Die beiden Grenadiere Op. 49 No.1 (1840)

Abends am Strand Op. 45 No.3 (1840)

Belsatzar Op. 57 (1840)

Between February 1840 and January 1841, having previously taken little interest in writing for the voice, Schumann completed no fewer than 135 songs, well over half the number he would produce in his whole career. The source of the inspiration for this “rich harvest,” as he so rightly called it, is not difficult to find. There were other factors – including his admiration of Mendelssohn’s recent Lieder and, not least, the fact that songs were easier to sell than complex piano works – but the initial stimulus was the composer’s blissful anticipation of his marriage to Clara Wieck. Obviously, in the circumstances, the vast majority of them are love songs, directly or indirectly addressed to Clara. During that time he did, however, write a numbern of songs which he would publish three or four years later as Romanzen und Balladen to distinguish them from the lyrics presented as Lieder und Gesänge or Gedichte.

One of the most successful of the Romanzen und Balladen is Die beiden Grenadiere, a setting of a ballad by Heine who, as a young man in Düseldorf, had been impressed by the sight of defeated French soldiers on the long walk home from Russia. It begins, as one might expect, as a march in a minor key and it could conceivably go on like that. But, although the opening march tune is twice resumed, as the grenadiers discuss their unhappy fate it is replaced first by a thoughtful rhythm of even minims in the accompaniment and then by triplet arpeggios accelerating into a defiant major-key climax on the “Marseillaise” in the last three stanzas. The slow and quiet piano postlude has been described as an anti-climax but it is surely an acknowledgement of the tragic reality of the situation.

Abends am Strand, another Heine setting written at much the same time as Die beiden Grenadiere, is probably better classified as a romance than as a ballad. Certainly, it is difficult to think of any other way of describing this extraordinary inspiration which, in the absence of a narrative, is not so much a ballad as a poetic evocation of the approach of night by the sea – until, that is, the tempo accelerates to highlight not only a radiant vision of the Ganges but also a gratuitously ugly, if comic, view of Lapland. It is with some relief that the undulating quavers return at the original tempo in the last stanza and night falls to draw a veil over the sailors’ romancing.

Strangely enough, neither of the first two songs Schumann wrote in February 1840, Schlusslied des Narren and Belsatzar, is a love song. Consumed by the emotions which at much the same time inspired the Heine Liederkreis and Myrthen, he must have found them irrelevant. Certainly, Schlusslied des Narren, based on Shakespeare’s “When I was and a little tiny boy,” was withheld throughout his lifetime, while Belsatzar, a Heine ballad setting, had to wait for publication until 1846. The latter work is, however, a masterly construction, gradually increasing the dynamic tension to the point where Belshazzar utters the fateful words “Ich bin der König von Babylon!” in the 13th couplet and then relaxing it in numbed horror as the writing appears on the wall. The death of the king is presented not as a dramatic culmination to the story but, unsensationally, as its inevitable outcome.