Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856): Dichterliebe
Given how much Robert Schumann loved the written word, it is surprising how relatively long it took him to embark on his major song settings. Some of it may have been down to an in-built snobbery towards vocal writing – he once asked a friend, “are you perhaps like me – someone who all his life has placed vocal compositions below instrumental music and never regarded them as great art?”
But there was perhaps another reason. During his twenties, Schumann’s output had consisted mainly of autobiographical piano music, full of cyphers, inscriptions, hidden motifs and personal allusions. He saw little sense in setting other people’s words when his brain was already chockful of programmatic references to his own life.
That would eventually change in the late 1830s, at a time when Schumann was undergoing a significant personal and artistic struggle. Much of it related to his ongoing battle to be with his teenage sweetheart, Clara Wieck, having met her several years earlier while undertaking an intensive period of piano coaching from her ambitious father, Friedrich. Although Friedrich had initially treated the young Schumann like a talented if somewhat wayward son, all of that had changed abruptly when he had discovered the blossoming romance between him and his daughter. Age might have been a factor, even if this was an era of younger consent laws – Schumann was then in his mid-twenties while Clara was still only sixteen – but Wieck’s behaviour towards the young couple would prove to be increasingly malicious and vindictive over the coming years.
With Clara still young enough to be under his jurisdiction, Wieck prohibited any further contact between her and Robert, evidently hoping the whole affair would eventually fizzle out by itself. In response, the young lovebirds tried every reasonable course to win Wieck round, all of which the older man flatly rejected. Wieck instead enlisted his lawyer to put together a defamatory portfolio accusing Schumann of all sorts. Schumann in turn could only lament that his old teacher “is carrying on like a madman and forbids Clara and me to have contact under pain of death.” He and Clara were eventually left with no option but to countersue, taking Wieck to court in an attempt to win their legal right to marry.
But the process would take time, and while the long, attritional battle was playing out, contact remained minimal between Robert and Clara. Emotionally fragile at the best of times, the frustration threatened to send Schumann over the edge. He tried to distract himself in other ways, once even admitting to Clara that he was trying to persuade himself to fall in love with a certain female friend instead – all completely in vain, of course.
But Schumann’s suffering would eventually produce a new resolve and even maturity. After a particularly dark period, he summarized his experience: “Plans. Tears. Dreams, work, collapse.” But then he added another, more hopeful-seeming word: “reawakening.” Long before there was any certainty over the outcome with Clara, Schumann had come to realise that he wanted, in every way, to be her husband and that he could be faithful to her for the rest of his life.
As an artist, he was ready to blossom as never before, leaving behind his early exclusivity in piano music and branching out to chamber music, symphonies, concerti and even opera, over the next half a decade. But before even that would come a further revelation. In the spring of 1839, at a time when he was still unable to see Clara, and he was in a period of overwork and general exhaustion, he dutifully turned up to review a song recital given by a sixteen-year-old soprano named Pauline Garcia. Despite feeling “half dead” as he took his seat, Schumann soon found himself in floods of tears “within the first few minutes of her starting to sing.” The scales fell from his eyes, and he recognized how German lieder could speak to his soul.
Having hardly composed a song setting in his life, he now went to the other extreme and started turning them out in droves. “Ah my Clara”, he announced in early 1840, “what bliss it is to write songs. I can’t tell you how easy it has become for me… it is music of an entirely different kind which doesn’t have to pass through the fingers… I should like to sing myself to death, like a nightingale!” Ever more evangelical about his new enthusiasm, he advised a friend that “the best way to cultivate a taste for melody is to write a great deal for the voice.”
1840 would turn out to be Schumann’s own personal liederjahr, or “year of song”, as he produced no less than 17 published collections over the space of twelve months, around 138 songs in all. But the most famous collection was undoubtedly his song-cycle setting Dichterliebe.
The sixteen songs which make up the work are all settings from Lyrisches Intermezzo by Schumann’s poetic contemporary, the romantic satirist Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856). Although Heine’s collection consists of a verse prologue and 65 songs (centring on a somewhat clumsy poet-knight, who languishes in gloomy loneliness all day but is visited at night by a fairy bride), Schumann would set around only a quarter of the poems (and not always in chronological order), creating his own narrative arc of a Werther-esque young man falling in love, experiencing both acceptance and then inevitable rejection, spending much of the song-cycle lamenting his loss, before finally dramatically renouncing love for good.
As much as Schumann bent the odd word or even line to fit his own reading of Heine’s poetry, he was also less inclined to revel in Heine’s self-mocking ironies. In musical terms, Schumann would treat such passages with a kind of earnestness and even tenderness, as if recognizing the emotional fragility that lay beneath them. Rather than laugh at Heine’s pain, he preferred to empathize.
