). Together, these recordings situate the Fantasie firmly within the so-called ‘golden age’ of piano performance and document the vitality of major pianistic traditions associated with Clara Wieck, Franz Liszt, and Theodor Leszetycki. The analyses demonstrate a pronounced degree of interpretative individuality across all performances, reflecting the work’s fantastical and passionate nature, while alternately privileging its dreamlike or energetic dimensions. More broadly, the study provides new evidence supporting recent scholarship on historical recordings and performance practice, confirming that a recognisably “modern” approach to pianistic interpretation only crystallised around the mid-twentieth century.
Prior to this shift, Romantic and late-Romantic performers consistently pursued expressive freedom, frequently diverging from the written score in ways that cannot be fully reconstructed from treatises and pedagogical sources alone. Expressive devices such as dislocation, arpeggiation, and various forms of tempo rubato remained central to pianistic practice, even when explicitly discouraged in contemporary theoretical literature. Only in the 1950s did a modernist aesthetic decisively prevail, characterised by stricter synchronisation of voices, increased textual fidelity, and a more regularised conception of tempo.
