For most listeners Schumann's only opera is still a relatively unknown quantity, but lovers of his music will celebrate a work that's intimate, thought-provoking and melodious.
The libretto (by Schumann himself, after Tieck and Hebbel) deals with secret passion and suspected adultery, while the music mirrors emotional turmoil with great subtlety, and sometimes with astonishing imagination. Copious foretastes are provided in the familiar overture, and thereafter, discoveries abound. Sample, for example, the jagged counter- motif that shudders as Genoveva's husband Siegfried entreats Golo (his own alter ego) to guard his wife while he's away at war; or the offstage forces representing drunken servants; or the almost expressionist writing at 4'00" into track-10, where Golo responds with seething hatred to Genoveva's vengeance. The entreaties of Drago's ghost (track-4, 6'10") aren't too far removed from Siegmund's 'Nothung!' in Act-1 of Die Walküre, and Genoveva's singing from 'a desolate, rocky place' (track-5, first minute or so), sounds prophetic of Isolde (who was as yet unborn, so to speak). Harnoncourt suspects that Genoveva was a 'counterblast' to Wagner, and though Wagner apparently thought the opera 'bizarre', there remains a vague suspicion of sneaking regard, even a smidgen of influence.
Teldec's balancing is mostly judicious, and the musical direction suggestive of burning conviction.
The worthy though relatively conventional Gerd Albrecht (in Orfeo's mellow 1992 recording) only serves to underline the leaner, more inflected and more urgently voiced profile of Harnoncourt's interpretation. As to the two sets of singers, most preferences rest with the latter's line-up. Stage effects are well handled; the sum effect is of a top-drawer Schumann set within an unexpected structural context.