Schumann: The Songs

in: Schumann: The Man & His Music, edited by Alan Walker, 1972 (pp. 120-161)

 

Antecedents

The Lied, or song for voice and piano, in which poetry is recreated as  music, is an essentially nineteenth-century (“Romantic”) art-form which can be arbitrarily defined as beginning with Schubert's first songs (1812) and ending with Wolf’s last (1897). It had ancestors in North Germany and Austria; [1] it soon had siblings in Russia and France; it now has descendants everywhere. But its new, individual voice belonged to an emergent German-speaking middle class; and its musical language fell midway between the courtly diction favoured by the nobility of the Hapsburg empire and the freer expressive vernacular of the people.

     All this had necessarily been preceded by a similar development in German poetry; the art of Holty for example, like that of Goethe himself, contained a new ferment of feeling which broke down classical thought and metre into simpler stanzas suitable for singing. At the same time, the pianoforte had de­veloped into an accompanying instrument which could provide not only sup­porting chords, like the homely guitar, but independent melodic lines and enriched tone-colour, like the court orchestra. Similarly the social milieu of the Lied was neither the homestead nor the palace, but the drawing room. It was made for small intimate fellowships rather than large societies, whether humble or noble; it remains the ideal art-form for friends or lovers.

     So from its earliest beginnings it expresses the emotions and aspirations of the individual. Ideally, indeed, the same person could be its poet, composer, pianist and singer, all in one. This tradition of the lutenist or troubadour was being revived in a sharply labour-dividing society; and in practice the new art, like that society, was better served by specialization. Yet its essence remained indivisible; in its music as in its poetry it deals electively with the feelings of one particular character, man or woman, real or imagined, at a given time; and usually in circumstances or surroundings which serve to set off or intensify those emotions. It is no mere hazard that the first great Lieder are about a girl's concern for her lover (Gretchen am Spinnrade), a father's fears for his son (Erlkönig), each imagined against a background of scenes and moods apt for quasi-dramatic recreation in sound. In this art-form words and music, lyric and drama, speech and action, mood and character, are fused into one substance; and many of its elements derive directly from the main influences absorbed and transformed by the young Schubert — the courtly wisdom of Mozart opera, the simple immediacy of popular song.

     Schumann in his turn was at first influenced by the mastery of Schubert and by the popular songwriting of his own day, including the work of Spohr (1784­1859) and Weber (1786-1826), as well as such minor figures as Gottlob Wiedebein (1797-1854). But his own dozen juvenile essays in that form (1827-29) proved unrewarding, and he soon abandoned it for the expressive piano-cycle or suite, which became his constant preoccupation from his eighteenth to his twenty-ninth year. At first this seems perplexing. His verbally-oriented mind made him a born song-writer. Yet not only did he write no song of any conse­quence until his thirtieth year, in 1840, but as late as 1839 we find him writing to a friend that he had always considered song an inferior art-form and ranked below instrumental music. [2] There is no reason to doubt his sincerity. From 1834 onwards he could have written about any topic he chose in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the journal he helped to found and later edited. But he wrote rather seldom on song, and then without any notable enthusiasm; he was gener­ally content to leave (indeed, to delegate) that topic to others. [3] A study of his own writings in those years helps to explain this view. He believed that music was a form of language, and that the duty of the song­writer was therefore to translate verse into music. For mere musical illustration, however (even in Schubert and Loewe), Schumann had a special distaste. Music ought not to be brought down to the level of words. Such a feeling would reflect Ls own personality and position. As a critic and composer, he was a leader of contemporary thought; despite the injury to his right hand, he retained a virtuoso's grasp of keyboard music. Besides, his own piano music already had speech  and language of its own; poetry would be at best an irrelevance, at worst rival.

     Yet by the end of 1840 Schumann had sufficiently overcome his objections to become the world's greatest living songwriter, with about 130 songs, including all his best-known masterpieces. Only Schubert in 1815, and Wolf in 1888, can match this for sustained inspiration; and each of them at the time was a practised songwriter. Schumann, the inspired layman, crammed his life's best work in the song form into a few months of memorable mastery. So profuse and violent a flowering must have been seeded early and deep in his creative mind.

 



Influences

No doubt it began with Schubert, whose instrumental music, as well as songs, always seemed to Schumann to be verbally expressive. His essay on Schubert’s great C major symphony, [4] which he had himself located in manuscript in Vienna, reaffirms those qualities. The stimulus of that experience may well have prompted the further exploration of Schubert's posthumous songs, then (1838­-1839) being published in Vienna.

     Beethoven, too, was a source of inspiration; his An die ferne Geliebte is freely quoted and adapted throughout Schumann’s C major Fantasie, op. 17 (1836), which was written as “a deep lament” for Clara Wieck. He must have played and sung Beethoven's song-cycle of the distant beloved very often, and in the most impressionable of moods. No wonder its pianistic style and cyclic form dominate his own love-songs.

     Another clear influence was Mendelssohn. Schumann’s review of St Paul [5] (1837) praises the “union of word and tone, language and music”; while in dis­cussing a set of the Songs without Words he gives an unconsciously prophetic description of his own songwriting style, thus:

     “Who has never sat at his piano in the twilight… and quietly sung to himself a tune while improvising? If you happen to play the melody and accompaniment together, and if (more to the point) you also happen to be a Mendelssohn, the result will be a beautiful Song without Words.” The resulting piano song is a con­cept explicitly avowed and defended in Schumann’s own critical writings. He described a set of songs by Kirchner as “self-contained instrumental pieces … often like translations of the poems into keyboard terms… like Songs without Words, but inspired by words… " [6] He also explained that the identification of piano and vocal lines, although admittedly limiting for the singer, comes naturally to a composer who has begun with instrumental composition and proceeded thence to songwriting. [7]

     Hindsight reveals how and when Schumann himself came to take that turning. By early 1839 he was chafing at the limitations of the keyboard. “I could smash the piano,” he writes; “it constricts my thinking. One day I shall master orchestral technique, though I've had little experience of it as yet." [8] Perhaps he never really broke with the piano. His symphonies may have been conceived in keyboard terms; the 1840 songs certainly were. But at least songwriting, like his forth­coming marriage, offered some escape from an increasingly convoluted world of private fantasy. Clara herself had suggested that his piano music was too cryptic for the general public. [9] Then, as now, vocal music was more widely popular. So Schumann in his marriage year of 1840 needed a more accessible form of musical communication, for the sake of both love and money. In each respect he was to be outstandingly successful. The songs made him a good profit and a good name; and they also persuaded Clara that he was the finest living musician (an impressive tribute from one who knew Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn).

