293. Robert Schumann - Dichterliebe (1840)

Recording

Title: Schumann Dichterliebe
Performer: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Jorg Demus
Year: 1965
Length: 31 minutes

Review

I must be one of the only persons of my circle of friends who can bear lieder, in fact I kind of love them. The short bursts of song in a way almost prefiguring the pop-single often in what amount to collections of songs prefiguring the concept album.

Other than this though, they can be really beautiful and delicate pieces, for this to work you need to have a great singer behind them. And probably no lieder singer is more accomplished than Fischer-Dieskau. He fills his songs with a lot of emotion which never seems false or mawkish.

So this is a great collection of Schumann songs, some really beautiful pieces here and definitely worth listening. Romanticism at its best can be deeply moving and these songs are often that.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The texts for the 16 songs come from the Lyrisches Intermezzo of Heinrich Heine, composed 1822-1823, published as part of the poet's Das Buch der Lieder. Following the song-cycles of Franz Schubert (Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise), those of Schumann constitute part of the central core of the genre in musical literature.

A selection of the pieces with Dieskau and Horowitz: