Robert Schumann and the Creation of Irony, by Jon W. Finson (© 2016)

This recording of Schumann’s two most famous “canonical” song cycles would seem at first to pair disparate entities. The “Eichendorff” Liederkreis, op. 39, comes from the long tradition of “Wanderer” cycles documenting a young man’s adventures in the wide world, whereas Dichterliebe, op. 48, takes as its artistic conceit the stages of a failed love affair. Yet both groupings, composed in direct chronological succession to one another, touch at common points on many levels. For one thing, Schumann served as the literary creator of both collections, choosing and ordering the poems himself to fashion their sequence of events. For another, both song cycles had a relatively long and somewhat arduous compositional genesis, each undergoing a substantial revision before it took the shape we know today. And finally, both collections make persistent use of irony to achieve their artistic effect at all levels: within the individual poems themselves, in the juxtaposition of those poems, and then in the interaction of text, melody, and piano writing that reveals Schumann as a master of the Lied.

Schumann’s output of Lieder resulted initially from financial exigency. During the 1830s he published exclusively works for the keyboard, many of them constructed by gathering piquant miniatures into collections meant to former larger wholes (such as Papillons, Carnaval, the Davidsbündlertänze, or Kinderszenen). We value these highly today, but Schumann’s early works for piano mystified or downright offended contemporary audiences. The composer lamented of his own Carnaval in an 1840 performance by Franz Liszt, “Much of [the piece] may charm this or that individual, but the musical mood changes much more quickly than the general public (which doesn’t want to be startled at every turn) can follow. . . . Though [Liszt] played with such great sympathy, so brilliantly, that it may have struck some individuals, the general audience remained unmoved.” Neither did the sheet music sell, either because of the music’s oddity or on account of its technical difficulty.

The distinctive writing in Schumann’s piano miniatures prepared him perfectly, however, to capture the varying moods of poetry in songs. Nobody expected these to last more than a couple of minutes, and their texts justified the very eccentricities that seemed inexplicable in instrumental music. Forced to prove in a court of law that he could make enough money from composition to marry Clara Wieck against her father’s strenuous objections, Schumann discovered in 1840 that he could produce and market Lieder quickly and successfully. He wrote proudly to his intended in May 1840, “In this half year I earned close to 400 Thaler from my compositions. It is amazing: I produce no book of songs of five sheets [10 pages] for less than 6 louis d’or [ca. 34 Thaler].” Not only did Schumann possess the musical background to write exceptional songs, he also had a wide and discerning knowledge of German literature. He chose from among recent masters (Heine, Eichendorff, Rückert) and more sentimental modern favorites (Chamisso, Kerner), all of whom were becoming touchstones of a liberal republican nationalism. Educated German middle-class consumers held this literature in high esteem and provided a ready market for solo vocal sheet music that set such poetry. Schumann penned roughly 125 songs in 1840—almost half of his entire output, which he expanded a bit more in 1841–42—and then published them over a period of seven years until his second efflorescence of Lieder composition began in 1847.

We must always understand that the Lied is a literary experience as much as a musical one, and we can translate the word itself either as “lyric” or “song.” In fact, during Schuman’s day, poets regularly gave public readings of their Lieder before literary societies as well as releasing them in print. Musical Lieder, whether published in cycles or miscellaneous collections, formed one of the many varieties of Hausmusik—compositions made primarily for talented amateurs to perform at home. One or two Lieder might occasionally appear on a concert program (along with a scattering of opera arias, individual pieces of chamber music, and then, if an orchestra was available, a symphony). But Germans during Schumann’s day never considered Lieder the province of professional singers and musicians, let alone appropriate in a public setting devoted entirely to them. The Liederabend (a professional chamber-music concert devoted solely to songs) as we know it today did not make its appearance until the 1860s. Accordingly, op. 48 did not appear on the concert stage as a cycle until April 1861, op. 39 in May 1863. The original domestic musical and literary milieu of Lieder is crucial to our understanding of how and why Schumann composed them and assembled them into volumes for public consumption.

