SCHUMANN’S PIANO CHAMBER MUSIC/1 Presented by Liszt Academy

At one time, the compilers of the Great French Encyclopaedia set themselves the task of systemizing their world and laying out the “limits of certainty, possibility and the dubious”. Similar objectives are driving, in part, those who put together the complete works, whether printed or (as in the current case) ‘live’ works. The investigation of these boundaries is especially important in the oeuvre of Robert Schumann (1810–1856), because in the past few years music life has been upset by the proposal of a German psychiatrist that Schumann was forced into a mental institution not due to a disease of the mind but rather because of his frustrated and desperate wife. Since prevailing researchers of the Schumann oeuvre tended to approach the composer’s (mainly late) works from the aspect of the onset of insanity, every ‘overview’ now offers a good opportunity for the revision of long-accepted viewpoints and judgements. Schumann’s piano chamber music features in the framework of the Complete Works Live series; hosts of the six concerts (and the guarantors of their quality) are the world-famous Hungarian pianist couple Izabella Simon and Dénes Várjon.