Liederkreis, Op. 24

After arriving on the scene as gifted child pianist, Robert Schumann (1810-1856) revealed a passion for literature sparked, no doubt, by being the son of a bookseller. In 1821 he left home to begin preparing for a career at law in Leipzig, though he spent more time socializing with poets and composers. For nearly ten years Robert maintained the façade of being a law student before openly pursuing music. Founding editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann combined rare musical insight with a lifelong passion for letters to create witty, progressive essays. He nurtured ambitions of becoming the Paganini of the piano (he would have faced Liszt on the latter’s own terrain), but an apparent muscular injury due to overuse abruptly curtailed that career path.
Another passion emerged at this time that brought Schumann both great joy and great pain. He had fallen in love with 16-year-old Clara Wieck, daughter of his Leipzig piano teacher. Forbidden to meet by Clara’s father, the lovers secretly pledged themselves to each other in Shakespearean fashion. Herr Wieck never acquiesced, but Robert and Clara did marry in 1840 without his consent and after much legal wrangling.
The effect on Schumann was immediate. During 1840 alone, he wrote well over one hundred songs, including several multi-song collections such as Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und –leben. These sets essentially define the modern idea of a “song cycle,” which involves direct key relationships between successive songs, musical allusions or recollections from one song to another, and—critically—a chronological progression of action over the course of the poems. Among the year’s first fruits were two “Song Circles” or Liederkreis. The Opus 24 collection heard this evening, setting nine texts by Heinrich Heine, includes Schumann’s first published songs.
By 1840 the great Franz Schubert had been dead a dozen years, but his spirit continued to define the burgeoning genre of German art song or lieder. That spirit hovers over the first song in the Heine Liederkreis, in which Schumann offers a brief, light-hearted scene setting. Its brevity is only matched by the darkly ironic fourth song, “Lieb’ Liebchen”, about a coffin maker’s incessant pounding. In the second song, Schumann’s uses sudden modulations and tempo fluctuations to mimic the poetry’s changing moods. These range from bitter frustration to deep ardor—such polarities being part and parcel of the German Romantic mindset. Radiant B major opens the third song’s familiar trope of the “solitary wanderer in nature.” Schumann even carves out a tender “dream within a dream” episode via the deceptive cadence into G major.
At the center of Liederkreis resides “Schöne Wiege, meiner Leiden”, the most developed and, not surprisingly, longest song in the set. Schumann generally avoids strict strophic form (in which the same music is used for multiple stanzas) but he is not averse to rondo forms as in “Schöne Wiege” and “Berg und Burgen” (Song 7). Already with Schubert, a more organic and “individualized” technique called through composition was becoming increasingly common, and it is this approach that generally marks Liederkreis. Consider the despondent Song 8 in D minor. Brief and ending with an open cadence, it functions as a link between two brighter moods. Yet echoes of D minor continue to influence the course of the set’s final song, “Mit Myrten und Rosen,” particularly as the end draws near. Repeating such tonal inflections would rob them of their expressive power. As written, Schumann leaves us with a poignant feeling for that characteristic Schadenfreude (“joy-in-sorrow”).

(c) Jason Stell