6 Gedichte und Requiem Op.90 (1850) — Robert Schumann | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

Lied eines Schmiedes

Meine Rose

Kommen und Scheiden

Die Sennin

Einsamkeit

Der schwere Abend

Requiem

There is something uncanny about Schumann undertaking a cycle of songs to poems by Nikolaus Lenau just weeks before moving from Dresden to take up his ill-advised conducting appointment in Düsseldorf in 1850. Although he thought the poet was dead by then, he must have known that the last years of this sadly unbalanced genius were spent in a mental asylum – a fate which the composer had long feared for himself and which, of course, was to befall him within the next few years.

It might not have been the result of a conscious decision on Schumann’s part – although it seems from Der schwere Abend that it might have been – but the set of six Lenau settings makes a melancholy counterpart to the Dichterliebe written in very different circumstances ten years earlier. The emotional progression is reflected in the key relationships passing on a circuitous route from a major key (E flat in the original) to the tonic minor in the last and giving each song a significance it would not have outside this context. Lied eines Schmiedes – which opens in rude health a cycle which is to end in a death wish – is not so much a song in itself, in spite of its splendid hammer-wielding rhythms, as an introduction. Exquisite though it is on its own, Meine Rose (in B flat major) is all the more fragrant by contrast with the workshop muscularity of its predecessor.

Kommen und Scheiden is a daringly vague, almost impressionistic transitional thought, beginning in one key (E flat minor) and ending in another (G flat expressed enharmonically as F sharp major) to approach the bright (B major) mountain atmosphere of the next song. But, for all its initial outdoor freshnes, Die Sennin declines into the elegiac (D sharp or E flat minor) tendency which is to prevail from this point. Einsamkeit, the piano part of which the undulates throughout with the waters of the fountain, passes through a variety of tonalities but ends (in E flat minor) where it began. The desolation of Der schwere Abend is all the more intense for the (surely deliberate) allusion to Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet, its triple-time rhythm at first contradicted by a vocal line in duple time as though to indicate that this is no dream.

The day after he wrote Der schwere Abend in his belief that Lenau was dead Schumann added a Requiem for the poet in the form of a setting of a German translation of part of Héloïse’s lament for Abelard (“Requiescat e labore”). A consolatory (E flat major) inspiration, it ripples with heavenly harp figuration throughout. The composer was dismayed to discover, however, that Lenau was still alive when he wrote it. Worse still, the poet actually died, as though he had been rushed into it, on the day of the first performance of the six Lenau songs and the Requiem – just before the Schumann family left Dresden for what they hoped would be a happy new life in Düsseldorf.

3 Gedichte aus den Waldliedern von Pfarrius Op.119 (1851)

Die Hütte

Warnung

Der Bräutigam und die Birke

Why, at this stage in his development Schumann turned to the recently published Waldlieder (Woodland Songs) of Gustav Pfarrius it is difficult to imagine. Perhaps the idea arose from some need in his fraught life in Düsseldorf to simplify matters both artistically and emotionally. Certainly, while there was a good chance of fashioning tuneful settings of the slightly smug Die Hütte and the more than slightly cynical Der Brautigam und die Birke, there was no hope of a song of more than minimal complexity from either of them. Happily, however, Warnung, which shows concern for someone other than the protagonist and at the same time echoes with syncopated bird song and comparatively sophisticated harmonies, offsets the other two.

4 Lieder

Die Spinnerin Op.107 No.4 (1851)

Herzeleid Op.107 No.1 (1851)

Nachtlied Op.96 No.1 (1850)

Ins Freie Op.89 No.5 (1850)

The first two of these four songs selected from the late Dresden and early Düsseldorf periods are both girls’ laments. Just how serious the situation is in Die Spinneriin we cannot be sure. Brahms’s paradoxical harmonies in his treatment of the same words, in Mädchenlied Op.107 No.5, seem to derive from a more personally compassionate interpretation than Schumann’s setting which, while taking an authentic place in the tradition of spinning songs, has a generic inevitability about it. The allusion to Ophelia indicates that the situation in Herzeleid could scarcely be worse, as Schumann confirms in his weeping-willow piano figuration, set in a harmonically sensitive relationship with the voice, and the hint of a funeral-march rhythm in the closing bars.

