Kreisleriana

The Kreis 6 Neighbourhood Culture Association presents ‘Kreisleriana – Fantasies by Robert Schumann and E.T.A. Hoffmann’. A journey to the great thorn hedge, the boundary of reason.

Robert Schumann’s eight-part cycle of piano pieces, entitled Kreisleriana, is an echo of the composer’s reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s prose pieces of the same name. The stories about the mad bandmaster Johannes Kreisler, a literary figure devised by Hoffmann – certain biographical parallels with the author cannot be dismissed – cast Schumann’s compositions in a variety of lights and serve as a reminder that the great musical Romantic – unlike the literary figure – was unable to escape the mental asylum.

What Eriko Kagawa and Daniel Fueter make of this in their joint project warms all the senses: it is a programme that is musically very rich and lyrically wonderfully eccentric, which playfully encourages reflection.