The centerpiece of this album is not a performance of
Robert Schumann's song cycle Dichterliebe as such, but a new set of English texts by poet Elizabeth Kirschner, fitted to
Schumann's music. The resulting text is, according to Kirschner, not intended as a translation of
Heinrich Heine's original but instead a new work based on
Schumann's music, text set to music rather than music set to text. In the event, that's not quite what it is, either, for Kirschner sticks close to
Heine in several important respects without running quite parallel to his arch-Romantic narrative of the despairing poet in love. She drops
Heine's cleverly bathetic rhymes, but keeps the simple iambic meter. She replaces
Heine's more or less male figure with one that is not really gendered; the cycle is sung here by soprano
Jean Danton but could also be taken by a male singer. Several of the poems closely follow
Heine, but the emphasis of the cycle is fundamentally altered -- the love affair is made to last longer, through four seasons rather than just one, and the heat is turned down to a slow burn that is perhaps more appealing for the modern listener than
Heine's lyrics of infatuation. The listener is directed especially to Kirschner's cool but devastating final exit for the poet. It is perhaps Kirschner's blank verse that is most compelling -- "In vesper shadows, I can behold/Your silhouette in violets" -- and it fits
Schumann's music. The work is introduced with some shorter works by both
Robert and Clara Schumann, presenting their own love affair as a sort of prelude to the song cycle. That's questionable, for whatever
Robert and Clara's love affair may have been, it was anything but doomed. Plenty about the whole enterprise is questionable, but there's a nifty balancing act going on that has more to it than the listener may see at first glance. Soprano
Jean Danton's voice is a bit thin for
Schumann, even in this more intimate recasing, but those who love
Schumann's music in this cycle will find that it has lost nothing in taking on a new set of American lyrics as passenger, and may even have gained a few possibilities.