Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 07/08/2015, uploaded on 04/09/2016

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

After six years of struggle with Friedrich Wieck, Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck finally married in 1840. Recharged by this blissfulness, Schumann experienced one of the most creative periods of his artistic life, and in one year alone he composed more than 120 songs. The song cycle Myrthen, a set of 26, is the wedding gift from the composer to his new bride, and “Widmung”, with the text written by lyricist Friedrich Rückert, is the first of this very intimate and personal song cycle. “You are my soul, my heart; both my joy and sadness. You are the world in which I live; my heaven, in which I float, O you are my grave, into which I eternally cast my grief. You are my rest, my peace. You are the heaven upon me bestowed. That you love me makes me worthy of you; your gaze transfigures me; you raised me lovingly above myself, my good spirit, my better self.” A contemporary of Schumann, Franz Liszt made 14 piano transcriptions of Schumann’s lieder; “Widmung” remains the most concertized composition for pianists today.     Notes by Ling-Ju Lai

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.