Featured artists:
Steven Isserlis
Joshua Bell
Christoph Eschenbach
Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen

Affable English cellist Steven Isserlis is good at telling stories. Anyone who has interviewed him on tour in a continental hotel, writing out a bedtime story to fax back for his young boy back home, can vouch for that. This documentary is a musical detective story in which Isserlis investigates the intrigues of the final years of Robert Schumann and his wife Clara (an outstanding pianist and composer in her own right, of course). It was a curious relationship. He was nine years older than her and had met her when she was a young girl, so perhaps we can understand the reluctance of her father to sanction the marriage. When they did, it produced an astonishing outpouring of music from Robert.

Before his premature death in a lunatic asylum, he composed five romances for cello and piano - but Clara destroyed them before they could be published. Isserlis's passion for Schumann's music fires his quest to retrace the master's footsteps throughout Germany. Along the way he performs some of Schumann's most beautiful works with his friends Joshua Bell and Christoph Eschenbach. Interwoven with this personal journey are dramatic vignettes that shed light on the relationship between Robert and Clara over the last ten years of the composer's troubled life.