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Robert Schumann’s talismanic song-cycle Dichterliebe has been recomposed by German composer and conductor Christian Jost. The results can now be heard on an album from Deutsche Grammophon which pairs the new score with recordings of Schumann’s Dichterliebe and the Liederkreis op.39 made by Jost’s wife, mezzo-soprano Stella Doufexis, a year before her tragic death from cancer. Jost’s reimagined Dichterliebe, performed by tenor Peter Lodahl and the Horenstein Ensemble, casts new light on the shifting moods of Schumann’s composition. Jointly commissioned by the Konzerthaus Berlin and the Copenhagen Opera Festival, Christian Jost’s reinterpretation of Schumann’s Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love) was first performed in Berlin in October of 2017 by the artists who appear on this Deutsche Grammophon world premiere recording: Danish tenor Peter Lodahl and the Konzerthaus Berlin’s own Horenstein Ensemble. In Jost’s Dichterliebe, the Romantic art song is fused with elements of the composer’s own contemporary style. The solo piano accompaniment is transformed into writing for a nine-piece chamber ensemble and Schumann’s cycle is doubled in length, thanks to the addition of newly-composed instrumental passages that link together the sixteen originally self-contained songs. As Jost explains, these transitions form “a harmonic sea, in which the songs are individual islands woven organically into a larger, newly created composition”.