Schumann: The Songs

Liederkreis, op. 39

The next song-cycle, the Eichendorff Liederkreis, op. 39, combines elements of the first two; the imagery of nature and movement is inter-stressed with the ideas of lovesong and personal self-revelation. Again we can cite direct testi­mony. Spring came early and profusely to Leipzig in 1840. Schumann wrote to Clara [27] ”This springtime has amazed me; everything is in full bloom already. I thought about the “Jasmine Bush’”; and on the next day “I expect your head like mine is still quite dizzy with the happiness of our time together; I can't calm down”. In the music too the external world, hardly glimpsed in the earlier piano music, and seen with growing awareness in opp. 24 and 25, is now sud­denly in full flower. Schumann turns instinctively to Eichendorff, the poet of the German rural scene and its seasons. He chooses lyrics that sing of place and time, of slow or swift change, of sky or forest quick or serene with the flight or song of birds; in spring or summer, at dusk or nightfall, with stars or moon. Again his letters to Clara testify to this new mood of almost mystic exaltation. “Such music I have in me that I could sing the whole day through”; [28] or “I'm having to sing myself to death like a nightingale”. [29] At the same time he had thoughts of an opera. So the poetry too is conceived scenically or dramatically. There are sound-effects ranging from imitation (e.g. the horns swelling and dying in the forest in Waldesgespräch) through suggestion (the processional six-eight rhythm for wedding and hunting parties in Im Walde) to metaphor (the way in which the arching leaf-music of the lonely woods in In der Fremde I is topped with fronds of rustling sound at the word “rauscht”), thus

 EX 18

     Then there are deeper associative levels, such as the creeping files of single notes ushering in an ominous twilight in Zwielicht, while the voice has not only recitative effects but such graphic devices as the falling octaves for the depths of the heart at the end of Im Walde. There may also be an expressive use of cipher. The word “Ehe” (marriage) had been noted by Schumann in a letter to Clara as “very musical”, [30] (meaning that it could be written in notes, since H in German is the note B, as in Ex. 17). Those notes appear like a litany throughout Mondnacht in the left hand of the piano part;

and that song begins with an image of the marriage of earth and sky. A striking feature of this cycle is the use of sequences to show how time passes and in what moods; slowly for the acceptance of fate as in the modal or mediaeval tones of Auf einer Burg

 EX 21

or swiftly for the excitement of change as in Frühlingsnacht

 EX 22

or blending both as in Mondnacht. In these last two songs the piano part moves into a higher register to suggest the reaches of the night sky. This insistent and intense fusion of music and meaning throughout op. 39 also affects other tech­niques; thus the piano prelude is often an integrated and inseparable part of the song (nos. 6, 8 and 12). Even the key-structure (beginning on F sharp minor and ending on F sharp major) plays its part in creating the illusion of a change from winter into spring.