Preface
I knew almost none of Schumann’s music of this kind until I went as an undergraduate to Oxford. Paul de Keyser, the son of Fanny Waterman, was a fellow student of modern languages at my college and he expanded my musical horizons vastly. One of the works to which he introduced me was Dichterliebe, the rawness of whose depiction of unrequited love was very much in line with my preoccupations at the time. However, it took me a while longer, and a little more experience of life, to realise just how accurately and poetically Schumann portrayed love fulfilled – a far rarer skill.