Schumann was the first to set a complete cycle of Heinrich Heine's poems to music. His literary ''forks of lightning'' had already fascinated Schumann when he was 17 years old. However, he only wrote opus 24 in 1840, in his ''year of song'', choosing to set a cycle of poems from the ''Buch der Lieder''. He wrote the following to his fiancee: ''Ah, Clara, what bliss it is to write for the voice''. This enthusiasm is reflected in each of the nine songs. This is Kazuko Ozawa's third edition of a Schumann cycle to be published in Henle Urtext.?