Schumann: The Songs

The 1850 Songs

This was characteristic enough of Schumann’s cyclic temperament all his life. But thus far his spirits had always regained their previous heights. In his carefree youth he had no need to compose in the depressive phase; but as a family man he was compelled to force out music for sale, and this ceaseless strain cannot have helped his condition. Yet by 1850 those marvellous powers were again returning, in the instrumental music at least. It would be hard to find signs of decline for example in the E flat major symphony, written in November-December 1850. But songs are quite a different matter. There above all the work of art is itself a hybrid. The music not only contains words and ideas but derives from them and embodies them. Schumann’s mind from 1850 onwards is steadily drifting away from an external world definable in words and language into a vague personal world of dumb emotion. We recall that his speech centres were already destroyed some months before he died in 1856, as Brahms recorded in a distressed letter to Joachim. [49]

     In the last years the songs are slowly sapped of verbal substance, as they decline in quantity and quality. In his truly inspired songwriting period, the twelve months beginning in February 1840, Schumann had completed at least a hundred and thirty-five songs, many of them durable masterpieces. In his four last years of songwriting, 1849-52, the tally runs 47, 33, 21 and 7; and very few are performed or remembered.

     After the great crest and trough of mood change, in 1849, the song-music of 1850 at first sounds curiously quiet and tired. There is little question of character-study or drama; the subject-matter reverts to a meek and usually doleful lyricism. The keys and tonalities become flat and minor; so does the poetry. For the first time in Schumann’s creative life he repeatedly turns to sentimental magazine-verses notable only for their bombast or bathos (e.g. those of “Wielfried von der Neun" [50] and Elisabeth Kulmann respectively). Worse still, he gravely enthuses over their supposed musical or philosophical qualities. [51] Perhaps worst of all, he lavishes on them the wealth of technical invention newly-devised for the Goethe songs. Indeed, he goes further; and creates the principle of thematic unity in song by means of a consciously expressive and varied leit-motif. Take for example the text of the “von der Neun” song of May 1850, Es stürmet am Abendhimmel, which offers a typically fustian allegory; a cloud in love with the sun is blown dismally away by an ill-disposed storm. In Schumann's music the techniques are as original as the ideas are banal; while his hand is acquiring new skills his mind is losing its old grasp. Ex. 40 tells the story in detail. A rising semitone is associated with the idea of the storm as tragic fate or doom, much as in the Goethe songs (a). Semitones loom and lour in every bar. In the prelude the bass growls ominously; thunder (b). Octaves sidle up ingratiatingly, still in semitones; a plea (c). Then they come storming up; a great wind (d). Part of that idea is turned into tremolando chords; sighs of love (e). Then suddenly the theme is blown together in diminution (f), blown out in augmentation (g), and blown apart in discon­nected fragments (h); yet it somehow survives long enough to give an offstage moan (i) before taking a final curtain in emphatic octaves to pronounce doom on life and love in the postlude (j). Wolf was later to work wonders, with this technique to hand and fine poetry in mind (as in Auf einer Wanderung). But here,

EX. 40