4 Lieder

Er ist gekommen Op.12 No.2 (1841)

Liebst du um Schönheit Op.12 No.4 (1841)

Warum willst du andre fragen Op.12 No.11 (1841)

Lorelei (1843)

There is no clearer indication of the mutuality of Robert and Clara Schumann’s feelings about Rückert than the Gedichte aus “Liebesfrühling” on which they collaborated in the first year of their marriage. The collection was published as Op.No. 37/12 (Robert’s Op.37, Clara’s Op.12) and contains three songs later identified as Clara’s compositions. The authorship of Er ist gekommen is clear enough from the resourceful piano writing, the turbulence of which is so effectively modified towards the end. Unassailable in its modesty, even when threatened by comparison with Mahler’s setting of the same words, Liebst du um Schönheit has a particularly nice touch when the expressive little motif that recurs in the piano part rises above the voice on “Liebst du um Liebe.” The still more modest Warum willst du andre fragen so much appealed to Liszt that he made a piano transcription of it. Given its dramatic inspiration, Lorelei - a Heine setting firmly in the German ballade tradition - might have been a more natural subject for the Liszt treatment but it was not published in Clara’s lifetime.

Liebst du um Schönheit Op.12 No.4 (1841)

Am Strande (1840)

Ihr Bildnis (1840)

Die gute Nacht (1841)

Unlike Mahler, who insisted that there was room for only one composer in the family, Schumann positively encouraged his wife to write music as she had done before their marriage. So it is ironic that one of Clara’s finest Lieder, “Liebst du um Schönheit” - which was published with two more of her Rückert songs together with nine by Robert in Gedichte aus “Liebesfrühling” in 1841 - has since been overshadowed by Mahler’s more memorable setting of the same words. The intrinsic value of Clara’s setting remains unchanged of course. Indeed, it could be argued that, since the poem is essentially an expression of modesty, her more intimate version, with its lyrically confiding piano part, is in a sense the more appropriate of the two.

Although Rückert probably meant more to Robert and Clara than any other poet, as composers they shared an interest too in Heine, Geibel and (as translated by Wilhelm Gerhard) Robert Burns. “Am Strande” (or “Musing on the Roaring Ocean,” as the Scottish poet called it) is Clara’s only Burns setting but it is also one of the few of her songs in which she allowed the virtuoso pianist in her to animate the accompaniment - though not without discretion, not without modulating the colouring and, above all, not without an intervention of plaintive melody in the right hand - with the utmost subtlety at the beginning of the last stanza and more prominently in the postlude.

“Ihr Bildnis” is an early version of “Ich stand in dunklen Träumen” Op.13 No.1. While the differences between the two settings are not enormous, they are interesting as an indication of the the composer’s attention to detail. The tiny but emotionally significant pause for breath in the piano part before the entry of the voice and the expressive dissonance on the unhappy last word of the last line are both eliminated in the version that was actually published. The original, which also has a longer postlude, is marginally less fluent than Op.12 No.1 but more specific in its response to Heine’s text.

“Die gute Nacht” - which, like “Ihr Bildnis,” remained unpublished in the composer’s lifetime - is a Rückert setting written at the same time as “Liebst du um Schönheit.” Why it was not included among the other Rückert settings in Gedichte aus “Liebesfrühling” one can only guess. The comparatively static nature of the song, its end-of-day sentiment and its lingering postlude suggest that it might have been intended as the closing item of that collection. While, for whatever reason, Robert and Clara seem to have agreed that the former’s placid little duet “So wahr die Sonne scheinet” was better suited to that function, “Die gute nacht” finds an appropriate place here today.