079 Liederalbum für die Jugend

An Album for the Young

To celebrate her seventh birthday on 1 September 1848 Schumann presented his daughter Marie with a little album of easy piano pieces. It contained eight he had written himself together with a few others by composers he admired like Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. His interest engaged by now, he went on producing more of the same - “Before I knew it, one piece followed another” - and by the end of the month he had completed an extensive collection, including six of his own compositions from Marie’s album and no fewer than 37 new ones. Before the end of the year the collection was published as Klavieralbum für die Jugend (Piano Album for the Young) and, attractively illustrated by Ludwig Richter, it sold so well that the composer’s income was quadrupled within twelve months.

Not surprisingly, Schumann was quick to follow up on his success and in the spring and early summer of 1849 he compiled a companion volume of songs, Liederalbum für die Jugend (Song Album for the Young). Undeterred by the revolution that had boken out in Dresden in May, when he was half-way though, he completed the collection in the little resort town of Bad Kreischa where he, Clara, Marie and and the three younger children had taken refuge from the violence in the city. “I find it remarkable that the terrible events from without,” wrote Clara, “awaken in him inner poetic feelings in such a diametrically opposite manner. A breath of the highest tranquillity hovers over all these songs: laughing like blossoms, they seem to me like harbingers of spring.” Escapist they might be, but it is surely not the function of a composer, however libertarian in principle, to risk death or exile by manning the barricades - as Wagner found, to his cost, after his active participation in the same revolution.

The piano and song albums are alike in that they are arranged in order of difficulty. The first 18 of the piano pieces are for “smaller children,” the remaining 25 for “more grown-up children.” The songs begin in the nursery and, as the composer remarked, “at the end comes Mignon on the threshhold of a more complex emotional life.” They are addressed to children in different ways, however. Unlike the Kinderscenen Op.15 of 1838, which are adult recollections of childhood for other adults, the piano pieces of Op.68 are scenes of childhood as seen by children and written so that they can be played by children. Some of the songs of Op.79, however, requre an adult understanding and not many of them are actually suitable for performance by children. A few - like “Der Sandmann,” “Marienwürmchen,” “Er ist’s,” “Schneeglöckchen,” “Mignon”- appear fairly regularly in song recitals but most of them are too short, too plain or too simple to find a natural place there.

The virtue of the “Album for the Young”programmes devised by Graham Johnson for CD and concert performance - both of which interleave songs from Op.79 with piano pieces from Op.68 (including all 43 of the songs in the case of the Hyperion CD) - is that they provide a unique context for an aspect of Schumann’s genius that otherwise goes unsung and unheard.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

17 songs and duets from Liederalbum für die Jugend Op.79 (1849)

interleaved with 5 pieces from Klavieralbum für die Jugend Op.68 (1848)

and “Soldatenlied” (1844)

“Der Abendstern” Op.79, No.1

Kleine Studie Op.68, No.14

“Der Schmetterling ”Op.79, No.2

“Sonntag” Op.79, No.6

“Mailied” Op.79, No.10

Volksliedchen Op.68, No. 9

“Käuzlein” Op. 79, No.11

Erster Verlust Op.68, No. 16

“Der Sandmann” Op. 79 No.13

“Marienwürmchen” Op. 79 No.14

“Das Glück” Op. 79 No.16

“Weihnachtslied” Op. 79 No.17

Figurirter Choral Op.68, No.42

“Frühlingslied” Op. 79 No.19

“Die Schwalben” Op. 79 No.21

“Kinderwacht” Op. 79 No.22

“Des Sennen Abschied” Op. 79 No.23

“Er ist’s” Op. 79 No.24

Winterzeit Op.68, No.38

“Schneeglöckchen” Op. 79 No.27

“Mignon” Op. 79 No.29

Lied italienischer Marinari Op. 68 No.36

“Soldatenlied” WoO 6

The first of the Op.79 songs is a setting of words by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who was an inspiration to Schumann not so much because of his revolutionary politics - although that was no doubt of some interest - as because of his flair for creating verses for children, some of which he published as songs with music, usually in folk-song style. Schumann presents “Der Abendstern” as a tiny chorale with harmonies which, rather than following any conventional pattern, make a discreetly symbolic progression through a not quite symmetrical pattern of falling fifths. It is followed on this occasion by the Kleine Studie from Op.68, an exquisite little study in rising and falling arpeggios with a melodic line picked out at the top of each curve. The next two songs are both Fallersleben settings - “Der Schmetterling,” a delightfully flighty scherzo reflecting the erratic movement of the butterfly, and “Sonntag,” a radiantly devout hymn to the benign influence of Sunday.

