Schumann: The Songs
Developments 1840-48
It was clearly time for Schumann's musical material to be taken out of the domestic song frame and put to more colourful and expansive use, as instrumental music. The First symphony’s opening call to awaken is drawn from op. 37 no. 7 at the opening words ”lovely but brief is the festival of springtime”.
EX 32
The symphony theme becomes first the subject of the opening allegro and then the melody of the slow movement, which itself recalls the most deeply felt of the songs, in which rose, sea and sun paint a springtime picture of the loved one.
EX 33
The symphony’s poignant harmonization of this passage is also drawn from the song, bar 9. More objectively, the contrary motion of Die Kartenlegerin skips into the symphony (first movement, bar 120 et seq.), creating its own special impression of independent and engaging wilfulness. Later the picaresque rhythms of Der Knabe mit dem Wunderhorn reappear in the next orchestral work, the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, op. 52, while the soliloquy in the postlude of Dichterliebe is re-enacted in the cadenza to the A minor Piano Concerto, op. 54. One of the themes associated with Clara (Exx. 3-5) becomes in its retrograde form the motto-theme of the work which Schumann said would depict her and would be called his “Clara” Symphony [39] (the D minor op. 120 in its 1841 version). Further, two of the songs yield material for the quartets of 1842; the dramatic encounter of Es leuchtet meine Liebe is retold in the scherzo of the A minor Quartet, op. 41 no. I, while the character-study of Mädchen-Schwermut is replayed in the second movement of the one in A major, op. 41 no. 3.
While the stream of song was running underground Schumann was visited in successive years by symphonic music, chamber music, an oratorio (Paradise and the Peri) and then in 1844 by a grave nervous breakdown, with tinnitus and giddiness. If his final breakdown and deterioration to death were indeed caused by syphilis (see p. 413) then these will be the first recorded symptoms (as with Smetana). [40] From these barren depths Schumann was lifted by the therapeutic C major symphony of 1845-46, which again begins with a signal of reawakening. At this time song makes a brief strange re-appearance with Auf dem Rhein, which begins and climaxes with the Clara-theme of the D minor symphony, and is inscribed “to his dear Clara; the first sound of song after long silence”. [41] The poem is clearly chosen for the deep personal significance of its image of love as a closely-guarded secret treasure hidden in the bed of a river — an eeried echo of the 1840 ballads Der Schatzgräber and Frühlingsfahrt, and an even more ominous foreshadowing of Schumann's own attempted suicide by drowning, having first thrown in his wedding ring as a deranged sacrament. But the song itself is retrogressive in its feeble subjectivism. A welcome return of his dramatic powers led to the opera Genoveva (1847-50) and also in May 1847 to a brief resumption of songwriting at the logical stage of character-studies of women, the zenith of his second 1840 style. They still reflect the contrasts of has own temperament; elated in Die Soldatenbraut, despairing in Das verlassene Mägdlein. They may again illustrate Schumann’s sensitivity to people and ideas. These two Mörike settings follow a visit by Robert Franz, notable for his own Mörike songs, just as the Leipzig songs began with Shakespeare after a visit from Mendelssohn. By this time the Schumanns had moved to Dresden, and 1847 was an unusually happy and contented year. Yet both songs, grave and gay, have new harmonic tensions; and the music is technically much more knowing and effective (although the basic attitude to songwriting remains unchanged, with the poem subordinated and the voice sharing the piano's melody). In particular the influence of Bach, heard earlier in Muttertraum, is now unmistakable. The new contrapuntal style had been freely exercised by a great deal of choral music in 1846-47. Its subject matter too is less romantically individual. The themes are social and purposeful; hunting and fighting, freedom and conscience, in tune with Schumann's own radical sympathies in these years. In the revolutionary year of 1848 came three “freedom” choruses, prudently left unpublished, and also the famous Album für die Jugend for piano solo. Once again the 1840 pattern of vocal music, based on piano music, is ready to recur. Since then Schumann had made only a few passing references to songwriting in his letters and reviews. In 1841 he had complained of being relegated by a critic to the second class of songwriters; with genuine humility, he thought he had claims to a special place of his own, though not of course a leading one. [42] In 1842 he had written to a friend that he could not with confidence look forward to any better performance in the song field than he had already achieved, with which he was on the whole satisfied. [43]
In 1843 he had published his famous review of songs by Franz including a summary of the history of the Lied. He felt that songwriting had been the only genre in which progress had been made, and that this had been due to historical circumstances — a new technical development in the piano, a new impulse in German lyric verse. [44]