The Eichendorff Liederkreis had one of the more unusual histories of genesis and publication among Schumann’s volumes of songs (and one shared by a very few of his remaining pieces in any genre). Schumann composed the Lieder we know today in the final version of op. 39 over the period of three weeks between May 1 and May 20, 1840. But then on June 22 of that year, he decided to add a new song to begin the cycle, substituting “Der frohe Wandersmann” (“The Merry Wanderer”) for “In der Fremde” (I) (In Foreign Parts) and publishing this version with Tobias Haslinger in August, 1842. After a number of years the composer returned to his original conception and published a revised version of the cycle (which appears in this recording) with Friedrich Whistling in October 1849. Schumann placed “Der frohe Wandersmann” at the beginning of his first version of the Eichendorff Liederkreis because the poem enjoyed widespread popularity and recognition. It had appeared at the beginning of Eichendorff’s beloved novel Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Ne’er-Do-Well), the tale of a young man who leaves home to make his fortune and finds only misfortune. His “great expectations” on setting out on his misadventures read:

He whom God would show His favor,
Is sent into the wider world,
To taste His wonders’ glorious savor
In hill, wood, stream, and field unfurl’d.

The lazy who stay homebound lying,
Ne’er behold the dawning’s red,
They only know of children’s crying,
Care and labor, need for bread.


The riv’lets from the mountains springing,
The larks who soar so high with joy,
Shall I not join them in my singing
With fullest voice in glad alloy?

I leave the good Lord sole command;
With riv’let, lark and hill and field,
With earth and heaven in His hand,
He knows for me what they best yield.

Beginning a Liederkreis in this way signals a wanderer’s or wayfarer’s cycle, a genre with a history stretching back into the eighteenth century and extending to famous nineteenth-century examples such as Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and countless others. These cycles usually present loosely knit snapshots from a journey in search of adventure and a beloved, ending either in amorous success or tragic death. In Schumann’s cycle, the persona encounters a series of bizarre and uncanny scenes in a fantastic sequence that led the composer to describe the cycle as his “most romantic.” This sense of “romantic” entails a pervasive element of “romantic irony,” a poetic device in which nothing is what it seems on its surface or conceptual dissonance arises within individual lyrics or between successive numbers in a series. For though a cycle may consist of isolated moments from the journey, our psychological proclivity to retain a memory of past events and use them to predict future ones leads us to construct a narrative. Ultimately Schumann found “Der frohe Wandersmann” unsuited to the atmosphere and “narrative” he wished to suggest, and he substituted “In der Fremde” (I) in his revised version as more appropriate.

In the version of op. 39 presented here, the persona sets out literally under a cloud (replete with lightening), alone and homeless, with grim prospects (the word “ruhe” often evokes death during this period) as he journeys “in the foreign” solitude of a forest. But all is not as grim as it initially seems: in the second Lied the speaker holds before him a “wonderfully blessed image” of his beloved, which cheers him in a gently accompanied major mode. All is well? Guess again. Forests are dangerous places, should one encounter beautiful strangers. The third number comes from the tradition of the miniature
Romanzen or ballads that often appear in Schumann’s wayfaring cycles. The texts for this sub-genre of the Lied relate a short tale that combines narrative, dramatic, and lyrical elements. “Waldesgespräch” (“Dialogue in the Forest”) portrays a hunter riding, as the piano part and vocal line both suggest musically, through the woods on a cold night and happening on a lone maiden, whom he invites home. Her response (accompanied by stereotypical “wave” figures) warns him off in ironically seductive tones: men are not to be trusted, she coos, and hunting horns might lead him astray. The hunter persists and realizes too late that the “maiden” is a witch—and not just any witch but the famous Lorelei, who has left her castle on the Rhine to ensnare unwary wayfarers in the nearby forest. The hunter becomes the prey, and he will not make it out alive. Ballads always have elements of love, lust, or grisly death (sometimes combining all three). And this one also situates the persona in the distinctly nationalistic landscape of the Rhineland, a place of fabled German natural beauty to which other songs in op. 39 return. The persona’s reaction to this story? It paradoxically gives him a sense of well-being in the next number. Nothing in Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis ever turns out as we expect, for in high Romanticism a narrative apparatus is merely metaphor, disguising a more profound reality.

