Schumann: The Songs
Spanisches Liederspiel: Liederalbum: Minnespiel
One example he gives is the Spanisches Liederspiel or Vaudeville, op. 74, which treated Geibel's translations (for no very obvious textual reason) in quasi-dramatic Form for vocal quartet, duet or solo with piano accompaniment. In his enthusiasm he began a second set straightaway, op. 138, for the same voices but this time with piano duet. The poems later inspired Wolf and the genre Brahms. The stvle is novel; there are syncopations in the accompaniment and bold declamation in the voice, with free-ranging melodies, chromatic harmonies and independent :caw parts. All this is often expressly related to the sense of the words. Yet the music is still basically conceived in piano terms. Here are some illustrations of these points from Melancholie, op. 74 no. 6 (Exx. 34 and 35)
Mixed with this new creative vigour there are some ominous signs, which rill soon become more disturbing still. The new techniques have no place for fresh melodic invention; indeed, they might have been devised to compensate lot its absence. The music lacks rhythmic unity; in Melancholie for example no taro bars are alike. There is an undue reliance on broken-chord accompaniments
EX 34
which sound like a jaded echo of the vocal line instead of a shared melody as in the earlier songs; and there is a curious trick of shifting briefly from a two-quaver to a triplet-quaver rhythm just to yield such an echo, e.g. from the same song.
EX. 35
Thus the creative excitement can easily decline into fatigue. It is as if Schumann’s personality is beginning to split under the strain. He needed some respite; if not a rest then at least a simpler style. This was achieved in the five pieces for cello and piano in folksong vein; and their return to naiveté and melody, together with his feeling for the oppressed and weak, brought Schumann back again to the world of childhood with the Liederalbum für die Jugend, op. 79.
But there, although the style was more relaxed, the mood was still tense and the tempo hard-driven—at the rate of about a song a day. Then on 3 May came the numbing shock of revolution knocking on Schumann’s door in Dresden itself. It was bloody and cruel, and was as brutally put down by Prussian troops. Schumann took refuge in a new home in the countryside. Some of his op. 79 echoes this remoteness, with bugle calls blending into cuckoo calls, battle songs into spring songs. As a lifelong radical, he must have felt the incongruity of this response. But when he has a scene to imagine, a picture to paint, he is still a fine composer, as we can hear in the serenity of Sonntag, the delicacy of Der Sandmann, the playfulness of Marienwürmchen, which all reflect the innocence of an ideal childhood. Again, he is comfortably at home in the salon music of Er ist's or Schneeglöckchen or the cosy domesticity of the next group Minnespiel again for vocal quartet, duet or solo with piano accompaniment. But by now the inevitable reaction had set in. Schumann's mind lived through dark days in that radiant summer of 1849; the diary record, [46] “lovely day” but “stupid obsessions”; “sunshine” but “hypochondria”. A revealing entry for 10 June, his thirty-ninth birthday, says simply “Die gute Clara und meine Melancholie”. Mein schöner Stern, in reflecting that ray of hope, far outshines the rest of op. 101. In that song the whole man speaks whole-heartedly. But elsewhere in the cycle the mood cracks into saccharine or acrid, each with its own characteristic harmony and tempo—whether (a) sweet as at “süsse” in no. 1 or (b) sour as at “mit Bitterem” in no. 6.
EX 36
