Schumann returned to the poems of Kerner in his ‘Year of Song’ (1839/40) with his Zwölf Lieder, Op. 35, of which Clara Schumann wrote in her diary: ‘He understands the texts so beautifully, more deeply than any other composer I know; none has his sensitivity’.
This fourth disc in the Naxos series of the complete Schumann Lieder focuses on settings of poems by Justinus Kerner, whose almost folk-song-like lyrics first captured Schumann’s imagination as early as 1828 in the five Jugend-Lieder