Schumann: The Songs

 

Poetry

As t happened, Shakespeare and the Bible were not the right elements for Schumann song. But they were certainly the right catalysts; the chain reaction was all but uncontrollable. Its source of energy was always music. We could have inferred this from Schumann's prose-writing as well as his songwriting. His choice of imagery for words and music instinctively awards pride of place to the latter; the poem is to wear the music as a wreath, or yield to it like a bride. [14]

     So he treats poetry as a means to an end. Thus it can be altered or repeated to make a small-scale musical form or grouped to make a larger one. It is selected to correspond with Schumann's own mood; hence the main choice in 1840 of Rückert or Heine and their sweet or bitter love-poetry. This is then added to piano music expressive of verbal ideas and thus converted into a song. Some examples may make the process clear. The Davidsbündlertanze, op. 6, of 1837 contained “wedding thoughts” of Clara and were “dedicated to her more than anything else of mine”. [15]

   That work is structured by a five-note running theme in B minor which (for whatever reason) was closely associated with Clara. [16]

     An entirely typical example begins op. 6 no. 11. 

EX. 3


      By the beginning of 1840 this melodic idea had been turned bodily into a song of impatient waiting, with the piano melody doubled in the voice part. The full chords are hurried along in both hands to convey a sense of urgency and strain.

 EX. 4


     By May 1840 the same material had been reworked into the more complex patterns of Dichterliebe; again the piano part matches the poetic imagery.

 EX 5

     So music and words interact in Schumann to make a more varied texture than in any previous songwriting. Even so, his songs are simpler in essence than his piano music. The melodies are essentially stepwise and modest in range, varied with recitative elements (e.g. Belsatzar, Zwielicht) and decorations (e.g. the turns in Lied der Suleika, Er der Herrlichste). The harmony is usually diatonic with contrasting sections in, for example, the supertonic or mediant, held firmly within the tonic frame; the miniature form is too slender for long-range tonal contrast. Time-signatures mainly conform to the natural duple or quadruple scansion of German iambic verse. Repeated rhythmic patterns are used sparingly (as Schumann himself recommended to aspiring songwriters). [7] Piano techniques are undemanding.

     Against this general background the exceptions stand out as serving an ex­pressive purpose. Remote key-signatures convey complex emotions (again, as Schumann himself advocated). [18] The melodies have a quasi-instrumental compass in songs of wide emotional range (e.g. Ich grolle nicht, Stirb, Lieb' and Freud'). A true modulation is always significant; a change of key-signature represents a complete change of mood; chromatics convey blurring and confusion. Complex or unusual time-signatures are a way of translating a special quality in the poem; thus Chamisso's quadrimeter is allotted a slow CC in Die Löwenbraut, but a quick 2/8 in Die Kartenlegerin, to match the sense of the poem and the movement of the verse. Rhythmic patterns recur wherever the text warrants, as in Im Rhein. They are usually illustrative, like the turning figurations which suggest the car­riage wheels in Mein Wagen rollet langsam.

 EX 6


The piano sometimes suggests another instrumental timbre, e.g. lute (Mein Herz ist schwer), horn (Der Knabe mit dem Wunderhorn), violin (Der Spielmann), bell (Auf das Trinkglas), or indeed a whole orchestra (Das ist ein Flöten and Geigen). Complex piano writing is an expression of the poem, as in Ex. 5 above. Arpeggios suggest the natural movement of wind or waves as in Der Nussbaum or Im Rhein; the depths of the left hand speak of darkness or solemnity as in Mondnacht (cf. Ex. 20). Such musical equivalents (novel though many of them are) can be inferred from Schumann's own prose writings. Thus he tells us that poetic contrasts can be well expressed in music. [19]

    He even suggests specific equivalents; for example that a question in a poem might aptly be expressed by the dominant chord. [20]

   This features in his own work, as at the end of Frage (A Question), op. 35 no. 9. More intense interrogations are posed by dominant sevenths, as at the end of Im wunderschönen Monat Mai and Die Nonne; and more intense still by diminished sevenths, as in Lied der Braut I and Rätsel (the latter is answered in Ex. 17).

 Ex 7



     Similarly, Schumann praises a song which begins in C minor and ends in A flat major “exactly reflecting the sense of the poem, which has itself become more keyed-up”. [21] In a review of an English Sailor's Song by Mme Malibran he writes “we can feel quite clearly the ‘wide and silver’d sea’, the evening lying spread out over it, the waiting ship with hoisted sails. However, this is not crude depiction but the image of an emotion (Seelenbild). [22]

EX 8



     Like many other composers he could sense that words and tones are com­plementary; the former arc at their most precise where the latter are at their most abstract, and conversely. No music can define seas or ships or sails as such; but it can evoke the nature of such qualities as expanse, brightness, serenity or tension in a given context. Even Mme Malibran’s modest compositional skills offer enough intuitive response to language to impress Schumann: the two different wave motions, deep swell and surface ripple, the melody augmented and sharpened for breadth and brightness, are inarticulate but expressive utterances in Schumann's own native tongue. Of course there is no one-for-one correspondence between music and language. But Schumann himself clearly believed not only that the two forms could be congruent, but also that the essence of songwriting lay in expressing that con­gruity. How his mind worked is best shown by the best-documented example.