     There may have been earlier subconscious impulses to songwriting. In 1838 we hear of a work called Maultreiberlied [10] (Muleteer's song), now lost. It was perhaps a piano piece; but it is the first work even to be called “song” for ten years, and is thus of some historical interest. More evidentially, we can hear the piano music of 1839 adding a new voice, written on a third stave, as in the

 EX. 1

 

Romanze in F sharp major, op. 28 no. 2, or the Humoreske, op. 20, where it is described as an “innere Stimme”, or inner voice (Ex. 2).

EX. 2


      It seems likely that at least one of the 1839 piano pieces, the Scherzo, op. 32 no. 1, was later converted into the song Ich wandre nicht. [11] At the same time, Schumann’s prejudices against songwriting were fading. The discipline of regular critical writing may have helped him (as it did Hugo Wolf) to a closer understanding of the inner life of words. By 1839 his prose is better integrated; the quotations and allusions, at first merely scattered on the surface, become absorbed in his own style. By 1838, he was reading and writing verses in homage to Clara. [12]  By then, too, he had reviewed a number of songs and studied several others (as editor of a journal which regularly published a vocal music supplement).

     Thus strong forces and pressures were at work clearing a channel for song and diverting Schumann's spate of piano music into it. His self-erected dam of a priori objections would no doubt have been overwhelmed in any event. But there is evidence [13] that it was independently broken down; hence the flood of 1840 songs. These began on I February with a setting of Shakespeare (Schlusslied des Narren, Feste's last song from Twelfth Night) followed by one on a Biblical theme (Belsatzar). On 31 January his diary recorded a meeting with Mendels­sohn, whose musical treatment of Shakespeare (Midsummer Night's Dream) and the Bible (St Paul) Schumann had praised for its verbal expression. Furthermore, that first song echoes Mendelssohn’s Shakespeare music. The inference is plain. They had talked of songs and songwriting; Schumann had objected that the form was hybrid and depended too much on poetry; and had received the self-evident rejoinder—“very well; then choose great poetry”.

 


 

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.

 


 

A Typical Lyric

In March 1840 he wrote to Clara: [23] “Do you remember how you felt after that first kiss, Clärlein? I'll tell you how.” He went on to quote a poem by Rückert. “The jasmine bush was green when it went to sleep last night. But when breeze and sunlight woke it this morning it was snowy white. What has changed me overnight? it wonders. Well, this is what happens to trees that dream in springtime.” He added “This lyric always makes me think of our first kiss. I'll be sending you the music for it wry soon”; and on the margin of his manuscript he wrote “really much too difficult to set to music, if the secret stirrings of nature in the poem are somehow so be matched. But consider it as an attempt”.

     We would expect this song to be in essence piano music inspired by Clara, and very possibly containing a musical allusion to her, as in op. 6. Schumann's own testimony also suggests that he will also try to distil the poem into music, phrase by phrase. If so, the music may well betray its verbal origins and thus become as it were a Rosetta stone or bilingual inscription, from which other meanings may be inferred; perhaps this was what Schumann meant when he said that his early songs “offer a deeper insight into the inner workings of my music”. [24] Jasminenstrauch (The Jasmine Bush) is illustrated entire as a typical Schumann lyric of 1840. Its one-bar prelude of upward arpeggio in a bright A major, redolent of colourful grace and vitality, would be self-explanatory even without the parallel in the first bars of Der Nussbaum (The Walnut Tree) which had flowered only a few weeks earlier (Ex. 9).

     Next, the A major colouring is tinged with Clara’s B minor theme as in Exx. 3-5 above; perhaps more than coincidence. Note also the characteristic

 EX 9

piano-song construction; the opening vocal melody is already contained in the right hand. The decorative variations may in a sense be taken literally; if music is to have symbolic meaning, then it seems apt that grace-notes should signify beauty, in this Schumann song as in many others. [25]

     The rhythmic movement in these two bars is also meaningful. The arpeggios are made to sway and droop at the word “schlafen” (sleep); the music is heard nodding off. Then the texture is imperceptibly lightened by the continued omission of the decorative motif in the second half of bars 6-7 and 9-11, making an image of half-awareness to match the poetic idea of gradual awakening from sleep. Against this background, the half-motif is set sighing at “Morgens Hauch” (breath of morning) and “aufgewacht” (awake). It is then rounded off and enlivened, for the only time in seven bars, at the word “(Sonnen) lichter” (rays of sunlight). Meanwhile a new harmonic idea has dawned. The first five bars Had stated, quitted and re-established the tonic — a brief separate introduction like the first two lines of the poem, which also end in a full stop. Then follows a six-four chord of the relative minor, with a slight but insistent accent, giving an effect of mild surprise; again, just as in the poem. Is this F sharp minor to remain a chord or become a new key? The listener shares the poem's uncertainty which In bars 12-13 is further transformed into amazement. As shown in Ex. 7a and b, the diminished seventh is a rhetorical question. Here the effect is enhanced by the downward arpeggio, which is heard as a negation of the confident feeling in the prelude and also as a mysterious counterpart to the natural movement of bar 5. All this is blurred by the piano into the sense of confusion and trance implied by the words “Wie geschah mir in der Nacht” (What has happened to me overnight?), where the voice part diverges from its melody into a recitative, as if absent-mindedly lapsing into speech. Then finally the last four bars for voice and piano reassuringly affirm the home tonic as a natural conclusion. It's all right, harmony says; this is how it was meant to be. And to resolve any lingering doubts the postlude goes over the same ground again. The springing arpeggio of upward elation is checked, troubled, reassured, perplexed again, resolved and finally


restored and complete, all in a handful of notes. The last bars illustrate what the prelude was always destined to grow into—an apt epitome of a charming song.

     For all its meticulous detail, the work is experienced as a unity and not as a succession of verbal or musical moments, however compelling. Words and music are here fused into one colourful substance by the intensity of thought and the compression of the miniature form. The music even models the poem's thought-structure; each has its metrical units (two bars, or one line) arranged into the same pattern of 2 + 3 + 1 + 2. More typically, each of the poem's facets has a corresponding musical motif. Thus Schumann's songwriting builds up mosaic patterns or pictures of feeling in every imaginable colour and form, ranging from frank imitation through conventional scene-painting to music of inward action and gesture, and finally to the “image of emotion” or Seelenbild. From this kaleido­scope some seventy fairly definable patterns may be isolated. [26] Some twenty are melodic, twenty-five contrapuntal or harmonic, and ten rhythmic, while the other fifteen relate to piano texture or register. This distribution may help to confirm Schumann's own feeling that his songs were less complicated, more melodious than his piano music. The addition of words precipitated lighter and brighter elements which cohered and interacted to form new expressive com­pounds which could in turn be combined into song-cycles made to symbolize whole new worlds of personal feeling.

