Robert Schumann – Davidsbündlertänze & Intermezzi

Schumann's piano music remains closely linked to the events of his personal life, revealing his questions, hesitations and contradictions. His greatest piano scores date from the years before his marriage to Clara, a prodigious pianist and daughter of Schumann's teacher, Friedrich Wieck. The battles he fought to win Clara were, Schumann said, the main source of the Davidsbündler: more than true dances, these eighteen pieces form a cycle of pieces united by an astonishing freedom of tone, rhythm and form. Schumann called the eighteen pieces in the Davidsbündlertänze ‘opera without text’, written in 1837, like so many breathless answers to the questions he asked himself between his self and his double...