Schumann: The Songs
Dichterliebe, op. 48
In op. 39, scene and drama are pantheistic and impersonal. The personal hero reappears in the complementary masterpiece of Dichterliebe, op. 48, also written in May 1840. Its title envisages an artist's love as especially sensitive and vulnerable and hence capable of extreme elation and despair. Heine's fine poems also add their own imagery of nature, movement, time, life itself.
Like the earlier Heine cycle, op. 24 (with which it shares themes, Exx. 4-5), Dichterliebe is an alloy of music and poetry rather than one single substance. Heine's verse now recalls past happiness in present grief, an added sorrow; hence its bitter irony. Schumann's music recalls past suffering in present bliss, an added joy; hence its innocent exaltation. So the two interlock in a fusion of contrasts. Thus in Heine Im wunderschönen Monat Mai is a poem of pure delight. The setting however is all hesitancy, nostalgia, regret; it begins with a grieving dissonance
EX 23
and ends uniquely on the dominant seventh of a tonic which is never once heard. Similar contrasts are manifest in the interplay of voice and piano throughout. In sixteen songs, only six of the voice parts end unambiguously on a tonic. Elsewhere the tensions often have to be resolved by an extended piano postlude, often using new material. This happens typically, here as in other song-cycles, where the poem is about thoughts too deep for words. Thus the piano muses on an inexpressibly sweet hour in Ich will meine Seele tauchen, an ineffable beauty in Im Rhein. Speechless rage and despair end Und wüssten's die Bliimen and Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen. The postlude of Hör ich das Liedchen expresses a sorrow, and of Die alten bösen Lieder a love, for which not even the poet can find words. When Heine is silent, Schumann speaks. Again, the key-structure is expressively related to the cycle of fifths which Schumann himself had suggested as apt for the expression of far-reaching emotion. [31] The voice is stretched to cover two full octaves (highest at “heart” in Ich grolle nicht, lowest at “tears” in Allnächtlich im Traume); the piano spans nearly six octaves (from the dark depths of “grave” in Die alten bösen Lieder to the rarefied heights of the postlude to that song and Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen); the rhythmic and dynamic contrasts are correspondingly wide and graphic. Other musical imagery is also more vivid and varied than ever. In Und wüssten's die Blumen the demisemiquavers flutter and twinkle as birdsong and starshine. In Im Rhein the semibreves stand like stone in the left hand while time and the river flow past in the right, as the cathedral is mirrored in the Rhine. In Das ist ein Flöten the bass notes are obsessively repeated as the hated dance music (at the loved one’s wedding) wheels and whirls in the jealous mind. In the ominous Ich hab' im Traum geweinet, the cortège creeps past in a pall of E flat minor, always a deathly key to Schumann (see Ex. 12). The final song creates a climactic processional march of giants; and so on.
Again (as in the Liederkreis, op. 39) the sequence in voice and piano have both structural and expressive function. They arc here associated with the idea of involuntary love, as in the first song at the words “love rose up in my heart”;
EX 24
and similarly throughout the lovesong Ich will meine Seele tauchen. Compare also Im Rhein at the mention of “her eyes, her lips and cheeks”; Ich grolle nicht at “love lost for ever”; Hör' ich das Liedchen at “a dark longing drives me out to the high hills”; and so on.
Finally in Dichterliebe, as in its predecessors, there are the unifying five-note linear themes so dear to Schumann which (whether one calls them “Clara themes” or not) are heard throughout the piano music of 1835-39 as well as the songs of 1840. To give just one example of one such link in its B minor form: each of the song-cycles thus far considered has a song which (like Jasminenstrauch, Ex. 8) is in A major with B minor overtones — no. 7 of op. 24, no. 9 of op. 25, no. 2 of op. 39, 110. 2 of op. 48.