from Lieder und Gesänge aus Goethes Wilhelm Meister Op.98a (1849)

Kennst du das Land

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt

Heiss mich nicht reden

Singet nicht in Trauertönen (Philine)

So lasst mich scheinen

Kennst du das Land, Schumann’s first setting of verses from Wilhelm Meisters Lehjahre, was originally published as the last item in his collection of songs for children, Liederalbum für die Jugend Op.79. If it seems out of place in a children’s album, it is because the complex psychology of the waif-like Mignon – a child of a brother-sister relationship abducted from Italy and forced to work in a circus in Germany – requires mature understanding. It is better placed at the beginning of Op.98a, the collection of nine Wilhelm Meister songs completed shortly afterwards, where the melodious regularity of its comparatively unsophisticated strophic construction so effectively offsets the spontaneity of the three other Mignon settings, Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, Heiss mich nicht reden, and So lasst mich scheiden.

In Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, which is the next item in the Wilhelm Meister collection after Kennst du das Land, Mignon seems to be making up the song as she sings it, securing a shape for it by repeating, though still tentatively, the twelve short lines that make up Goethe’s poem. Heiss mich nicht reden is almost an operatic scena, beginning dramatically in C minor with a recitativo accompagnato, modulating to C major for the more lyrical aria-like middle section and ending not unhopefully, in spite of the piano’s stony intervention, in the major again.

Philine, the soubrette of Wilhelm Meister’s theatre company, is in comparison with the tragic Mignon a shallow personality with neither the heart nor the intellect to be very interested in rehearsing Hamlet, the seriousness of which she counters by singing “a ditty with a very graceful and pleasing melody.” In his setting of Singet nicht in Trauertönen Schumann duly and ingeniously supplies just what Goethe ordered.

The last of the Wilhilm Meister songs, So lasst mich scheinen – sung to zither accompaniment by Mignon dressed in angel costume in a charade and, as she knows, with little time to live – is even more impulsive than Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt. There is an element of recapitulation in the fourth stanza but it is the dying fall of the piano postlude that sets the seal on the song.