Drei Lieder für Drei Frauenstimmen

Over the course of his life, Schumann contributed well over one hundred songs to the corpus of German lieder. In fact, he even wrote more than one hundred lieder in a single year, 1840, which is commonly referred to in scholarship as Schumann’s own Liederjahr. He continued to dabble in the genre after his initial period of great proficiency, and thirteen years later, Schumann produced Drei Lieder für Drei Frauenstimmen. Although this set of three songs is rather short, the composer has provided a diverse sampling of his compositional abilities within the domain of the art song. Here he has chosen to set poems of varying lengths, written by different poets, and each song contrasts substantially with the next in terms of form and expressive devices.
The first song, “Nänie,” is a strophic setting of a melancholic poem mourning the burial of a beloved songbird. Schumann brings the listener’s attention to particularly important or evocative words by choosing to repeat them in the music, words such as traurig (sorrowful), schlummere (slumber) and blühender (blooming). The following “Triolett” begins and ends with a reverent, hymn-like refrain, as the three voices muse together on the beauty of the gradual descent of night. In the middle section each voice takes on more rhythmically independent lines, and each part has an opportunity to express individual praise for the night. “Spruch” provides a rich end to the set with a four-line repeating refrain about looking to the heavens for guidance. The song begins with a single voice singing through the stanza. The second time through the same stanza, a second voice is added, followed by a third voice during the final repeat. Listening to this progression, we experience the initial simplicity of the song gradually blossoming into greater rhythmic, harmonic, and textural complexity. Schumann’s song set may be brief, but it does not withhold from the listener a variety of expressive delights.

(c) Jason Stell