Schumann: The Songs
Liederkreis, op. 24
These four variables give all Schumann’s music a great depth and contrast. But the Lied is essentially a lyric form; so it is not surprising that his fame in this genre rests almost wholly on the lovesong cycles written for Clara in their marriage year. These begin with the Liederkreis, op. 24 (completed in February, 1840, but perhaps sketched much earlier), on poems by Heine, to which Schumann's strong stream of self-expression often runs counter. His main mood is that of a successful thirty-year-old, deeply in love; the poems express the desperately unhappy passion of a very young man. Schumann seizes on the clement of love-longing and enhances it by changing or repeating the words, on which he also imposes his own unity of key-structure. Conversely the poems though immature already have the typical dash of Heinesque bitters which brings new tang and substance to the fluid blandness of the Davidsbündler-type piano music whence Schumann fashions his accompaniments. The words also give the melodic line a new expressiveness deriving from transient dissonances or appoggiature. For example the word “klage” (lament) in no. 1 yields this:
EX 11
Again, a phrase like “da hauset ein Zimmermann schlimm und arg” in the fourth poem, where Heine likens his heartbeat to the hammering of a carpenter making a coffin, freezes the freeflowing melody into an awe-struck whisper, while in the accompaniment a dark shadow falls and the heart misses a beat.
EX 12
Nothing so graphic and verbally responsive had been heard on this miniature scale in German song before, not even in Schubert, whose influence is evident throughout, for example, in the constant images of movement as in Winterreise. Schumann also brings to the Lied a thesaurus of expressive devices compiled from ten years of piano music. Thus the footsteps of the first song, about walking in a day-dream, have this pattern among others.
EX 13
which is then urged along, as in Ex. 4, to suit the impatience of the second song, and then again relaxed
EX 14
for the dreamy amble of the third, before breaking into a run in the sixth song about flight and pursuit.
EX 15
The seventh is about the Rhine and its waves; and Schumann responds in a Schubertian flow of semiquavers. In the postlude we hear for the first time his generalized expression for the undulating movement of water or of wind-stirred leaves (sec also Ex. 10 and the first and penultimate bars of Ex. 9).
EX 16
