Ständchen Op.36 No.2 (1840)

Mondnacht Op.39 No.5 (1840)

Er ist’s Op.79 No.23 (1849)

Hauptmanns Weib Op.25 No.19 (1840)

Hochländisches Wiegenlied Op.25 No.14 (1840)

Aufträge Op.77 No.5 (1850)

Stille Tränen Op.35 No.10 (1840)

Although Schumann had written several promising songs in his youth, in the ten turbulent years before his marriage to Clara Wieck he had concentrated almost exclusively on piano music. It was only in February 1840, when it was clear that her father’s virulent opposition to their marriage would be defeated in the courts, that he turned back to song. Within a year he had completed more than 125 Lieder, most of them addressed to Clara in one way or another. With its seductively strummed guitar-style accompaniment Ständchen, one of six Reinick settings written a month or two before the wedding in September 1840, is a particularly delightful example of its amorous kind. Written a few weeks earlier, Mondnacht (from the Eichendorff Liederkreis) is one of the most beautiful of all Schumann’s songs, beginning with its exquisitely fragrant piano ritornello and floating its vocal line on an ostinato of delicate dissonances.

The charmingly excitable setting of Mörike’s spring poem Er ist’s from the Lieder-Album für die Jugend - a “Song Album for the Young” compiled in 1849 as a vocal sequel to the piano Album für die Jugend - is followed by two Burns songs from the Myrthen collection presented to Clara as a wedding present in 1840. Gerhard’s apparently wilful mistranslation of The Captain’s Lady gave Schumann the opportunity to acknowledge Clara’s moral courage in Hauptmanns Weib, which he thought “really original and romantic too.” In a more faithful German version Burns’s “Hee Balou” is the basis of a song, Hochländisches Wiegenlied, that must have appealed not only to her maternal instincts but also, with its Scotch snap and bagpipe drone affectionately applied to a lullaby for a bandit baby, her sense of irony.

Aufträge, an early product of a second surge of song activity in 1850, features the most brilliant piano part in any of Schumann’s songs together with a wittily calculated voice part. Going back to 1840, Stille Tränen, which for the most part restricts the piano to a freely modulating chordal accompaniment to an expressively arching vocal line, could scarcely be more different. As she would have understood from the eloquent piano postlude, the composer’s love for Clara is the inspiration once again.