This Romantic world appears most vividly in “Mondnacht” (roughly “Moonlit Night”), in which the view of a common natural scene has unimagined consequences. Schumann’s setting suspends all sense of motion for the first two stanzas of the poem through a series of incessantly repeated notes in the piano, a constant repetition of a single melodic phrase for each couplet, and a lack of clarity about the centering key. Our wayfarer has happened on the edge of an open field during a night with a bright, full moon. But Eichendorff describes this as heaven “kissing the earth,” moving the earth to dream of heaven. And he then draws a picture of even more improbable causation from this event: a breeze arises and moves gently over tassels of grain, “so starry-clear was the night.” The ultimate effect on the beholder is entirely unexpected: his soul leaves his body and flies over the landscape “as if flying home.” Schumann underlines this uncanny experience, expanding the melodic range (“spread[ing] wide its wings”) and finally confirming the actual key to bring the setting “home” (“nach Haus”). Many critics consider this song the most perfect and beautiful combination of text, melody, and instrumental writing in the history of the German Lied. Schumann then builds on the events of “Mondnacht” by relating in ecstatic tones (“Beautiful Foreign Lands”) that the “fantastic night” portends a “great happiness to come” that concludes the first volume of the cycle.

The second volume of the cycle, however, is anything but fortunate at its outset. The persona finds himself beholding another Rhenish scene on the ramparts of a decaying castle where an ancient knight lies buried, symbol of Teutonic glory during the First Reich (919–1024), which unified all German-speaking lands under Saxon rule. In “Auf einer Burg” (“In a Castle”), German national hopes have withered and decayed and the German people, symbolized by the bride at a wedding in the valley below, lament their diminished status as hack musicians heedlessly play cheerful tunes. Of course, Schumann’s setting is anything but cheerful. The pseudo-contrapuntal writing in minor mode that prefaces each stanza invokes a “Gothic” musical stereotype (or topos) in its antique style (the composer would use this topos again, though in major mode, to invoke the wonders of the Cologne cathedral in the fourth movement of his “Rhenish” symphony). “In der Fremde” (II) (“In Foreign Parts”) continues the theme of lost happiness and national prestige by transplanting the castle in the previous song to a valley, which disorients the wayfarer and makes him believe that the beloved he seeks has died long ago. And “Wehmut” (“Melancholy”) reinforces the gloom at this turn of events by suggesting that the singing of nightingales in the awakening spring disguises deep emotional pain. “Zwielicht” (“Twilight”) reinterprets this dark mood as something sinister: the piano prelude for this song also begins by using the “Gothic” topos to portend dread and betrayal. The relatively uneventful melodic line resembles something like the flat affect of a paranoid: having lost his beloved in the previous song, the persona now loses trust in friends and admonishes the listener to be on guard.

The final two Lieder in op. 39 provide the closing ironic twist of the gloomy second
volume. “Im Walde” (“In the Forest”) refers back to the musical “riding” topos that opened “Dialogue in the Forest,” now depicting an ostensibly happy wedding and a merry hunt, which paradoxically cause the persona to “shudder” in the depths of his heart. He lies not far from the sad protagonist of Die schöne Müllerin who drowns himself after losing his beloved. But “Frühlingsnacht” (“Springtime Night”) reverses everything: quite unexpectedly all of nature—nightingales, stars, the enchanted moon—inform him that he has won his beloved. His travels have brought him an ecstatically happy ending to his quest
(reinforced by the rapid drumming in the piano part and the highly active vocal line).

