Gesänge der Frühe, Op.133

Im ruhigen Tempo

(In a quiet tempo)

Belebt, nicht zu rasch)

(Fairly quick, not too fast)

Lebhaft

(Lively)

Bewegt

(Fairly quick)

Im Anfange ruhiges, im Verlauf bewegtes Tempo

(In a quiet tempo to begin with, quicker later)

Schumann described his Gesänge der Frühe - the last of his piano works to be published in his lifetime - as “five characteristic pieces dedicated to the poetess Bettina… depicting the emotions on the approach and advance of morning.” Echoing the escape clause in Beethoven’s description of his Pastoral Symphony, they were, he added, “more an expression of feeling than painting.”

Useful information though that is, there is a possibly more significant clue to the meaning of these cryptic pieces on the title page of Schumann’s manuscript where the main heading “an Diotima” (“to Diotima”) has been crossed out. Suffering the mental anguish that was shortly to drive him into attempting to drown himself, perhaps he felt that this allusion to Diotima - the ideal beauty and spiritual saviour of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin - was giving too much away. The dedication to Bettina Brentano, who had befriended Hölderlin and had helped to get him out of the asylum to which he had been committed in 1806, seems to confirm that something of the kind was in his mind.

In this light the Gesänge der Frühe, which were completed in 1853 just a few months before he threw himself into the Rhine at Düsseldorf, are not only “Songs of the Morning” but also visions of release from the metaphorical darkness that was closing in on him. Certainly, like the Variations that Schumann was working on at the time of his suicide attempt, they made a more than ordinary impression on Brahms, who had recently become a close friend of both Robert and Clara.

The opening piece in D major, a hymn to dawn perhaps, is echoed in more than one of Brahms’s works. He learned something too from the piano writing of the second piece - though perhaps not from the descriptive element in it which, during the course of the harmonic development from B minor to D major, seems to add a touch of birdsong to the sun rising in the lower registers of the piano. While he might have made a note to avoid the repetetive rhythms of the energetically mid-morning third piece in A major, he absorbed so much of the exquisitely lyrical fourth in F sharp minor that it is tempting to think of it as an “intermezzo.” In the last piece Schumann returns to the D major tonality and the contemplative manner of the first but this time overlaying the sustained melodic line with happily chosen decorative detail.