[Sholto Kynoch:] I think in a way Schumann is the epitome of the great romantic composer.
His music is so passionate and heart-on-sleeve,
but also able to be so incredibly intimate... it's got everything.
[Laura Tunbridge:] He attempted suicide in 1854, in his early 40s.
And that's what people partly think of with Schumann.
Now, people tend to look back over Schumann's output
from the 1830s, as well as through to the 1850s
and say, "Well, he was suffering from mental illness...
so this is why the music is so strange or doesn't quite work."
It seems you need a much more nuanced idea of how an artist's
life and works connect to one another,
that they needn't necessarily reflect the kind of scholarship
that performers know dates from the 1950s and 60s.
I think part of the issue is how you transmit
the new knowledge and research that academics are producing.
Because we can write books, that's fine --
they're expensive academic books that maybe not that many people will read...
Trying to get the ideas out in terms of
doing work with performers and around concerts,
because I think hearing music live
and hearing performances in music
is a really good way of getting people to engage.
[Stephen Loges:] I met Laura for the first time about a year or two years ago
And there have been various projects in the last 1 or 2 years where we've met,
where I've either sung a recital or I've been involved in a conference.
All of us have a slightly narrow view of what we do.
You can't always look at everything from every angle,
It often happens that I learn something
through conversation with academics and musicologists
that I didn't know before
and then I look at the texts again
and certain things that weren't very clear suddenly make sense.
[Laura Tunbridge:] And so, by working with performers and with audiences,
we get more interaction with what you might call 'the real world'
-- responses to this music that are to do, not only with historical context...
and what we might, more drily, think of as the significance of a piece,
but actually how it works in concert,
how we respond to it as a piece of music
that we'll enjoy alongside more famous pieces.
[Stephen Loges:] And things like the Maria Stuart songs
or the Spanische Liebeslieder --
there are amazing songs in there, and it would be wrong and arrogant to dismiss them.
I think he was very ill
but I think, in the stuff that he wrote,
he was very aware of what he was doing .
[Laura Tunbridge:] The Oxford Lieder Festival is devoted to songs and chamber music.
It happens in and around Oxford...
[Sholto Kynoch:] We pick a theme every year.
The year just gone was the songs of Robert Schumann...
and we delve into that theme as far as we possibly can
with related study events,
with master classes,
concerts given by up-and-coming artists...
We had, with Laura Tunbridge, this fantastic study day on late-Schumann style.
There we were particularly making sure
that our audience felt they could approach the whole composer
because everybody knows the great songs of 1840 that they love,
and the song cycles like Dichterlieber,
and they think, "Well, that for me is Schumann."
And then there's this slightly less exciting repertoire
that comes at the end, when he was going a bit mad
and losing the plot a little bit
and the music wasn't that great,
-- that's been the popular myth about Schumann
and we aimed to unravel that with Laura's help.
When we bring study events to the festival
it's an opportunity, for people involved in research,
to say, "No, this is directly relevant to the music as well...
...we're not just in some strange, ivory intellectual tower
discussing things with no bearing on
the reality of performance and music,
and no soul to it.
It's not like that at all, it's actually:
their interest is born of a passion for the music
and it's great to be able to link that back directly
through a meeting of research and performance.