 



Personality

Four main aspects of Schumann’s complex character are reflected in his song-writing. First comes his cyclic disposition, fluctuating between extremes of elation and depression. Next is the quite different (but equally marked) duality which Schumann himself called Florestan and Eusebius, the active or passive voices of his outgoing or inward moods. On these two innate dualities his life superimposed a pattern of growth and decline. Betrothal and marriage in 1840 brought maturity and responsibility. Thereafter his world, and hence his music, was no longer composed solely from his own intensely personal feelings. Finally the organic disease which destroyed his mind in 1854 must surely have already damaged his creativity at an earlier stage.

 


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


 


Myrthen, op. 25

     With such musical equivalents of life and movement he can now animate poems about nature and fulfilled love, which is the central idea of his next cycle Myrthen, op. 25 (that is, myrtles or traditional bridal finery; they were his wedding present to Clara). The twenty-six poems were hand-picked for the purpose; and their significance perhaps goes even deeper than intended.

     First we hear Schumann himself in the Florestan vein; independent, confident, active (Freisinn, Hochländers Abschied, Niemand). He was making money, gaining popularity, being more industrious than ever. But all this took its toll (“tired out”, “unwell”, “exhausted”, says the diary); and these equally characteristic feel­ings also infiltrate the music (Mein Herz ist schwer, Was will die einsame Träne?). In other moments of involuntary candour Schumann's choice of poem tells of his fondness for wine (Sitz' ich allein, Setze mir nicht) and women (Zwei Venetianische Lieder) as well as song. Rätsel shows his lifelong penchant for enigma. The text is a riddle to which the answer is “the letter H”. The voice's last word, “Hauch”, meaning a breath or an aspirate, is omitted so that the piano can have the last word—on the German note “H”.

EX 17


 To this self-revelation Schumann adds his own vision of Clara: devoted (Lied der Suleika, Lieder der Braut), brave (Hauptmanns Weib), lonely (Die Hochländer-­Witwe, Weit, weit), maternal (Hochländisches Wiegenlied, Im Westen), and above all beautiful, like a flower (Die Lotosblume, Du bist wie eine Blume). This last is in A flat major, Schumann’s ceremonial key (as also in e.g. Stirb', Lieb' and Freud'), conveying the tones of organ voluntary and marriage service. In the first and last songs these same tones offer a solemn harmonic unity; alpha and omega, till death do us part. Best of all perhaps is the sweet kernel of longing in the songs of separation and assuagement, Aus den östlichen Rosen and Der Nussbaum. In each we hear the piano part set free for a moment to make an image of leaves in springtime, just as in Jasminenstrauch (Ex. 9), and again this independent use of piano texture provides new expressive device.

 


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;

EX 19


 

EX 20


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.

 


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.

 


Frauenliebe: the Ballads

 In this respect as in many others, the next song-cycle Frauenliebe und -leben (A woman’s life and love) is quite different. We can hear that Schumann's creative mind has taken a new turn. Personal passion has changed to concern for the loved one, for others, for the world at large. His music had always been responsive to external circumstance. As he wrote to Clara in 1838: “Everything that happens affects me; politics, literature, people — I think it all over in my own way, and then it has to find an outlet in music”. [32] Such a reaction was possibly the source of his songwriting, which began with a ballad and a character-sketch. This was not the right road at the time. But it remained open; and Schumann's thoughts often turned in that direction. It was then the modern trend; and it also led directly to his own development towards much larger forms as symphony and opera. At first, even his ballads and stories and characters in music were subjective or self-expressive. For example Die Grenadiere is so vivid because Schumann's own hero-worship for Napoleon marches in step with his own dread of defeat and oblivion, making fine dramatic end as the triumphant strains of the Marseillaise turn into a dying fall.

 EX. 25

We can compare Wagner's postlude in his contemporary setting, which while embodying the meaning and drama of the poem lacks the contrasting lyric elements which are the essence of the Lied, even in its ballad form.

 EX. 26

      Another Heine ballad, Die feindlichen Brüder, is about two brothers who fight to the death for love of the lady Laura, which will surely not be unrelated to the fight by Florestan and Euscbius for the hand of Clara. And certainly the ideas of rivalry and jealousy are deeply ingrained in the songs, with Heine as the prime source of texts, as in the trilogy Der arme Peter and in Es leuchtet meine Liebe, omitted from Dichterliebe. In other separate songs the driving force is nature in all its moods; examples range from the pallid watery arpeggios of Lorelei to the finely graphic Abends am Strand which contrasts places and people and brings them all under the sway of the sea, in undulating quaver lines and deep bass *cotes (as also in Frühlingsfahrt). As in many another song where the sea of the Rhine is mentioned, much of this music reflects the darker depths of Schumann'’ own nature, and foreshadows his own despairing leap from the bridge at Düssel­dorf in the first onset of his madness in 1854.

     But of course there was also the lighter side. The clown's ditty which began the 1840 songwriting was the forerunner of many in gayer mood; dancing or drinking in propria persona, as in Niemand or the two Divan songs, or adventuring in mask and cloak as in the two Venetian songs, all in op. 25. As in the Ballads, all this music is full of images of action and gesture. Schumann's lyric impulse was preparing to absorb these ideas into a new dramatic music. Nothing had come of the proposed opera; perhaps fortunately, since the time was not yet ripe. But the urge to more objective forms found some outlet, in the male voice quartets, op. 33 and the duets, op. 34. In the latter we hear for almost the first time in Schumann’s work the idea of colloquy or dialogue (Liebhabers Ständchen, Unterm Fenster) or even of shared family life (Familiengemälde).

