Matthias Goerne, the preeminent interpreter of German art songs, and Evgeny Kissin, one of the world’s great pianists, offered a breathtaking program of Schumann and Brahms songs at Carnegie Hall April 25. Most of the music was set to texts by Heinrich Heine, a propitious choice for chol hamoed Pesach. The Song of Songs was read in synagogues on the following Shabbat, and no poet of the past three thousand years has evoked love that is as harsh as death and as strong as the grave as uncannily as Heine. As the Sages rightly forbade a secular reading of the book that R. Akiva called the “holy of holies,” I propose, rather, a religious reading of Heine.
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