All four of the duets in the Liederalbum are included here, beginning with “Mailied” which, although there is no counterpoint between the voices in this case, brings timely textural variety to the selection. Its cheerful rhythms contrast effectively with the solemn progress of the D minor outer sections of Volksliedchen (Little Folk Song) which, however, has its own rather more sprightly D major variant in the middle section. There is a different kind of contrast between “Käuzlein” with its gently ironic use of minor harmonies, and the piano piece Erster Verlust (First Loss) which has a similarly shaped melodic line but a real E minor pathos.

“Der Sandmann” and “Marienwürmchen” are two of the most frequently performed items in the Liederalbum - the first of them remarkable for the exquisite detail of the piano part as it dances the soft-soled step of the sandman, the other for its delicate wit and its refusal to take seriously the child’s alarmist observations in the second stanza. The second of the four duets in the programme, “Das Glück” is a genuine ensemble, involving all three participants (including the pianist) in an extraordinarily nimble and lighthearted exercise in counterpoint. “Weihnachtlied” is just the opposite, a solo chorale setting of words by Hans Christian Andersen calling for a “chorus” (or at least one other voice) at the end of each stanza. The following Figurirter Choral not only presents the familiar chorale “Freue dich, o meine Seele” in Schumann’s own harmonic interpretation but also weaves round the even minims of the old tune a chromatic counter-melody in an undulatingquaver figuration.

Of the two duets concerned with the change of season, “Frühlingslied” and “Die Schwalben,” the first has the more elaborately worked piano part, but nothing too explicit - just a brief hint of bells echoing the imagined sound of the snowdrops and the tiniest of fanfares to welcome King Spring. The setting of “Die Schwalben” is as elusive as the flight of the swallows themselves.

After the ineffably simple, prayer-like “Kinderwacht” the season changes again in “Des Sennen Abschied” whichh is a miniature masterpiece of nostalgia inspired by lines in Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell and, with its bagpipe drone harmonies and its yodelling descant in the piano part, very clearly set in Switzerland. Folky though the herdsman’s song is, however, its disjointed harmonies at the end of the second stanza, which breaks off as the drone is dissonantly resumed, are as imaginative as they are dramatic. “Er ist’s” welcomes spring again, this time in one of the most sophisticated and most frequently performed songs in the collection. Scarcely able to contain its excitement, as the syncopations in the highly mobile piano part in the outer sections clearly indicate, it meets its antithesis in the desolate expression of the Winterzeit (Wintertime) piano piece. But spring is about to return in “Schneeglöckchen” which, like “Frühlingslied,” echoes with flower bells but now in cautious anticipation, as reflected in hesitant vocal line of short phrases and uncertain piano harmonies.

If “Er ist’s” and “Schneeglöckchen” seem to be beyond the capabilities of child performers, or perhaps even child listeners, “Mignon” is such a grown-up concept that it occupies not only the last place in the Liederalbum für die Jugend Op.79 but also the first in Lieder und Gesänge aus Goethes Wilhelm Meister, Op.98a, completed a few weeks later. Schumann’s interest in the complex psychology of the waif-like figure in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre - a child of a brother-sister relationship abducted from Italy and forced to perform in a circus in Germany - was so firmly engaged by this first Mignon song that he went on to write three more in Op.98a together with five other settings of poems from the same novel. Constrained though he was by the strophic form he adopted for most of the Op.79 songs, Schumann devised an approach, introducing agitated triplet rhythms into the piano part in the middle of each stanza, that becomes ever more apposite as the song goes on.

The “Album for the Young” sequence is concluded by the strangest of the piano pieces from Op.68, Lied italienischer Marinari (Song of Italian Sailors) - a grim tarantella introduced by an eerie tritone summons like something demonic out of Liszt - and the simplest but not the least charming of all Schumann songs, “Soldatenlied,” which was written for one of Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s anthologies for children five or more years before Schumann was inspired by his daughter Marie to create his own.