     At the same time he was thinking of character-studies of women, a further step towards objectivity, as in Hauptmanns Weib (which he thought “very novel and Romantic" [33] meaning no doubt precisely the elements of realism and characteriza­tion) and the two Lieder der Braut, op. 25, which serve as sketches for Frauenliebe. This, the next and last of the great song-cycles (July 1840), is both continuation and contrast. It focuses on the interior world through the verse of Chamisso, the indoor poet of nature and dream. There is only the one scene—a room in a house. But there is a strong and clear story, and a supporting cast. For the first time in a Schumann song-cycle we learn (as in both of Schubert's) something about the protagonist. She is young, with even younger sisters. Her lover, whose lot is ceaselessly and unaffectedly contrasted with her own, is presumably old, rich and famous (if only in comparison with her own more modest station). The girl herself grows from a hero-worshipping child in the first three songs to a woman, a mother, and finally a widow (and in the last poem, omitted by Schumann, a grandmother). At each stage the past is seen through older and wiser eyes. The verse has been sharply criticized for its sentimentality and con­vention. The latter at least has been misunderstood. Chamisso's aim (whatever its success) is to describe an actual relationship for better or worse in a real world. Schumann's music embodies his and Clara's mutual love, which commands respect. Thus considered, op. 42 is as much a masterpiece in its kind as its pre­decessors; but its kind is significantly different. It is not only an expression of emotion but an attempt to see life through another's eyes. So the music changes its attitude. The untranslatable direction “innig” appears on four songs out of eight (as compared with five out of sixty-three in the other cycles) which sug­gests that inwardness is a sign of objectivity in Schumann. This inward mood matches the interior quality of the scenes and emotions described. Sharp keys yield to flats; voice and piano have a modest compass, a rhythmic sameness. But the cycle is also notable for its frequent changes of tempo within the same song; now hesitant, now impetuous. The idea of musical movement, previously ex­perienced, is now observed. Thus the first song Seit ich ihn gesehen has reluctant but inevitable progress, as if being drawn along despite itself. A stepwise walking movement sidles ingratiatingly into the second song, Er der Herrlichste, at the words “go your ways” with a canonic hint of following on behind.

EX 27


     The same motif marks the transition from childhood to maturity in Du Ring an meinem Finger; and by the fifth song, Helft mir, ihr Schwestern, it has become caught up into a wedding march. The musical sequences are more marked and expressive than ever. There is an ascending flight expressive of outright adoration at “let me but hold you close and closer”

EX 28


while a more modest upward glance accompanies the idea of admiration from a distance, e.g. as in Ex. 27 above, or at the words “I will live for him, serve him” in the fourth song.

EX 29


A more gentle questioning — “do you not know why I weep?” — is even more restrained musically, rising no more than a third in five bars:

EX 30


But when the words speak of humility, the sequences incline downwards, as at “nur in Demut” etc., following Ex. 27; while for the later moments of entire selfabnegation in that second song – “I will bless the exalted woman of your choice” — the figures bow more deeply than ever in obeisances soon made even lower still as the self-denial deepens into self-sacrifice at the words “what matter though my heart should break, so long as he is happy?”

     The music is more aware of duality than ever before, even in the duets. The piano has separately expressive motifs, e.g.

EX 31


 which was first heard in Ex. 27 and recurs three more times, the last of which coincides with the key word “weinen” (weep). All these devices are heard throughout the cycle. For example in Ex. 30 above and the few preceding bars we find accompanied recitative, separate piano motifs, the expressive appog­giature, sequence, canon, and true modulation (a great rarity in these 1840 songs). The whole motivic vocabulary is being deployed to create story, scene and character as well as mood.

     All of these components reappear in the varied settings with which Schumann followed Frauenliebe, for which we are again indebted to Chamisso. First, there are three more poems of women and their emotional life. Die Löwenbraut is a Grand Guignol ballad of jealousy and revenge; Die rote Hanne a solemn study of poverty and fidelity; and Die Kartenlegerin a deft and gay picture of childish petulance. In all three, Schumann’s art becomes plastic; his Galateas come to life. The world is seen realistically through sombre eyes in Der Soldat and Der Spiel­mann (again about betrayal and jealousy) and is depicted in dark hues in Muttertraum and the other Andersen songs of op. 40 (in Chamisso's translation). But other songs don full costume and produce stage effects in the colourful Geibel settings of July 1840; Der Page, Der Knabe mit dem Wunderhorn and especially Der Hidalgo, where the piano and voice sing love duets. In the same month the duets as such resume, also to words by Geibel, and also with scenes of the outside world; Ländliches Lied, In meinem Garten, and the lively vocal quartet Zigeuner­leben with triangle and tambourine. This last is a vivid if naïve presentation of scene, character and costume, all in the open air; it might well have been the opening chorus of an opera, and is worth a revival. More pressing however was the denouement of Schumann's own drama. After much frustration and mis­fortune he finally married Clara Wieck on 12 September 1840, the day before her twenty-first birthday. Of course the first music thereafter was a set of duets, op. 43 (one of which, Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär, later appeared in the opera Genoveva). In the months after his marriage, Schumann's ballad-writing cul­minates in three songs which (consciously or not) express his own hopes and fears, as in the earlier lyrics. They even foretell his own fate. In Frühlingsfahrt two brothers set out to seek their fortune; one finds home and family, the other disaster and despair. That theme is itself divided into two other songs. Blondels Lied tells of the successful quest for a loved one, while in Der Schatzgräber the treasure-seeker is buried alive and smothered to death. Again the musical images are physical in origin; the leading figures in the music sing as they wander, intone as they delve. Finally the single songs end with two more character-studies of single women, Die Nonne and Mädchen-Schwermut, both very unhappy.

     Thus through all that long flowering of song from spring to autumn the two faces of Schumann's music had slowly unfolded to the external world. There too the last song-cycles belong.

 


 

The Reinick Songs

Indeed the successor to Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe might well have been called Malerliebe, since the words are taken from Reinick’s Lieder eines Malers (Songs of a Painter). Again Schumann strives to depict the world. Certainly music and verse are alike illustrative, full of line and colour. But the result lacks depth and perspective. The key-structure is less taut and controlled. The musical impulse slackens too. Schumann's original fears are now being realized; the settings faith­fully reflect the essential dullness of the verses. Of course there are fine moments. The idea of a serenader's guitar-music helps to make Ständchen enchanting; the idea of billowing clouds buoys the long-flighted melodic line and gently-moving accompaniment of Liebesbotschaft. But Sonntags am Rhein with nearly five-hundred continuous quavers, and Nichts Schöneres, nearly as repetitive, convey only too well the plodding metre and pedestrian thought.

