Schumann: The Songs

 

A Typical Lyric

In March 1840 he wrote to Clara: [23] “Do you remember how you felt after that first kiss, Clärlein? I'll tell you how.” He went on to quote a poem by Rückert. “The jasmine bush was green when it went to sleep last night. But when breeze and sunlight woke it this morning it was snowy white. What has changed me overnight? it wonders. Well, this is what happens to trees that dream in springtime.” He added “This lyric always makes me think of our first kiss. I'll be sending you the music for it wry soon”; and on the margin of his manuscript he wrote “really much too difficult to set to music, if the secret stirrings of nature in the poem are somehow so be matched. But consider it as an attempt”.

     We would expect this song to be in essence piano music inspired by Clara, and very possibly containing a musical allusion to her, as in op. 6. Schumann's own testimony also suggests that he will also try to distil the poem into music, phrase by phrase. If so, the music may well betray its verbal origins and thus become as it were a Rosetta stone or bilingual inscription, from which other meanings may be inferred; perhaps this was what Schumann meant when he said that his early songs “offer a deeper insight into the inner workings of my music”. [24] Jasminenstrauch (The Jasmine Bush) is illustrated entire as a typical Schumann lyric of 1840. Its one-bar prelude of upward arpeggio in a bright A major, redolent of colourful grace and vitality, would be self-explanatory even without the parallel in the first bars of Der Nussbaum (The Walnut Tree) which had flowered only a few weeks earlier (Ex. 9).

     Next, the A major colouring is tinged with Clara’s B minor theme as in Exx. 3-5 above; perhaps more than coincidence. Note also the characteristic

 EX 9

piano-song construction; the opening vocal melody is already contained in the right hand. The decorative variations may in a sense be taken literally; if music is to have symbolic meaning, then it seems apt that grace-notes should signify beauty, in this Schumann song as in many others. [25]

     The rhythmic movement in these two bars is also meaningful. The arpeggios are made to sway and droop at the word “schlafen” (sleep); the music is heard nodding off. Then the texture is imperceptibly lightened by the continued omission of the decorative motif in the second half of bars 6-7 and 9-11, making an image of half-awareness to match the poetic idea of gradual awakening from sleep. Against this background, the half-motif is set sighing at “Morgens Hauch” (breath of morning) and “aufgewacht” (awake). It is then rounded off and enlivened, for the only time in seven bars, at the word “(Sonnen) lichter” (rays of sunlight). Meanwhile a new harmonic idea has dawned. The first five bars Had stated, quitted and re-established the tonic — a brief separate introduction like the first two lines of the poem, which also end in a full stop. Then follows a six-four chord of the relative minor, with a slight but insistent accent, giving an effect of mild surprise; again, just as in the poem. Is this F sharp minor to remain a chord or become a new key? The listener shares the poem's uncertainty which In bars 12-13 is further transformed into amazement. As shown in Ex. 7a and b, the diminished seventh is a rhetorical question. Here the effect is enhanced by the downward arpeggio, which is heard as a negation of the confident feeling in the prelude and also as a mysterious counterpart to the natural movement of bar 5. All this is blurred by the piano into the sense of confusion and trance implied by the words “Wie geschah mir in der Nacht” (What has happened to me overnight?), where the voice part diverges from its melody into a recitative, as if absent-mindedly lapsing into speech. Then finally the last four bars for voice and piano reassuringly affirm the home tonic as a natural conclusion. It's all right, harmony says; this is how it was meant to be. And to resolve any lingering doubts the postlude goes over the same ground again. The springing arpeggio of upward elation is checked, troubled, reassured, perplexed again, resolved and finally


restored and complete, all in a handful of notes. The last bars illustrate what the prelude was always destined to grow into—an apt epitome of a charming song.

     For all its meticulous detail, the work is experienced as a unity and not as a succession of verbal or musical moments, however compelling. Words and music are here fused into one colourful substance by the intensity of thought and the compression of the miniature form. The music even models the poem's thought-structure; each has its metrical units (two bars, or one line) arranged into the same pattern of 2 + 3 + 1 + 2. More typically, each of the poem's facets has a corresponding musical motif. Thus Schumann's songwriting builds up mosaic patterns or pictures of feeling in every imaginable colour and form, ranging from frank imitation through conventional scene-painting to music of inward action and gesture, and finally to the “image of emotion” or Seelenbild. From this kaleido­scope some seventy fairly definable patterns may be isolated. [26] Some twenty are melodic, twenty-five contrapuntal or harmonic, and ten rhythmic, while the other fifteen relate to piano texture or register. This distribution may help to confirm Schumann's own feeling that his songs were less complicated, more melodious than his piano music. The addition of words precipitated lighter and brighter elements which cohered and interacted to form new expressive com­pounds which could in turn be combined into song-cycles made to symbolize whole new worlds of personal feeling.