Jochen Kupfer and Reinild Mees - Songs of Robert Schumann (2000)

Song literature, and particularly the romantic song literature, has been my delight and inspiration from a very early age, when I began my singing career as a boy soprano. Later on during my studies, when I worked on the song cycles of Robert Schumann, this fascination became stronger. His songs, with their longing, their deep and sincere emotions, their strong sense of nature, and their burning passion — the purest form of Romantic music– drew me irresistibly. For me, the art song, and particularly that of Schumann, is the musical form which allows the singer and his personality the greatest opportunities of expression. If, in the opera, we are confronted with a designated, concrete role, which we are intended to realize on stage with the help of costumes and makeup, the song is inherently a more intimate form, which puts more value on of the individuality and spontaneous ideas of the singer.