     This outcome must have disturbed the composer himself. If he was to go on writing songs he needed at this stage texts full of character and incident to stimulate him to fresh invention. One solution was deliberately to seek particular kinds of verse; and this he had tried. “Bring me the Kerner poems” he wrote to Clara, [34] “Lend me the Geibel volume” to a friend. [35] Another possibility was to abandon songwriting in favour of larger instrumental forms, in which the musical construction itself provides dramatic contrast and interplay of themes. This impulse was already active; in mid-October 1840 we hear of symphonic sketches, [36] no doubt the beginnings of the First, in B flat major. This may be why the letters in August and September suggest a subconscious resentment against songwriting; “I can't stop writing songs”… “can't free myself from vocal music”, together with further talk of an opera and larger forms in general. [37] The impulse that had seemed so unexpected and marvellous in February was now outstaying its welcome. But once Schumann's mind had clenched there was no prising it loose; it could only relax of its own accord, slowly. And it still had two more song-cycles within its grasp.

 


The Kerner Songs

First came the promised Kerner. This group is interestingly titled Eine Liederreihe, a row or series of songs, as distinct from the previous Zyklus or Kreis, a cycle or circle, as if to confirm that the music is now open-ended. The outside world of nature is the main motivic force. The typical soft, slow music in flat keys makes a fine autumnal afterglow to the 1840 songs. The poems are chosen as a counterpart to Frauenliebe, to hint at a similar story of love and loss, with nature as final solace. The evocations of scene and character are memorable, as in Stirb, Lieb' and Freud'. So is the background of external nature; the storm in the valleys in Lust der Sturtnnacht, the green freshness of the interludes in Erstes Grün!, the touching nostalgia of Sehnsucht nach der Waldgegend. Whenever the music is outward bound or forward looking its impulse is vital; but when it looks inward (e.g. at the room from the storm in Lust der Sturmnacht) or back­ward (e.g. the home thoughts from abroad in the middle of Wanderlust) then the inspiration seems to falter.

 


The Rückert Songs

At this dramatic turning point the curtain is about to fall on Schumann's first and finest year of mature songwriting and to rise without intermission on his first and finest year of mature orchestral music. As usual there is a linking theme. The first symphony, known as the “Spring”, was of one birth with the song-cycle, op. 37, from Liebesfrühling (Love’s Springtime) by Rückert. Their constant harping on seasonal renewal seeks to unite love and nature in a cosmic flowering. After opp. 39 and 48 this should have inspired another masterpiece. But as in the Reinick songs the sweet sentiment of the verse cloys the music. Union with Clara is being overdeliberately expressed by her collaboration in Schumann's work as in his life. A letter to a publisher says that the lovesongs and duets of op. 37 were written together (sic) with his wife; [38] and this may have been meant literally. Certainly three of them (Er ist gekommen, Liebst du um Schönheit, Warum waist du And're fragen) were acknowledged as Clara’s and published as her op. 12; but they have an occasional master-touch which is not hers. Conversely some of the other songs have an atypical woodenness, for example in the open­ing bars of O Sonn', O Meer and So wahr die Sonne.

 


 

Developments 1840-48

It was clearly time for Schumann's musical material to be taken out of the domestic song frame and put to more colourful and expansive use, as instru­mental music. The First symphony’s opening call to awaken is drawn from op. 37 no. 7 at the opening words ”lovely but brief is the festival of springtime”.

EX 32


The symphony theme becomes first the subject of the opening allegro and then the melody of the slow movement, which itself recalls the most deeply felt of the songs, in which rose, sea and sun paint a springtime picture of the loved one.

EX 33


The symphony’s poignant harmonization of this passage is also drawn from the song, bar 9. More objectively, the contrary motion of Die Kartenlegerin skips into the symphony (first movement, bar 120 et seq.), creating its own special impression of independent and engaging wilfulness. Later the picaresque rhythms of Der Knabe mit dem Wunderhorn reappear in the next orchestral work, the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, op. 52, while the soliloquy in the postlude of Dichter­liebe is re-enacted in the cadenza to the A minor Piano Concerto, op. 54. One of the themes associated with Clara (Exx. 3-5) becomes in its retrograde form the motto-theme of the work which Schumann said would depict her and would be called his “Clara” Symphony [39] (the D minor op. 120 in its 1841 version). Further, two of the songs yield material for the quartets of 1842; the dramatic encounter of Es leuchtet meine Liebe is retold in the scherzo of the A minor Quartet, op. 41 no. I, while the character-study of Mädchen-Schwermut is replayed in the second movement of the one in A major, op. 41 no. 3.

     While the stream of song was running underground Schumann was visited in successive years by symphonic music, chamber music, an oratorio (Paradise and the Peri) and then in 1844 by a grave nervous breakdown, with tinnitus and giddiness. If his final breakdown and deterioration to death were indeed caused by syphilis (see p. 413) then these will be the first recorded symptoms (as with Smetana). [40] From these barren depths Schumann was lifted by the thera­peutic C major symphony of 1845-46, which again begins with a signal of re­awakening. At this time song makes a brief strange re-appearance with Auf dem Rhein, which begins and climaxes with the Clara-theme of the D minor sym­phony, and is inscribed “to his dear Clara; the first sound of song after long silence”. [41] The poem is clearly chosen for the deep personal significance of its image of love as a closely-guarded secret treasure hidden in the bed of a river — an eeried echo of the 1840 ballads Der Schatzgräber and Frühlingsfahrt, and an even more ominous foreshadowing of Schumann's own attempted suicide by drowning, having first thrown in his wedding ring as a deranged sacrament. But the song itself is retrogressive in its feeble subjectivism. A welcome return of his dramatic powers led to the opera Genoveva (1847-50) and also in May 1847 to a brief resumption of songwriting at the logical stage of character-studies of women, the zenith of his second 1840 style. They still reflect the contrasts of has own temperament; elated in Die Soldatenbraut, despairing in Das verlassene Mägdlein. They may again illustrate Schumann’s sensitivity to people and ideas. These two Mörike settings follow a visit by Robert Franz, notable for his own Mörike songs, just as the Leipzig songs began with Shakespeare after a visit from Mendelssohn. By this time the Schumanns had moved to Dresden, and 1847 was an unusually happy and contented year. Yet both songs, grave and gay, have new harmonic tensions; and the music is technically much more knowing and effective (although the basic attitude to songwriting remains unchanged, with the poem subordinated and the voice sharing the piano's melody). In particular the influence of Bach, heard earlier in Muttertraum, is now unmistakable. The new contrapuntal style had been freely exercised by a great deal of choral music in 1846-47. Its subject matter too is less romantically individual. The themes are social and purposeful; hunting and fighting, freedom and conscience, in tune with Schumann's own radical sympathies in these years. In the revolutionary year of 1848 came three “freedom” choruses, prudently left unpublished, and also the famous Album für die Jugend for piano solo. Once again the 1840 pattern of vocal music, based on piano music, is ready to recur. Since then Schumann had made only a few passing references to songwriting in his letters and reviews. In 1841 he had complained of being relegated by a critic to the second class of songwriters; with genuine humility, he thought he had claims to a special place of his own, though not of course a leading one. [42] In 1842 he had written to a friend that he could not with confidence look forward to any better performance in the song field than he had already achieved, with which he was on the whole satisfied. [43]

