World-renowned pianist Jonathan Biss has written extensively about his relationships with the composers with whom he shares a stage. In 2011, he wrote Beethoven’s Shadow, the first Kindle Single written by a classical musician. In 2012-13 he undertook a project called Schumann: Under the Influence, an international initiative of more than 30 concerts. Three years in the making, the project examined the work of Robert Schumann and his musical influences. It included a vast range of music, from Schumann’s Gesängeder Frühe and Davidsbündlertänze, to Janáček’s Selections from On an Overgrown Path, to Mozart’s Minuet in D Major, K. 355.
Biss’s e-book, A Pianist Under the Influence, delves into this project and everything that Schumann has meant to him. He writes, “My feelings for this music go beyond love, though there’s also plenty of that: silly as it may sound, I feel somehow protective of him. This is first of all because his music is so deeply personal and achingly vulnerable that it tends to inspire these feelings in those who respond deeply to his music. But equally, it comes from my sense that for a composer of his stature, he is subject to a remarkable number of misconceptions, and to an attitude that can at times be downright condescending. I wanted to show Schumann’s music exactly as it is — deeply poetic, fragile, obsessive, evocative, whimsical, internal.”
World-renowned pianist Jonathan Biss has written extensively about his relationships with the composers with whom he shares a stage. In 2011, he wrote Beethoven’s Shadow, the first Kindle Single written by a classical musician. In 2012-13 he undertook a project called Schumann: Under the Influence, an international initiative of more than 30 concerts. Three years in the making, the project examined the work of Robert Schumann and his musical influences. It included a vast range of music, from Schumann’s Gesängeder Frühe and Davidsbündlertänze, to Janáček’s Selections from On an Overgrown Path, to Mozart’s Minuet in D Major, K. 355.
Biss’s e-book, A Pianist Under the Influence, delves into this project and everything that Schumann has meant to him. He writes, “My feelings for this music go beyond love, though there’s also plenty of that: silly as it may sound, I feel somehow protective of him. This is first of all because his music is so deeply personal and achingly vulnerable that it tends to inspire these feelings in those who respond deeply to his music. But equally, it comes from my sense that for a composer of his stature, he is subject to a remarkable number of misconceptions, and to an attitude that can at times be downright condescending. I wanted to show Schumann’s music exactly as it is — deeply poetic, fragile, obsessive, evocative, whimsical, internal.”
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