Mondnacht

It was as though Heaven / Had softly kissed the Earth, /
So that she in a gleam of blossom / Had only to dream of him.

Bass-baritone Michael Sumuel considers “Mondnacht” one of the most beautiful pieces in the entire lieder catalogue. “I heard my first Robert Schumann lieder during my sophomore year of college,” he recalls. “I immediately found all of the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau Schumann recordings I could and listened to them repeatedly the entire weekend. Not only did I learn to sing it in college but I played it for my final piano jury while my best friend sang.”

Pianist Maureen Zoltek, who performs this exquisite setting of Joseph von Eichendorff poetry with Michael, shares, “One particular joy of working on art song repertoire lies in the exploration of a composer’s setting of a poem or text. This requires looking not only at what the words mean to my collaborator and myself, but delving deeper into what the words may have meant to the composer based on their amalgamation of words and music.”