     In 1843 he had published his famous review of songs by Franz including a summary of the history of the Lied. He felt that songwriting had been the only genre in which progress had been made, and that this had been due to historical circumstances — a new technical development in the piano, a new impulse in German lyric verse. [44] 

 


The 1849 Songs

All these remarks sound in their contexts like obituary notices and funeral orations. He felt that his own works had been forced from an intense inner ferment which could never recur. But in 1849 he wrote more music than eves before in his life in a single year, including nearly as much vocal music as in 1840. This abnormal productiveness may have been a symptom of his condition.. The choice of poem as well as the music expresses the older Schumann. The young lover is now the middle-aged paterfamilias; the pianist is a practised composer in every instrumental and vocal form; the style is more distanced, les personal; the harmony is more complex. All these points are well illustrated by the choral works with which the 1849 outburst began. Opp. 67, 69, 75, 91, 145 and 146 for mixed or women’s voices a cappella were mostly written in March of chat year. The poets are those already known to Schumann from 1840—Burns, Eichendorff, Goethe, Kerner, Rückert, Reinick—but the themes are predictably ballads and character-sketches rather than lovesongs. The outgoing phase is again approaching the full. With renewed brightness and power it strives to illuminate not only characters but whole societies, classes, nations. As ever, Schumann's music was a reaction to his own reading and experience. In those years the attention of all Europe was still focused to burning-point on social questions. Schumann wrote sociably for chorus or vocal group; his choice of text favoured popular folk poetry of all nations. The famous anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn used once in 1840, now becomes a favourite source; so does translation. The newcomers among the poets are those most strongly influenced by folk­song, e.g. Mörike and Uhland. Even such old favourites as Eichendorff and Geibel now appear as translators from the Spanish. All these were consciously exploited as sources for new musical thoughts and forms as revolutionary as the as the epoch itself; Schumann wished to be popular in every sense. His letters at this period often mention his involvement with the times, the originality of his work, its arramgemente for dramatic effect, and its relation to the drama of the outside world. [45]


Spanisches Liederspiel: Liederalbum: Minnespiel

One example he gives is the Spanisches Liederspiel or Vaudeville, op. 74, which treated Geibel's translations (for no very obvious textual reason) in quasi-dramatic Form for vocal quartet, duet or solo with piano accompaniment. In his enthu­siasm he began a second set straightaway, op. 138, for the same voices but this time with piano duet. The poems later inspired Wolf and the genre Brahms. The stvle is novel; there are syncopations in the accompaniment and bold declamation in the voice, with free-ranging melodies, chromatic harmonies and independent :caw parts. All this is often expressly related to the sense of the words. Yet the music is still basically conceived in piano terms. Here are some illustrations of these points from Melancholie, op. 74 no. 6 (Exx. 34 and 35)

     Mixed with this new creative vigour there are some ominous signs, which rill soon become more disturbing still. The new techniques have no place for fresh melodic invention; indeed, they might have been devised to compensate lot its absence. The music lacks rhythmic unity; in Melancholie for example no taro bars are alike. There is an undue reliance on broken-chord accompaniments

EX 34


which sound like a jaded echo of the vocal line instead of a shared melody as in the earlier songs; and there is a curious trick of shifting briefly from a two-quaver to a triplet-quaver rhythm just to yield such an echo, e.g. from the same song.

EX. 35

Thus the creative excitement can easily decline into fatigue. It is as if Schumann’s personality is beginning to split under the strain. He needed some respite; if not a rest then at least a simpler style. This was achieved in the five pieces for cello and piano in folksong vein; and their return to naiveté and melody, together with his feeling for the oppressed and weak, brought Schumann back again to the world of childhood with the Liederalbum für die Jugend, op. 79.

     But there, although the style was more relaxed, the mood was still tense and the tempo hard-driven—at the rate of about a song a day. Then on 3 May came the numbing shock of revolution knocking on Schumann’s door in Dresden itself. It was bloody and cruel, and was as brutally put down by Prussian troops. Schumann took refuge in a new home in the countryside. Some of his op. 79 echoes this remoteness, with bugle calls blending into cuckoo calls, battle songs into spring songs. As a lifelong radical, he must have felt the incongruity of this response. But when he has a scene to imagine, a picture to paint, he is still a fine composer, as we can hear in the serenity of Sonntag, the delicacy of Der Sand­mann, the playfulness of Marienwürmchen, which all reflect the innocence of an ideal childhood. Again, he is comfortably at home in the salon music of Er ist's or Schneeglöckchen or the cosy domesticity of the next group Minnespiel again for vocal quartet, duet or solo with piano accompaniment. But by now the inevitable reaction had set in. Schumann's mind lived through dark days in that radiant summer of 1849; the diary record, [46] “lovely day” but “stupid obsessions”; “sunshine” but “hypochondria”. A revealing entry for 10 June, his thirty-ninth birthday, says simply “Die gute Clara und meine Melancholie”. Mein schöner Stern, in reflecting that ray of hope, far outshines the rest of op. 101. In that song the whole man speaks whole-heartedly. But elsewhere in the cycle the mood cracks into saccharine or acrid, each with its own characteristic harmony and tempo—whether (a) sweet as at “süsse” in no. 1 or (b) sour as at “mit Bitterem” in no. 6.

