Robert Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe, Op. 48 (1840), is widely considered the composer’s most celebrated cycle of Lieder and, along with Franz Schubert’s marginally earlier cycles Die Schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1828), constitutes part of the central core of the genre in musical literature. Based on German poet Heinrich Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo, a 65-poems spanning collection first published in 1823, Dichterliebe in a way even represents the epitome of romantic poetry set to music. Both Heine and Schumann were progressive spirits who bent genres and rewrote the rules of their crafts. Therefore, it only seems appropriate that the Estonian pianist Kristjan Randalu, a forward-thinking mind in today’s contemporary music world, would do his part in bending genres by tackling this song cycle and updating its structure and vocabulary with the language of the 21st Century.
