William Sharp, baritone
Kenneth Slowik, fortepiano

This recording of Schumann’s two most famous “canonical” song cycles would seem at first to pair disparate entities. The “Eichendorff” Liederkreis, op. 39, comes from the long tradition of “Wanderer” cycles documenting a young man’s adventures in the wide world, whereas Dichterliebe, op. 48, takes as its artistic conceit the stages of a failed love affair. Yet both groupings, composed in direct chronological succession to one another, touch at common points on many levels. For one thing, Schumann served as the literary creator of both collections, choosing and ordering the poems himself to fashion their sequence of events. For another, both song cycles had a relatively long and somewhat arduous compositional genesis, each undergoing a substantial revision before it took the shape we know today. And finally, both collections make persistent use of irony to achieve their artistic effect at all levels: within the individual poems themselves, in the juxtaposition of those poems, and then in the interaction of text, melody, and piano writing that reveals Schumann as a master of the Lied.