Informed readers in Schumann’s day had no illusions that the love affair detailed in Dichterliebe would have a happy ending. Those who admired Heinrich Heine’s poetry and had read his Buch der Lieder (Book of Lyrics) already knew that the poet took a jaundiced view of love altogether. By the time Schumann embarked on the composition of the songs in Dichterliebe, he had already set a poetic cycle written and published as such by Heine himself. This composition appeared as Schumann’s first volume of songs, op. 24, and the great success of the initial venture likely prompted the composer’s determination to fashion a sequel. Op. 24 begins with the same hopeful ardor and also ends in bitterly melodramatic disappointment. With this template before him, Schumann composed the songs for his second Heine cycle with amazing rapidity from May 24 to June 1, 1840. But he had an extraordinarily difficult time placing the opus with a publisher. He offered it first in June 1840 to Bote & Bock in Berlin, who declined. In 1841 the Leipzig publisher of the first Heine cycle, Breitkopf & Härtel, offered a disparaging tip to the composer on this account: “We have learned in many similar cases that the rapid appearance of two works by one and the same composer in the same genre injures both. And we ourselves believe this must be the case already with the many volumes of your beautiful songs, which coincidentally appeared at the same time more by happenstance, [and] the negligence of publishers, than by your wishes.” Schumann therefore waited until 1843 to try his luck with Dichterliebe again, first with Johann Hoffman in Prague (May), then with Breitkopf & Härtel (August), and
finally with Peters in Leipzig (October), who accepted but must have negotiated Schumann’s original twenty-song version down to sixteen numbers in two volumes.

Schumann drew the poetry in Dichterliebe from the “Lyrical Intermezzo,” a subsection of Heine’s Buch der Lieder. The composer’s well-read audience would have known the prologue to this interlude about a gauche and lovelorn knight with “hollow white cheeks” who falls asleep in his cups and dreams of a beautiful sea nymph who frolics with him in her watery palace. But when he awakens, this vision has dissolved, leaving him to write verse about his amorous disappointments in his “gloomy poet’s alcove.” His Poet’s Love is doomed to fail from the beginning, and the verse is ironic from the outset, sometimes verging on bitter sarcasm. For listeners unfamiliar with this background of poetic irony, Schumann provides a musical one.

Volume one of Dichterliebe begins “In the glorious month of May,” which seems on its surface to relate the persona’s simple declaration of love. But there is something amiss here. The piano part, dripping with saccharine arpeggios, never settles in one key, and the song does not come to a satisfying cadence. It leads instead to the next song with a deliberately insipid text (when Heine read such poetry, with nightingale’s song and flowers presented to a “dear child,” his audience would burst into laughter). Schumann decouples his instrumental part just slightly from the vocal line by delaying the cadence in the piano until after the singer has finished his line, as if to say “oh, sure.” To set the obsessive
assonance of the third song (“reine, feine, kleine, eine”) Schumann provides a manic setting that leaves even the best singer out of breath in its headlong speed and repeats the internally rhyming line at the end just to rub it in. By way of contrast, Schumann’s setting for “When I Look into Your Eyes” steps into the background. He needs nothing to
emphasize the irony of Heine’s verse: the twist becomes obvious at the end of the poem (“But when you say, ‘I love you,’ I must weep bitterly”). But the long postlude does resemble something like a musical elegy by way of commentary on the romantic doom about to ensue.

Volume one of the cycle now veers into erotic fantasy, delusional obsession, bitterness, and, finally, self-pity. For the image of the persona suggestively plunging his “soul into the chalice of the lily,” causing the flower to “sing,” Schumann responds with ardent arpeggios, which continue to quiver “like the kiss from her lips” even after the melody of the song has concluded. And we gain a premonition of the inevitable outcome of the affair from the piano part to a Lied situated in the Cologne cathedral (the nationalistic image will return again in greater force). Schumann has supplied a funeral march to accompany the persona’s fantastic vision of his beloved’s face in a portrait of the Virgin Mary. But he “will not complain” at being dropped, at least not according to the first lines of the seventh song’s text, belied by the incessant grumbling of the piano. Even after he dreams of the “snake that gnaws at her heart,” he will not grumble (the repeated lines at the end added by the composer) as the pianist redoubles his attack on his hapless instrument. Quickly rippling arpeggios return in the satiric finale to this volume, in which the “little flowers,” the “little stars,” “the nightingales” would join the persona in his grief, if they only knew how “she tore [his] heart asunder.” Schumann could not help emphasizing this last sentiment, both by the emphatic declamatory outburst at the end of the vocal part and then the pianist’s frenetic dash to the end of the postlude.

