3 Duets from Spanisches Liederspiel Op.74

Erste Begegnung

Liebesgram

Botschaft

Schumann was not far behind Mendelssohn in turning his attention to songs for two voices. In fact, although Schumann’s first duets were written four years after the earliest of Mendelssohn’s Op.63 set, he was the first of them to go into print with works of this kind when his Four Duets Op.34 were published in 1841. Some of the most captivating of Schumann’s later duets are to be found in the Spanisches Liederspiel Op.74, a collection of German translations from the Spanish by Emanuel Geibel - whose “limpid and charming poetry,” as Schumann described it, was to furnish many of the texts for Hugo Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch forty years later.

Conceived in semi-dramatic form, in that a loose kind of narrative links the various items together, the Spanisches Liederspiel includes three solo songs, five duets and a quartet. The girl in the story is represented by the two female voices singing of her first meeting with the boy she loves (Erste Begnegung), the torments her love causes her (Liebesgram) and her hopes of happiness (Botschaft). Although the idiom is different, given the modestly exotic colouring and the hints of a strummed guitar in the accompaniment, the treatment of the voices in the first two songs is much the same as in the Mendelssohn duets. The scoring of Botschaft, a lively bolero, is rather more adventurous, not only in the charmingly symbolic and occasionally even contrapuntal intertwining of the two vocal lines but also in the colourful comments in the piano part.