There is probably no more poignant song from this troubled period in Schumann’s life than Nachtlied which, without attempting to emulate Schubert’s famous setting of the same words, comes so close to perfection in its contemplative demeanour. At the same time – in one or two instances of rhythmic unease but above all in the questioning rather than re-assuring upward seventh on the last two words – Schumann seems less than completely convinced that Goethe’s promise of peace actually applies to him. Even so, he seems to say in the bravely defiant Ins Freie (one of six von der Neuen settings dedicated to Jenny Lind), however constricted he feels, the power of song releases him.

Gabriel Fauré

Le jardin clos Op.106 (1914)

Exaucement

Quand tu plonges tes yeux dans mes yeux

La messagère,

Je me poserai sur ton coeur

Dans la nymphée

Dans la pénombre

Il m’est cher, Amour, le bandeau

Inscription sur le sable

Le jardin clos is a cycle of renunciation – for us today as it was for Fauré in 1914. What we have to renounce is our expectation of the seductive charm which is such a distinctive quality of the vast majority of Fauré mélodies regularly performed in song recitals. For him, in his 70th year at the beginning of a war that caught him on the wrong side of the border with Germany before he could escape to Geneva, the renunciation was of much that he held most dear.

On 21 July Fauré had written to his wife from Ems, where he was taking a cure, to tell her that he had started work on “a group of three or four mélodies” to words by the Belgian poet, Charles Van Leberghe, whose poems he had drawn on a few years earlier for his previous song cycle, La Chanson d’Ève: “I can find nothing, alas, in the work of contemporary French poets,” he explained, “nothing that calls music to mind!” In Van Leberghe’s symbolist Entrevisions he found love poetry that might once have sent him into romantic raptures but which now inspired very mixed feelings and a highly economical, though no less intense, way of expressing them. It is not so much a matter of emotion recollected in tranquillity as of emotion recollected with a keen, harmonically bewildered sense of loss.

The fundamental difference between La jardin clos and La bonne chanson is that in 1914 Fauré had no relationship such as he had had with Emma Bardac in the early 1890s to add a personal, concordant dimension to the sentiments of the text. Nor was he likely to have any such relationship again. A remarkable feature common to the first seven songs of Le jardin clos is that they begin in a clearly defined major key, as though the composer identified with the poet’s sentiment, but within a few bars desert it in a tortuous series of modulations and return to it only in the closing bars. That common feature does not make a cycle, however. Nor does the consistent textural economy in which the pianist’s right hand more or less clearly traces a unison line with the voice while, in most cases, the left hand offers a counterpoint to it. If it is a cycle, rather than a “suite de huit mélodies” as Fauré put it – and there is certainly no coherent key relationship between the songs and no recurring theme – a tenuous link is initiated in Exaucement, where the one allusion to the opening C major before the very end is on the words “jardin clos.”

Although the eroticism of Quand tu plonges tes yeux dans mes yeux (F major) is intensified by dissonances, when it comes to the crucial “Est-ce moi que tu as choisi?” there is another clear chord of C major. La messagère (G major) – which offers a limpid example of a contrapuntal relationship between vocal line and bass line – is harmonically highly adventurous, not least in the mysterious third stanza poised between night and dawn, but the climactic “rire d’or” is hamonised in C major. Still more interestingly, in the harmonically precarious, infinitely delicate Je me poserai sur ton coeur (E flat major), with its syncopated rocking motion in the left hand, Fauré repeats the first two lines of the second stanza at the end as though to give himself the opportunity to slip briefly into C major as he does it. Dans la nymphée (D flat major), one of Fauré’s most eloquent hymnic inspirations, differs from its companions in that it makes an early recall of its tonic harmonies, but not before the amazing modulation to C major at the beginning of the third bar on “Pense en ton âme.”

The one occurrence of C major in Dans la pénombre (E major) – a spinning song which halts its rhythmic rotation between left hand and right to contemplate the beauty of dawn in spring – can scarcely be claimed as significant. There is no C major at all in the activity of Il m’est cher, Amour, le bandeau (F major) where Fauré both recovers and sustains the authentic erotic thrill. In Inscription sur le sable, however, he renounces it. Beginning and ending in E minor, the last song of Le jardin clos seems to accept the death of the eternal feminine. In fact, it transcends death as the harmonies progress to a climax on C major, the spiritual tonic of the cycle, with the words “impérissables diamants” – the imperishable songs love has left behind?