Volume two of the cycle portrays a persona on the brink of infatuated madness pulling back from the precipice at the very last moment. Schumann chose to start with a pair of auditory fantasies, beginning with a demented minor-mode waltz in which the persona imagines, “They’re probably dancing the wedding reel of my heart’s most beloved,” accompanied by the “sobs and groans [of] the dear cherubs.” In response to the semantic content of Heine’s verse, the composer produces one of his more unusual settings in its relationship among text, melody, and instrumental writing. Rufus Hallmark, examining the sketches for this song, relates that the composer outlined only the piano part. Schumann probably had the vocal line in mind as he wrote, but the resulting song does bear strong evidence of its genesis. For the composer has superimposed the vocal melody and declamation of the text onto a dance, repeating some of Heine’s lines to make the verse fit the instrumental music rather than the other way around (Mahler would later adopt this as his primary approach to setting text). By way of contrast, the idea of recalling a song the beloved once sang elicits a return to the primacy of the vocal line, supported by limpid arpeggiations, seemingly indifferent to the persona’s “enormous pain.” And the “old story” of the beloved marrying another man unfolds sarcastically over a bumptious polka, which ends with the cheerful assurance that the heart of anyone to whom this happens will “break in two.”

The lovelorn persona now comes totally unglued, first in a surreal stroll through a garden. The rhetorical device (called “apostrophe”) of addressing inanimate objects had become a cliché in Romantic poetry, and Heine makes a little fun of it by reversing it here. The flowers in the garden whisper sympathetically to the jilted lover, “Don’t be angry with our sister, you sad, pale man” (a direct reference to the pale knight in the prologue). Schumann follows this with a dripping instrumental epilogue that lasts longer than the
vocal part. And the composer next assembles a dream sequence. First we hear a quasi-recitative in which the persona imagines his beloved dead, then abandoning him, then declaring her fidelity with all the illogic of a nightmare. He then dreams that she still harbors tender feelings for him, causing him to throw himself before her “sweet feet.” But at the end of this vision she presents him with a cypress wreath, signifying mourning. To conclude this series of hallucinations, Schumann transports the persona in folkloric tones to a fabled land of beautiful flowers, dancing phantoms, phosphorescent trees, and glistening streams. But all this proves illusory too, disappearing at morning’s light like mere foam, yet another reference to the prologue’s sorrowful poet whose fantasies of an ocean nymph vanish with the dawn.

Dichterliebe concludes by setting the last poem in Heine’s “Lyrical Intermezzo,” thus preserving the literary frame set out by the poet (the first four poems in the “Intermezzo” appear in order at the beginning of Schumann’s opus). Heine builds his text using a selection of exaggerated nationalistic similes, burying “the old evil songs” in a coffin as big as the Heidelberg barrel from a famous pub there, supported on a pall as long as the
half-mile pontoon bridge across the Rhine at Mainz, and borne by twelve giants as big as the statue of St. Christopher in the Cologne cathedral. This frame of reference would have appealed to the educated middle-class German consumers of Lieder in Heine’s and Schumann’s time. The composer supports the imagery and sentiments of the verse with a magisterially implacable funeral march for the piano, but the march gives way in the last verse to quasi-recitative for Heine’s concluding apothegm, “Do you know why the coffin needs to be so big and heavy? Because I am laying [Schumann: “sinking”] both my love and my pain in it.” And then in a remarkable gesture the composer transforms this exaggerated bitterness into (perhaps sarcastic) forgiveness by quoting the long postlude from the twelfth song, recalling the lines, “Don’t be angry with our sister, you sad, pale man.”

Dichterliebe owes its continuing popularity first to its implied narrative about the stages of a failed love affair, something to which any adult can relate. But it also displays most vividly among all of Schumann’s output the rich musical potential of the German Lied. In Dichterliebe the pianist changes from an accompanist to an equal partner in the work of art, helping to create a polyrhythmic interaction of text (both its structure and meaning), vocal melody, and instrumental writing that continues to intrigue and compel listeners.