7 Songs from Myrten (1840)

Widmung

Aus den östlichen Rosen

Lied der Braut

Lied der Braut

Hochländisches Wiegenlied

Die Lotosblume

Rätsel

Much though Schumann enjoyed arranging his song collections as cycles - or was compelled to do so by his structural conscience - he scarcely expected to hear them performed in that way. Of course, some are more cyclical than others. Frauenliebe und =Leben, for example, really ought to be performed complete and in the prescribed order. Myrten, the composer’s generously eclectic wedding present to Clara, is a loose miscellany in comparison. It is true that the cycle of twenty-six songs begins and ends in the same key, having followed a logical schedule of changing tonalities in the meantime. But it includes texts by as many as seven different poets (or so Schumann thought: in fact there are more) with no more than a vague subject-matter link between them.

Obviously, any selection from Myrten that includes Widmung must begin with that song: it represents the composer’s ecstatic dedication to Clara not only of his music but also of himself. In ternary form, with a simple but highly effective change of key and keyboard texture in the middle section, it ends with a discreetly adoring “Ave Maria” allusion in the piano postlude. Although it comes late in the cycle (No.25) Aus den östlichen Rosen, a setting of lines from Rückert’s Östliche Rosen, finds an appropriate place here as a poignant reminder, in its delicately scented harmonies, of the lovers’ separation before their marriage. The two Brautlieder naively addressed by the bride to her mother, also to words by Rückert (Nos.11 & 12), are followed on this occasion by the refreshingly unsentimental Hochländisches Wiegenlied (No.14) where the bride is now the mother. Schumann wittily reflects the irony of Burns’s lullaby for a bandit child (“Hee balou”) in a pseudo-serious folk-song setting with gentle Scotch-snap syncopations and a bagpipe drone.

In a different, purely poetic world Die Lotosblume (No.7) turns on one of Schumann’s magical modulations where, as the drooping bass line disappears, the moon makes its lover’s entry at the beginning of the erotically inspired second stanza. As different again, Rätsel (No.16) is a cypher-loving composer’s delighted tribute to the letter H which, in German terminology, represents the note we know as B natural - the one heard in octaves on the piano at the beginning and just breathed by the singer at the end. Not by Byron as Schumann thought, the original English text is by Catherine Maria Fanshawe.