Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart Op 135 (1852)

Abschied von Frankreich

Nach der Geburt ihres Sohnes

An die Königin Elisabeth

Abschied von der Welt

Gebet

When Schumann completed his last song cycle - his last solo songs of any kind, in fact - he was still fourteen months away from his final mental breakdown and still able to work. Even so, it is difficult not to associate his choice of these poems attributed to Mary Queen of Scots – the first beginning “I am going away,” the last ending “Save me” – with his own, all too clearly deteriorating situation. Paradoxically, the songs are all the more poignant in that they avoid poignancy, as though the composer felt the words to be so real that to add more than minimum musical colour or a too melodiously inflected vocal line would be to fictionalize them. The one extravagance he allows himself in these essentially frugal settings is the suggestion in the piano part of the rocking of the waves as Mary reluctantly leaves Calais for Leith in 1561. The prayer on the birth of her son, the future James VI of Scotland and James I of England, in 1566 is accompanied by nothing more than isolated chords at unpredictable intervals. The anguished uncertainty of her sonnet to Queen Elizabeth is reflected in one jagged motif in the piano part, just as her resignation under the sentence of death in Abschied von der Welt finds expression in little more than a short descending phrase. The closing Gebet is set in much the same way as Nach der Geburt ihres Sohnes but with a passion which, though suppressed, transcends the economy of the setting.

Gerald Larner ©2004