Davidsbündlertänze, Op.6 (first edition)

1 Lebhaft (Lively)…F. & E.

2 Innig (Inward)…E.

3 Etwas hahnbüchen(Somewhat outrageously)…F.

4 Ungeduldig (Impatient)…F

5 Einfach (Simple)…E.

6 Sehr rasch und in sich hinein (Very quick and within itself)…F.

7 Nicht schnell . Mit äusserst starker Empfindung

(Not fast. With extremely strong feeling)…E.

8 Frisch (Fresh)…F.

9 Hierauf schloss Florestan und es zuckte ihm schmerzlich die Lippe

(Hereupon Florestan stopped and his lips twitched painfully)

10 Balladenmässig. Sehr rasch (In ballad style. Very fast)…F.

11 Einfach (Simple)…E.

12 Mit Humor (With humour)…F.

13 Wild und lustig (Wild and happy)…F. & E.

14 Zart und singend (Tender and singing)…E.

15 Frisch (Fresh)…F. & E.

16 Mit gutem Humor (With good humour)

17 Wie aus der Ferne (As from a distance)…F. & E.

18 Ganz zum Überfluss meinte Eusebius noch Folgendes; dabei sprach aber viel Seligkeit aus seinen Auge

(Quite superfluously Eusebius added the following; but his eyes spoke

of great happiness)

The “Davidsbund” - Schumann’s “League of David”against the musical Philistines of the day - was a society so exclusive, he said, that “it existed only in the imagination of its founder.” Recalling the early days of his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which he owned and edited for ten years from its foundation in 1834, he explained that it had occurred to him that “in order to express divergent views about art it might be appropriate to invent contrasting characters as their spokesmen. The principal protagonists were Florestan and Eusebius…” These two “Davidsbündler” had actually first appeared in print, representing opposite sides of Schumann’s personality, in his famously prescient (“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”) article on Chopin in another magazine in 1831. They first appeared in music in Carnaval in 1835, each with his own brief portrait - Eusebius characterised as the poetic dreamer, Florestan as the passionate man of action - and, of course, they joined in the Marche des Davidsbündler contre les Philistins in the finale of that work.

In the first edition of the Davidsbündlertänze (the version which is being performed today) every piece is attributed, usually by initials, to either Eusebius or Florestan or to a combination of the two. The work is a multi-faceted reflection, seen from two broadly contrasting points of view, of the composer’s happiness in the period between his engagement to Clara Wieck in August 1837 and the unexpectedly fierce intervention of her father a few weeks later. In the second edition, published in 1850, he left out the F. and E. Initials and called the work Davidsbündler, dropping the Tänze (“dances”) from the title and describing it as “eighteen character pieces.” Diverting attention from the dance element made Schumann’s rhythmic invention here no less exciting of course. But a few other changes in the second edition, affecting the music itself, did reduce the spontaneity of a work which, he told Clara, was written “in the most delicious excitement that I ever remember.”

Schumann also told Clara that “the whole story” of the work “is of a Polterabend” - which, according to one definition, is “a wedding eve when all sort of mischievous hobgoblins and sprites torment the bride with hilarious practical jokes.” That is what happens in the sublimated rough and tumble of the Davidsbündlertänze. A theme representing Clara - taken from a mazurka in her Soirées musicales, Op.6, and quoted by Schumann in the first two bars - is teased, cajoled, jostled and caressed in a sustained outburst of rhythmic exuberance and poetic inspiration. The work is not, however, a theme and variations in any conventional sense. Clara’s opening theme in G major, for example, does not determine the overall tonality, which is the B minor first established by Eusebius in the enchantingly lyrical second piece (Innig) and confirmed by both Eusebius and Florestan when that piece is recalled near the end of the seventeenth (Wie aus der Ferne). So No.1 is a kind of prologue and Eusebius’s No.18 in C major a kind of epilogue.

In general, of course, it is Florestan who does the dancing and Eusebius the sentimental thinking. In the opening movement they combine in extending Clara’s mazurka theme into the descending phrase identified with Clara in most other works of this period. After that the mazurka rhythms are only occasionally and only briefly recalled, as when Florestan mixes them with waltz-time reminiscences of Papillons and Carnaval in No.3. In fact, the practical jokes of this “Polterabend” are nearly all rhythmical, as in the impatient syncopations of No.4, the galloping tarantella of No.6, the cross-rhythms of No.10 and - after the delightfully witty parody of a Paganini caprice in No.12 - the heavily out-of-step first section of No.13.

In the meantime, Eusebius dreams. As we know from the curious stage direction and obsessive rhythms of No.9 (in C major in anticipation of Eusebius’s No.18), Florestan also has his private feelings. It is Eusebius, however, who consistently touches on the emotional nerve, most poignantly of all perhaps in the infinitely tender and tonally uncertain No.7 in G minor but scarcely less in the sustained melodic line of the love song of No.14 in E flat major. And it is Eusebius who adds the “superfluous” but, with its midnight chimes at the end, poetically conclusive last waltz.