What you’re thinking is not necessarily what other people think you’re thinking. Pianist Michael Finnissy and soprano Fiona Rose are refining their performance of Schumann’s Widmung ensuring that Fiona’s interpretative intentions are clearly audible in her performance.
As a composer himself, Michael’s personal insights into Schumann’s compositional technique and use of text, help Fiona to bring her interpretation of this lied to maturity. Just as Schumann’s inspiration for this song was Müller’s poem, so the energy behind the singing needs to come from the words and intentions of the text, while observing the detail of the composer’s word-setting choices. Sometimes he will reinforce emphases that are already inherent in the poem’s metre, sometimes he will choose to go against the way one might read the poem out loud. The singer then has further choices in, for example, underplaying some of the musical emphases, or enhancing the importance of particular words that might appear to be overlooked in the musical setting.
