Nachtlied, Op. 96 No. 1

Unlike the other items in this group of rarely heard Lieder by Schumann, Mein Wagen rollet langsam dates not from towards the end of his career as a song composer but, on the contrary, from near the beginning. Written in the same month in 1840 as the Heine settings published in Dichterliebe, it was at one time intended for that collection but was withdrawn at a late stage and – it is important to remember – never published in Schumann’s life-time. Exactly why he decided to keep it out of sight, even though he chose to release two of the three other Dichterliebe rejects in 1854, we do not know. It could be, however, that he thought it an unsatisfactory setting of Heine’s text – in which case it would be unfair to belabour it for that very reason. It is true that Schumann seems to underestimate the menace of the shadowy figures that interrupt the poet’s reverie and that the piano postlude is disproportionately long. But the beauty of the song is the piano imagery inspired by the idea of a coach rolling so gently through the woods and fields, the wheels turning once in every bar, that thoughts turn dreamiily to the beloved. The intruders do not dissipate the dream, as they do in the poem, but most effectively offset it in preparation for an extended and poetically developed recall of the gently rolling figuration in the postlude.

The first two of the late songs are both girls’ laments. Just how serious the situation is in Die Spinneriin we cannot be sure. Brahms’s paradoxical harmonies in his treatment of the same words, in Mädchenlied Op.107 No.5, seem to derive from a more personally compassionate interpretation than Schumann’s setting which, while taking an authentic place in the tradition of spinning songs, has a generic inevitability about it. The allusion to Ophelia indicates that the situation in Herzeleid could scarcely be worse, as Schumann confirms in his weeping-willow piano figuration, set in a harmonically sensitive relationship with the voice, and the hint of a funeral-march rhythm in the closing bars.

There is probably no more poignant song from this troubled period in Schumann’s life than Nachtlied which, without attempting to emulate Schubert’s famous setting of the same words, comes so close to perfection in its contemplative demeanour. At the same time – in one or two instances of rhythmic unease but above all in the questioning rather than re-assuring upward seventh on the last two words – Schumann seems to fall short in confidence that Goethe’s promise of peace actually applies to him.

It was possibly through a continuing need to identify with nature that, a year later, Schumann turned to the recently published Waldlieder (Woodland Songs) of Gustav Pfarrius. Certainly, while there was a good chance of fashioning tuneful settings of the slightly smug Die Hütte and the slighly cynical Der Brautigam und die Birke, there was no hope of a song of more than minimal complexity from either of them. Happily, however, Warnung, which shows concern for someone other than the protagonist and at the same time echoes with syncopated bird song and comparatively sophisticated harmonies, comes between the two.

The six Lenau settings of Op.90 were clearly written as a cycle and meant to be performed as one. The Lied eines Schmiedes – which opens in rude (E flat major) health a cycle which is to end in a death wish (in E flat minor) – is not so much a song in itself, in spite of its splendid hammer-wielding rythms, as an introduction. Exquisite though it is on its own, Meine Rose (in B flat major) is all the more fragrant by contrast with the workshop muscularity of its predecessor. Kommen und Scheiden is a daringly vague, almost impressionistic transitional item, beginning in one key (E flat minor) and ending in another (G flat expressed enharmonically as F sharp major) to approach the bright (B major) mountain atmosphere of the next song. But, for all its initial outdoor freshnes, Die Sennin declines into the elegiac (D sharp or E flat minor) tendency which is to prevail from this point – not least in Einsamkeit, the piano part of which the undulates throughout with the waters of the fountain while passing through a variety of tonalities but ends (in E flat minor) where it began. The desolation of Der schwere Abend is all the more intense for the (surely deliberate) allusion to Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet, the triple-time rhythm of which is at first contradicted by a vocal line in duple time as though to indicate that this is no dream.

The day after he wrote Der schwere Abend, in the belief that Lenau was dead Schumann added a Requiem for the poet in the form of a setting of a German translation of part of Héloïse’s lament for Abelard (“Requiescat e labore”). A consolatory (E flat major) inspiration, ripples with heavenly harp figuration throughout. The composer was dismayed to discover, however, that Lenau was still alive when he wrote it. Worse still, he actually died on the day of the first performance of the six Lenau songs and the Requiem just before the Schumann family left Dresden for what they hoped would be a new life in Düsseldorf.