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–94)

4 mélodies

Les cigales (1890)

Tes yeux bleus (c.1883)

Lied (c.1885)

Chanson pour Jeanne (c.1885)

In the interview in which he proclaimed Gounod the true founder of the mélodie, Ravel went on to name the two composers responsible for the next significant stage in the development of French song – Fauré and, in the same breath, Chabrier. While no one would seriously disagree with Ravel’s estimate of Fauré’s importance, his promotion of Chabrier to a similar status must have come as a surprise. After all, he wrote no more than 25 songs, only nine of which were published in his lifetime. On the other hand, those which his contemporaries could have known are so distinctive and so direct in their reflection of the composer’s uniquely engaging personality that younger admirers like Ravel and Debussy could scarcely resist their influence. And it wasn’t only those who knew him who were captivated. Poulenc, who was born five years after Chabrier’s death, adored his music, not least the songs.

No culture which includes an utterly unselfconscious and yet entirely original inspiration like Les cigales can fail to be affected by it. One of a set of four “romances zoologiques” written at his country retreat in Touraine in 1890, it echoes throughout with a joyfully dissonant chirping of cicadas in the piano part and three times resolves into the major for a delightfully melodious refrain.

Although Chabrier presumably cannot have known Maurice Rollinat’s Tes yeux bleus before it was published in his Névroses in 1883, the song must have been written soon after the composer’s first, traumatic encounter with Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1880. Certainly, the love scene is still echoing in his memory here, alongside chromatic extensions that even Wagner himself would not have thought of. Formative experience though Tristan was, however, it is rare that its influence shows through so clearly in Chabrier’s music.

Lied, written perhaps two years after Tes yeux bleus, is no less sophisticated but is pure Chabrier. While the innocently mischievous rhythms and provocative harmonies of his setting of these faux-naif verses by Catulle Mendès might seem unthinkingly spontaneous, they are finely calculated elements in a precisely accurate study in characterisation. When Poulenc said that he knew nothing “more impertinent in the entire literature of French song” he hit on exactly the right word. Impertinence is not an easy attitude to express in music. While most composers, relying on the words to do it for them, wouldn’t have tried, Chabrier, who was one of the very few who could write genuinely funny rather than merely witty music, knew exactly how to do it.

Like most Chabrier fans, Poulenc deplored the influence of the “insufferable” Mendès, who wrote the libretti of two of his operas. He must have agreed, however, that in both Lied and Chanson pour Jeanne the poet supplied the composer with just what he needed. Amazingly banal though the words of Chanson pour Jeanne are, and dangerously close though the vocal line is to the salon at times, Chabrier’s subtly equivocal harmonies here are so original in their application that, as Ravel confessed (thinking perhaps of the regularly recurring syncopated pedal ponts), they had a lasting effect on him.

Francis Poulenc (1889–1963)

La courte paille (1960)

Le sommeil

Quelle aventure!

La reine de coeur

Ba, be, bi, bo, bu

Les anges musiciens

Le carafon

Lune d’avril

Poulenc’s last song cycle was written in 1960 for Denise Duval who, after the retirement of Pierre Bernac, was his favourite singer. Or rather, as the composer explained, “they were written for Denise Duval to sing to her little boy of six.” Unfortunately, although the cycle was dedicated to her – “the light of my heart and my music” – Duval didn’t much like La courte paille and never actually sang it. The reason is perhaps not too difficult to find. Of the seven little poems chosen from Maurice Carême’s La cage aux grillons and Le voleur d’étincelles, only three are the playful sort of thing you might expect in a children’s song and two are positively sinister.

One can well imagine a mother being reluctant to tempt fate with the first song in the cycle, Le sommeil: set as a not very gentle lullaby with worrying chromatic intrusions on its C major harmonies, it is clearly addressed to a child who is sick. Even Quelle aventure!, which is one of the more fanciful poems and represents Poulenc in music-hall mode, has its alarming aspects for the child at least. La reine de coeur, written for the most part in the manner of a popular song in easily flowing slow-waltz time, finds itself in an uneasy harmonic situation in the spooky third stanza. Ba, be, bi, bo, bu, beginning with a nursery mnemonic for vowels and including another one for nouns that take ‘x’ rather than ‘s’ in the plural, is a small-scale anarchist rebellion against lessons.

Poulenc enjoyed quoting Mozart, as he discreetly does in the piano part at the beginning and end of Les anges musiciens. Although the angels clearly share his enthusiasm, not many six-year-olds do. Le carafon is a delightful blend of music-hall rhythms and popular-song melody entirely appropriate to its amusingly whimsical words – until, that is, the detached and curiously dry minor chord at the end. If the idealistic vision of Carême’s Lune d’avril seems to stray off the point, Poulenc’s serenely melodious setting links it harmonically to Le sommeil and completes the cycle in C major tranquillity, as the piano postlude confirms.