Mit Myrten und Rosen, Op.24, No.9

Er ist’s, Op.79, No.24

Marienwürmchen, Op.79, No.13

Mondnacht, Op.39, No.5

Stille Tränen, Oop.35, No.10

An den Mond, Op.95, No.2

Schneeglöckchen, Op.79, No.26

Es stürmet am Abendhimmel, Op.89, No.1

Dein Angesicht, Op.127, No.2

Mädchen-Schwermut, Op.142, No.3

Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden, Op.24, No.5

Schumann is regularly accused either of failing to understand the irony in Heinrich Heine’s verse or of failing to reflect it in his settings. But Myrten und Rosen, the closing item in the first of his song cycles, the Liederkreis Op.24 of 1840, is an unusually sensitive study in irony. In choosing a set of poems called Junge Leiden (“Young Sorrows”) in Heine’s Buch der Lieder, Schumann knew exactly what he was dealing with and that any consolation offered at the end is little better than illusory. So the chivalrous theme in the piano part at the beginning of Myrten und Rosen survives only as long as the poet keeps up the pretence and it returns only to accompany the self-mockery implied in the overheated imagery of his songs flowing like lava from Etna. The faint hope expressed at the end is reflected in a much subdued echo of the eager triplet figures with which the song began.

Er ist’s comes from the Lieder-Album für die Jugend (“Song Album for the Young”) Op.79, which was written in 1849 as a vocal sequel to the piano Album für die Jugend Op.68. As this charming but excitable little setting of a Mörike Spring poem suggests, they are not so much songs to be sung by children as songs inspired by “poems appropriate to childhood.” Another song from the same collection, Marienwürmchen is so rewarding in its delicately witty treatment of childish words from Des Knaben Wunderhorn that it too has become a regular item in the adult repertoire.

Returning to the miraculous song year of 1840, this time to the Eichendorff Liederkreis Op.39, Mondnacht is one of the most beautiful not only of Schumann’s songs but of songs by any composer. Its genius rests in its simplicity. A melody of two short phrases is repeated with every two lines of verse except at the beginning of the last stanza, where the poet’s thoughts turn from the moonlit landscape to his own soul and a melodic variant turns inwards with them. The harmonies scarcely depart from the tonic while the piano accompaniment offers an ostinato of exquisite dissonances and brief but regular reflections of the vocal line low in the left hand. The Zwölf Gedichte von Justinus Kerner Op.35, were also written in 1840 and the tenth of them, Stille Tränen, is inspired by another example of the poet’s identification with nocturnal nature. Again the voice is poised against an ostinato accompaniment, although in this case the colours are darker to match the more vulnerable state of mind and the expression correspondingly more passionate. An den Mond is an even sadder moonlit thought. The second of three Byron settings, the Drei Gesänge Op.95 written in the winter of 1849, it expresses the poet’s disenchantment in the cold harmonies of a drily arpeggiated accompaniment.

Resuming the Spring theme of Er ist’s,Schneeglöckchen, which also comes from the Lieder-Album für die Jugend, reflects Friedrich Rückert’s flower-bell imagery in a delicately sonorous piano accompaniment to a delightfully melodious vocal line. In direct and dramatic contrast is Es stürmet am Abendhimmel, one of the Sechs Gesänge Op.89 to words by the amateur poet, Wilhelm Schöpff, whose not very modest pen name was Wilfried von der Neun (the allusion is to the nine Muses) and whom Schumann somewhat unwisely encouraged to supply him with verses in 1850. Published only in 1854 (hence its late opus number), Dein Angesicht is one of four Heine settings written in 1840 for the Dichterliebe cycle but left out of the final version - presumably, in this case, because its tenderly expressed but somewhat macabre sentiment would have been out of place in a collection celebrating the composer’s hard-won union with Clara. Also written in 1840 but not published in Schumann’s lifetime, Mädchen-Schwermut is a touchingly modest setting of a melancholy text by one of Clara’s friends, Lily Bernhard.

Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden represents a decisive stage in the poet’s renunciation of his unrequited love in the Heine Liederkreis of 1840. In its alternation of the rocking rhythms and the apparently not too distressed vocal line introduced in the first stanza with two impulsive episodes of harmonic and rhythmic disarray, it is one of the most perceptive and most disturbing of all Schumann’s song settings.