Schumann: Dichterliebe, Op. 48 (A Poet's Love)

In Dichterliebe (2000), a film by Oliver Herrmann based on Robert Schumann’s song-cycle of the same name, the boundaries between song recital and reality blur. The chosen setting – a night club in the centre of Berlin – creates the intimate, dark salon atmosphere in which the songs might also have been performed at the time they were written. Returning to origins in this way, the film departs from the concert atmosphere in which song-recitals are normally performed nowadays.

In the film One Night. One Life (1999), based on the cycle Pierrot Lunaire, Arnold Schönberg’s opus 21, director Oliver Herrmann has created a surreal, at times grotesque dream world set in a modern city, through which Pierrot (Christine Schäfer) moves like a spirit. In each new number she passes through different scenes and levels of the world around us: such as an abattoir, a peep-show, a station or a supermarket.