EX 36


 


 

The Wilhelm Meister Songs

 This duality seems to have been exacerbated by the Dresden uprising. Schumann’s feelings in 1848-49 had been embodied in pious and paternal music preoccupied with the fate of others. The Song Album for the Young had ended deliberately with just such a setting—Goethe's famous Kennst du das Land?, a lyric sung by the doomed child Mignon in the novel Wilhelm Meister. That choice, as Schumann himself later explained, [47] was designed to symbolize the end of youth and the threshold of a fuller emotional life. In his disturbed mind that symbolism shifted, after the carnage in Dresden, to a more fatal end, a more ominous threshold. “With Clara through the town; all the signs of a terrible revolution" [48] says the diary in May. On 27 June we read “still thinking of the Song Album”. The next entry, on 2 July, records “sketches for the Requiem für Mignon”. Her fate had so obsessed Schumann that here he even chose Goethe's prose description of her obsequies, for his musical setting. Next he returned to his Faust music, choosing those scenes that presage the fate of the hapless Gretchen, who was also to die young. It was natural to continue with more settings from Wilhelm Meister, a rich source especially memorable for the interspersed lyrics sung by Mignon and the mysterious Harper. Neither knows that she is his child by his own sister; this sin has sent him wandering crazed through the world. His harp-songs are heavy with remorse and despair; Mignon's lyrics brim with secret grief. Schumann's music, though couched in dramatic terms, is clearly an expression of his own personal feeling. The crazed and fated musician had already figured by chance in his 1840 songs (Der Spielmann); so had the sorrowing and lonely girl (Mädchen-Schwermut). Now his own dread of death and madness, his fears for Clara, speak with his own voice in the Goethe songs. The words chosen for emphasis and repetition betray his distress; “all guilt is avenged here below”, “I cannot tell my secret” and so on. This new pitch of expression demands new techniques. The vocal lines move in semi-tones, to catch the moaning inflections of fear and despair. This leads to enhanced chromatics in the piano part. In earlier songs the diminished seventh in a diatonic context had expressed perplexity (as in Jasminenstrauch, Ex. 8). Now it is used operatically, as a rhetorical device; the accompaniment too is conceived orchestrally. Chromatic tensions have become the norm; so the contrasts are textural or dynamic. Keys or chords are used impressionistically for their own sake, in isolation. Most notable of all is the novel and conscious use of leitmotifs.

     All this can be illustrated from one song, Mignon’s Heiss mich nicht reden, about a fatal and ineffable secret. This is contrasted in the poem with the inevitable release of sunrise after darkness, the eventual ascent of subterranean rivers into the light, illustrated with a rising motif in the piano part.

EX 37


Later the words tell of lips sealed by a vow, “from which only a god can release them”. “God” is darkened by a sombre E flat minor chord, meaning death (as throughout Ich hab im Traum geweinet). The interlude brings a moment of peace in a chord of D flat major. But then the “release” motif reappears, reduced to a diminished seventh, with an effect of wordless straining for speech; and this is followed by a silent cry of dumb agony in a grinding dissonance. Meanwhile the voice has intoned its chromatic recitative; the left hand has conjured up cellos and basses; the right hand's repeated chords suggest woodwind, while the climax clamours for brass. The whole passage (Ex. 38) is strikingly more dramatic and intense than anything in Schumann's own opera Genoveva; it challenges comparison with the Wagner of 1849, and indeed anticipates the Ring.

     Wagner was very much on Schumann's mind and conscience at the time, not only as a musician but as a revolutionary active at the barricades in Dresden

EX 38

while Schumann was in his country retreat. So this new proto-Wagnerian song-style may have been moulded by special psychological and social pressures as well as normal artistic development. At the same time, the freshness of his youthful style is far from spent, as we can hear from the sprightly melody of Philine (the song of the soubrette in Wilhelm Meister).          

     So in the summer of 1849 Schumann was perhaps the most richly endowed of any living musician in expressive force and variety. These Goethe songs should have been towering masterpieces. Yet plainly they are no such thing. They are rarely sung, rarely praised. The ominous signs noted in the earlier 1849 songs are beginning to proliferate. Unmotivated triplets intrude. The thought rambles and becomes incoherent. The motifs are sporadic and tend to be overlooked or forgotten, for example in So lasst mich scheinen, where a motif appears three times in the first five bars and then vanishes. In that song's 54 bars, no two are rhythmic­ally analogous. The same expressive progression does duty for several dissimilar moods throughout the Wilhelm Meister songs, as shown in Ex. 39; (a) the splintering of lances, (b) the searching of the horizon in all directions, (c) the donation of food to a beggar, (d) the repayment of all guilt on earth, or (e) the need for silence.

 EX 39


These five ideas have in common only a certain pathos and the fact that each word consists of two syllables. Soon the resemblances begin to appear in wholly unrelated songs. If the illness which was to destroy first Schumann's reason and then his life in a few more years was in fact an organic disease of the brain, then this music may record the first faint signs of its insidious onset. A typical mood-change is exemplified by the next set of songs, the Byron settings of op. 95, written in December 1849. The texts brood over the same themes; the death of a girl, the death of a hero, a mood of inconsolable melancholy. They are a pallid echo of the Wilhelm Meister themes—musical as well as literary—with accom­paniment for harp or piano, as if the Harper's music were still sounding like a tinnitus. Each song consists of a threefold repetition of a dull idea. In six months the pendulum had swung from frenzy to lethargy.

 


 

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


and in other songs of Schumann’s last period, it is applied to banal music and trivial verse.

     At the same time he continues to write the same music over again in different and apparently unrelated contexts; sometimes within a month or so,

EX. 41

sometimes within a day or so

EX. 42


to cite only two such parallels among many. Alternatively the music contains echoes, again apparently subconscious, of earlier and better songs. Often this involves an involuntary association of ideas, the postlude to Abschied von Walde, for example, which recalls a melody from Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen; both are about lamentation in the woodlands. Sometimes this trait makes the music toler­able, even admirable, as in the Lenau songs of August 1850 where the mellow beauty of some of the verses (e.g. in Meine Rose) shines through the music in a lingering afterglow of the old diatonic style, briefly dispelling the gloom and anxiety of the surrounding chromatics. But even in this set the treatment of the poetry is becoming more and more confused. Rhyming words are absent­-mindedly omitted, as in Kommen and Scheiden; the repetitions destroy the poetic sense, as in Meine Rose. Another symptom already noted in the Goethe songs now becomes chronic, namely, the constant shifts and quirks of rhythm, despite the obvious striving for rhythmical unity; thus Der Gärtner, for all its smiling suffers from intention tremor.

