Schumann: The Songs
The Wilhelm Meister Songs
This duality seems to have been exacerbated by the Dresden uprising. Schumann’s feelings in 1848-49 had been embodied in pious and paternal music preoccupied with the fate of others. The Song Album for the Young had ended deliberately with just such a setting—Goethe's famous Kennst du das Land?, a lyric sung by the doomed child Mignon in the novel Wilhelm Meister. That choice, as Schumann himself later explained, [47] was designed to symbolize the end of youth and the threshold of a fuller emotional life. In his disturbed mind that symbolism shifted, after the carnage in Dresden, to a more fatal end, a more ominous threshold. “With Clara through the town; all the signs of a terrible revolution" [48] says the diary in May. On 27 June we read “still thinking of the Song Album”. The next entry, on 2 July, records “sketches for the Requiem für Mignon”. Her fate had so obsessed Schumann that here he even chose Goethe's prose description of her obsequies, for his musical setting. Next he returned to his Faust music, choosing those scenes that presage the fate of the hapless Gretchen, who was also to die young. It was natural to continue with more settings from Wilhelm Meister, a rich source especially memorable for the interspersed lyrics sung by Mignon and the mysterious Harper. Neither knows that she is his child by his own sister; this sin has sent him wandering crazed through the world. His harp-songs are heavy with remorse and despair; Mignon's lyrics brim with secret grief. Schumann's music, though couched in dramatic terms, is clearly an expression of his own personal feeling. The crazed and fated musician had already figured by chance in his 1840 songs (Der Spielmann); so had the sorrowing and lonely girl (Mädchen-Schwermut). Now his own dread of death and madness, his fears for Clara, speak with his own voice in the Goethe songs. The words chosen for emphasis and repetition betray his distress; “all guilt is avenged here below”, “I cannot tell my secret” and so on. This new pitch of expression demands new techniques. The vocal lines move in semi-tones, to catch the moaning inflections of fear and despair. This leads to enhanced chromatics in the piano part. In earlier songs the diminished seventh in a diatonic context had expressed perplexity (as in Jasminenstrauch, Ex. 8). Now it is used operatically, as a rhetorical device; the accompaniment too is conceived orchestrally. Chromatic tensions have become the norm; so the contrasts are textural or dynamic. Keys or chords are used impressionistically for their own sake, in isolation. Most notable of all is the novel and conscious use of leitmotifs.
All this can be illustrated from one song, Mignon’s Heiss mich nicht reden, about a fatal and ineffable secret. This is contrasted in the poem with the inevitable release of sunrise after darkness, the eventual ascent of subterranean rivers into the light, illustrated with a rising motif in the piano part.
EX 37
Later the words tell of lips sealed by a vow, “from which only a god can release them”. “God” is darkened by a sombre E flat minor chord, meaning death (as throughout Ich hab im Traum geweinet). The interlude brings a moment of peace in a chord of D flat major. But then the “release” motif reappears, reduced to a diminished seventh, with an effect of wordless straining for speech; and this is followed by a silent cry of dumb agony in a grinding dissonance. Meanwhile the voice has intoned its chromatic recitative; the left hand has conjured up ’cellos and basses; the right hand's repeated chords suggest woodwind, while the climax clamours for brass. The whole passage (Ex. 38) is strikingly more dramatic and intense than anything in Schumann's own opera Genoveva; it challenges comparison with the Wagner of 1849, and indeed anticipates the Ring.
Wagner was very much on Schumann's mind and conscience at the time, not only as a musician but as a revolutionary active at the barricades in Dresden
EX 38
while Schumann was in his country retreat. So this new proto-Wagnerian song-style may have been moulded by special psychological and social pressures as well as normal artistic development. At the same time, the freshness of his youthful style is far from spent, as we can hear from the sprightly melody of Philine (the song of the soubrette in Wilhelm Meister).
So in the summer of 1849 Schumann was perhaps the most richly endowed of any living musician in expressive force and variety. These Goethe songs should have been towering masterpieces. Yet plainly they are no such thing. They are rarely sung, rarely praised. The ominous signs noted in the earlier 1849 songs are beginning to proliferate. Unmotivated triplets intrude. The thought rambles and becomes incoherent. The motifs are sporadic and tend to be overlooked or forgotten, for example in So lasst mich scheinen, where a motif appears three times in the first five bars and then vanishes. In that song's 54 bars, no two are rhythmically analogous. The same expressive progression does duty for several dissimilar moods throughout the Wilhelm Meister songs, as shown in Ex. 39; (a) the splintering of lances, (b) the searching of the horizon in all directions, (c) the donation of food to a beggar, (d) the repayment of all guilt on earth, or (e) the need for silence.
EX 39
These five ideas have in common only a certain pathos and the fact that each word consists of two syllables. Soon the resemblances begin to appear in wholly unrelated songs. If the illness which was to destroy first Schumann's reason and then his life in a few more years was in fact an organic disease of the brain, then this music may record the first faint signs of its insidious onset. A typical mood-change is exemplified by the next set of songs, the Byron settings of op. 95, written in December 1849. The texts brood over the same themes; the death of a girl, the death of a hero, a mood of inconsolable melancholy. They are a pallid echo of the Wilhelm Meister themes—musical as well as literary—with accompaniment for harp or piano, as if the Harper's music were still sounding like a tinnitus. Each song consists of a threefold repetition of a dull idea. In six months the pendulum had swung from frenzy to lethargy.