Herbstlied Op.43 No.2 (1840)

Erste Begegnung Op.74 No.1 (1840)

Sommerruh WoO7 (1849)

Schumann was not far behind Mendelssohn in turning his attention to songs for two voices. In fact, although Schumann’s first duets were written four years after the earliest of Mendelssohn’s Op.63 set, he was the first of them to go into print with works of this kind when his Four Duets Op.34 were published in 1841. His next set of duets includes Herbstlied , which shares a title with Mendelssohn’s Op.63 No.4 but which is set to quite different words, beginning in autumnal melancholy but ending, with an appropriate change of key, in confidence in renewal.

Some of the most captivating of Schumann’s later duets are to be found in the Spanisches Liederspiel Op.74, a collection of German translations from the Spanish by Emanuel Geibel – whose “limpid and charming poetry”, as Schumann described it, was to furnish many of the texts for Hugo Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch forty years later. Conceived in semi-dramatic form, in that a loose kind of narrative links the various items together, the Spanisches Liederspiel begins with Erste Begnegun g in which the girl in the story, represented by two female voices, sings of her first meeting with the boy she loves. Although the idiom is different, given the modestly exotic colouring and the hints of a strummed guitar in the accompaniment, the treatment of the voices is much the same as in the Mendelssohn duets. It is no more adventurous in Sommerruh but without inhibiting effective colouring or harmonic beauty.