But Heine’s poems could also speak to him vividly, not least after his long, arduous trial to be with the love of his life. Always fully sensitive to the mood of each poem, Schumann would create the most beautifully crafted and varied collection of songs, showcasing all the different sides to his art and not least his varying artistic personalities, from the dreamy Eusebius to the more forceful and dynamic Florestan.
Now in full creative flow, Schumann would manage to write the entire cycle in just over a week, during May 1840. Although there are inevitable echoes of Schubert (whom Schumann regarded as a god of lieder-writing), Schumann shows his own brand of innovation, not least with his exquisite piano textures and subtle harmonic experiments.
And rather than just using the piano as a background accompaniment, Schumann places it on almost equal terms with the singer. The piano tops and tails each song (sometimes with extended preludes, interludes and postludes), sets the mood, creates abstract pictures and symbolizes certain ideas or images in the text. When the singer’s lines often end on ambiguous notes and uncertain cadence points, the piano is there to bring a sense of resolution to each song.
The song cycle opens with a young poet declaring his love for a girl and awaiting her response – Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai (In the Wonderful Month of May). While the flowing, organic piano lines evoke the lush nature of May, the surprisingly dissonant harmonies suggest the frailty and uncertainty of new love. Still awaiting an answer, the song ends most unusually on an unresolved dominant seventh.
But even with his love apparently accepted, the next five songs depict the over-sensitive poet experiencing almost as much agony as joy from his new liaison. He promises to pick flowers for her “sprung up from his tears” (song II); he tells her that he now loves her more than the “rose, lily, dove and sun” (III), that he wants to bathe his soul “in the chalice of the lily” (V); finally he compares her to the face of Our Lady in Cologne Cathedral, reflecting off the waves of the mighty Rhine (VI). But it is perhaps the fourth song, Wenn Ich in Deine Augen Seh, which is the most passionate declaration of love in the entire cycle: “when I look in your eyes all my pain and woe fades”, proclaims the poet. “When I kiss your mouth I become whole: when I recline on your breast I am filled with heavenly joy…” Schumann sets the words with a warm, hymn-like chords, suggesting an almost religious intensity. But there is also a brooding darkness somewhere, not least in the highly ambiguous final line, “when you say ‘I love you’, I weep bitterly” – as if anticipating the disaster about to fall.
One of the most striking songs of the set is number VII, Ich Grolle Nicht, where the unfortunate poet has inevitably been jilted. “I do not chide you”, he tells her, “though my heart breaks, love ever lost to me!” For good measure, he adds that she is empty and there is a serpent eating her heart, even as he repeats his “I do not chide you” line a further five times. At no other point in the cycle does Schumann seem so eager to engage with Heine’s ironic tone, setting the piece in a bombastic C Major full of defiant grandiose chords, while aching harmonic inflections suggest a broken heart somewhere underneath all the bravado.
Over the following seven songs, the poet tries to come to terms with his loss but ends up wallowing in his own misery. His ex has found another man and marries him, and he unwisely pops in for the wedding celebrations (number IX: Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen). He has sad dreams (XIII and XIV) and talks to the flowers (VIII and XII), but even the latter now come to mock him. Finally, in Aus Alten Märchen Winkt Es (XV) he contemplates a “magic land” full of pantheistic love and joy, where “songs of love are sung such as you have never heard… Oh, could I only go there, and free my heart, and let go of all pain, and be blessed!” He sees the land in the “joys of dreams, then comes the morning sun, and it vanishes like smoke.”
Although Schumann’s cycle has taken a slightly different path to Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo, the two come together in the final song, Die alten, bösen Lieder, which is also the final poem in Heine’s collection. Here “the bad old songs and the angry, bitter dreams”, together with the sum total of the poet’s “love and suffering”, are put into a huge, heavy coffin and thrown into the Rhine, to disappear forever beneath its waves. Schumann saves some of the most dramatic music of the entire cycle to denote the poet’s anguished resolution, before finishing the cycle with a gentle, consolatory postlude on the piano in F Sharp Major. But what may have felt like a death to Heine is seemingly treated like a renewal by Schumann. Perhaps he dared to hope that his own heartache might now be at an end.
Later in that summer of 1840, the Leipzig Royal Court of Appeals would in find favour of him and Clara, with Friedrich Weick’s defamatory claims about Schumann having collapsed through a lack of evidence.
Robert and Clara were married a few weeks later in Schönefeld, a village just outside Leipzig. Although not without its difficulties and dramas, their union would endure until Robert’s death, becoming one of the great love stories of classical music.