Anniversaries are more than a mere ritual for calendar-keepers. They inspire an intense involvement with the work of the figure being celebrated and, best of all, can stimulate new insights. While our summer festival celebrated Schumann’s 200th birthday with performances of his symphonies and concertos, the programming for our piano-centered autumn naturally turns to his keyboard compositions in three concerts to which we would like to draw your attention.

At first, Robert Schumann famously planned to have a career as a pianist, but he himself made this an impossibility: In an effort to strengthen his fingers, he ruined his right hand through the use of a mechanical “finger trainer.” As a composer, Schumann initially wrote only for the piano. Even after he had expanded his horizons to take up other genres in the so-called “Year of Song” in 1840, venturing into the major forms of symphony, concerto, and opera, Schumann remained loyal to the piano. After all, his wife Clara was a celebrated pianist.

At this year’s LUCERNE FESTIVAL at the Piano, you can hear piano music from all phases of Schumann’s creative life. The first event happens right after midday on 24 November, when Jinsang Lee, Géza Anda Award winner for 2009, makes his debut performing the virtuosic C-major Fantasy. On the evening of 24 November, András Schiff will then juxtapose Schumann’s agitated Sonata in F-sharp minor Sonata—“a long cry from my heart,” according to the composer—with the Symphonic Etudes, whose remarkable demands are already apparent in the adjective “symphonic.” Finally, on 27 November, Andreas Staier will present two of the most popular compositions by Schumann: the “Scenes from Childhood” and the “Forest Scenes”—but on the fortepiano, giving this music an unusual, historically oriented sonic guise. Moreover, he will combine these pieces with works that show up Schumann the admirer of Bach. Schumann considered Bach’s fugues to be “character pieces of the loftiest kind, in part truly poetic images, each of which requires its own expression, its special light and shadow.” A miniature retrospective made of milestones of the repertory as well as rarities—how nice it is to have anniversaries!