 


 

The Last Phase

Most daunting of all is the choice of poetic theme. The tide of musical invention continues to flow unabated; for example, the piano textures have not only orchestral effects but string quartet textures, as in Resignation of April 1850. But the words are already on the turn; resignation is their main theme. Then their life begins to ebb. By July 1850 the verbal features of the songs seem to be com­posing themselves for death. From then to the end of that year Schumann wrote 20 songs; four are about death, six about sorrow, and two about both. In 1851 he was outwardly happy and active; but of the twenty-one songs in that year, four are about sorrow and nine about death, varied with blood, killing, madness and prayer.

     In 1852 he was again cheerful and busy; but of his seven songs all save one are about prayer or death, again with killing and blood. So the sad story continues, with the alienated mind eerily active to the last. For example the form of the large-scale declaimed ballad with piano accompaniment which Schumann had invented with Schön Hedwig in 1849, had two successors in 1852; one, Der Haidenknabe, op. 122 no. 1, is about death by murder, and the other, Die Flücht­linge, no. 2, is about death by drowning. The last solo songs, in December of that year, are settings of texts allegedly by Mary Queen of Scots. The symbolic figure of that doomed heroine intones Schumann's requiem with her own. The five songs say, in pathetic broken chords, “I am going away; look after my new-born child; we must submit to fate; I must die; Christ have mercy on my soul.” Sometimes this music is resurrected, presumably as an act of piety. But it would surely be a greater piety to leave its acrid dust undisturbed, and to re­member Schumann the songwriter at his greatest.

 


 

The Heritage

Then he was the rightful heir of Schubert, adding his own powerful expressive device, the independent keyboard, to the Lied. In the hands of Brahms and Wolf, this crowned the whole art-form. Schumann's choice of poetry was similarly influential; his translations from the Spanish were continued by Wolf, and his use of folksong by Brahms (who was able to borrow from Schumann's actual library of verse) and by Mahler. Schumann’s instrumental music also had its effect on all their song-styles. His fluctuating melodic lines (e.g. in the slow movement of the Trio, op. 63) foreshadow Wolf’s subtle declamation; while the idea of two-piano works with vocal quartet led straight to Brahms’s masterly Liebeslieder; the ironic scherzo of Das ist ein Flöten is very Mahlerian.

     Brahms and Wolf, opposites though they were, were united in this indebted­ness — each to the extent of actually setting to music not a poet's authentic text but the altered version of it that Schumann had used: Wolf in Das verlassene Mägdlein, and Brahms in Mondnacht and In der Fremde. Each of those influences extends, by widely diverse routes, to Richard Strauss.

     Among indebted contemporaries was Robert Franz, in whose neglected songs we have a treasury of work which, if not as fine as Schumann’s best, is nevertheless often comparable with the songs of 1849 or later. It also seems entirely possible, as Christopher Headington has perceptively suggested [52] that it was Schumann who inspired Liszt to begin songwriting; and certainly the latter’s Heine settings date from the year, and almost from the day, on which he first met Schumann, then engaged on his first Heine settings.

     Further, Schumann’s friend Gade had spread his name and works through Scandinavia; Grieg was conscious of that debt and readily acknowledged it. The songs were known and admired in Russia by 1859, [53] that is before any of Mussorg­sky's mature songs were written; and their influence on the French mélodie has seen brilliantly documented by Olivier Alain. [54] 

     When the definitive history of the Lied comes to be written, Schumann as creator and innovator will surely be accorded the status he modestly claimed — “a special place of my own”. Indeed; at the heart of the Lied.

 
Notes
[1] Maurice J. E. Brown. Schubert Songs, pp. 6-11, London, 1967
[2] F. Gustav Jansen. Robert Schumanns Briefe. 1904, p. 158
[3] Jansen, pp. 104, 120, 130, 199.
[4] GSK, Vol I, p. 45
[5] GSK, Vol I, p. 323
[6] GSK, Vol. I, p. 98
[7] GSK, Vol. II, pp.83, 123
[8] Jansen, p. 153
[9] e.g. Berthold Litzmann: Clara Schumann. 1906, Vol. I, p. 311
[10] Wolfgang Bötticher. Schumann in seinen Briefen und Schriften. 1942. p. 210
[11] Eric Sams, The Songs of Robert Schumann. 1969, pp. 83-84
[12] Litzmann. Vol. I, pp. 255-258
[13] Eric Sams. “Schumann’s Year of Song” Musical Times, February 1965
[14] GSK, Vol. I, pp. 495, 272
[15] Litzmann, Vol. I, pp. 169, 179
[16] As first shown by Roger Fiske in “A Schumann Mystery”, Musical Times, August 1964
[17] GSK, Vol. I, p. 432
[18] GSK, Vol. I, p. 106
[19] GSK, Vol. I, p. 268
[20] GSK, Vol. II, p. 408
[21] GSK, Vol. I, p. 270
[22] GSK, Vol. II, p. 302
[23] Litzmann, Vol. I, p. 412
[24] Jansen, p. 203
[25] Eric Sams, op. cit., p. 22
[26] Eric Sams, op. cit, pp.11-26
[27] Bötticher, p. 332
[28] Bötticher, p. 338
[29] Jugendbriefe, p. 314
[30] Jugendbriefe, p. 281
[31] GSK, Vol. I, p. 106

[32] Jugendbriefe, p. 282

[33] Bötticher, p. 331

[34] Bötticher, p. 339

[35] Unpublished MS

[36] Bötticher, p. 251

[37] Jansen, pp. 193, 197, 198

[38] Jansen, p. 431

[39] Litzmann, Vol. II, p. 30

[40] Brian Large. Smetana. 1970, pp. 393, 220, 244, etc.

[41] Unpublished MS

[42] Jansen, p. 206

[43]Jansen, p. 216

[44] GSK, Vol. II, p. 147

[45] e.g. Bötticher, p. 444; Jansen, pp. 457-8

[46] Bötticher, p. 449

[47] Jansen, p. 324

[48] Bötticher, p. 448

[49] Johannes Brahms. Briefwechsel mit Joseph Joachim. 1908, p. 131

[50] i.e. of the Nine (Muses); the typically pretentious pseudonym of one Wilhelm Schöpff

[51] e.g. Jansen, p. 324; and the fulsome commentary to the first edition (1851) of the Kulmann songs, op. 104

[52] In Franz Liszt, the man and his music, ed. Alan Walker. London. 1970, pp. 222, 224

[53] D. Chitomirski, in Sämmelbande der Schumann-Gesellschaft. 1961. p. 27

[54] Ibid., Schumann und die französische Musik, pp. 53-60