by Martin Geck
The category of humor that Schumann brings into play here clearly provides a key not only to his early piano music but also to his whole aesthetic outlook on the world of song. This view is based on the conviction that subjective experience is possible only at a particular moment and even then only in the way in which the finite founders on the infinite. Eichendorff’s poem “Mondnacht” (Moonlit night) contains the lines:
Und meine Seele spannte
Weit ihre Flügel aus,
Flog durch die stillen Lande,
Als flöge sie nach Haus.
[And then my soul a-sighing/Spread out her wings to roam/Through silent landscapes flying/As she were flying home.11]
Here the idea of returning home may be interpreted as something that has the potential to happen, whereas with Schumann it acquires an air of unreality as the vocal line ends on a chord similar to the one described by musicologists as an interrupted cadence. (In German, the term Trugschluss literally means “deceptive ending.”) The vocal line gives the impression that the soul has made an emergency landing in the finite, and it requires the piano postlude to open up a vision of the longed-for infinite. This is romantic humor of a kind that Schumann not only encouraged other composers to adopt but which he himself was able to demonstrate in particularly striking ways.
It was with a certain sadness that the Greek-born German musicologist Thrasybulos Georgiades, for whom the unspoiled world of art music came to an end with Schubert, noted how artists of Schumann’s generation set out “to free the world from the fetters of the ‘public and conventional’ by means of the private and subjective.”12 However justified or otherwise the critical undertone that informs this statement, there is no doubt that in his song cycles Schumann succeeded in giving voice in both words and music to a new subjectivity. Having lost its way, the confused subject—“I know not where I am”—finds hitherto unprecedented sounds for the situation in which it finds itself. Above and beyond the specific example of Schumann himself, this represents an advance in the world of art: the new is not necessarily better, but in an act of emancipation it expresses something that may already have existed but which could previously not be spoken aloud.
It may now be spoken aloud because the “embrace” or “symbiosis” of poetry and music is achieved not by any direct means but often enough in a cryptic, irrational, and fantastical way. Lawrence Kramer has noted that at many points in Schumann’s song cycles,
the text is trying, naïvely or defensively, to suppress something, to inhibit the possibility of a reading that the song insists on pursuing. A latent discontinuity in the poetry is thus made explicit in the projected form of an open tension between the poetry and the music.13
Schumann demonstrates a magnificent ability to play with this tension. His handling of the text cannot be determined in advance but demonstrates a degree of freedom in formal matters such that his lieder may be seen as examples of “absolute” music as defined by the early romantics in their typically generous way. These songs are “absolute” to the extent that the relationship between vocal line and piano writing can be summed up in the image of a symbiosis: the listener does not necessarily have to pay attention to the individual words because everything is “said” by the way that voice and piano chime together in total accord.
In this sense many of Schumann’s songs are miniature character-pieces that can be meaningfully performed without the human voice. It is no accident that Clara Schumann published thirty of them for unaccompanied piano. Take the third song from Dichterliebe:
Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne,
Die liebt’ ich einst alle in Liebeswonne.
Ich lieb’ sie nicht mehr, ich liebe alleine
Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine;
Sie selber, aller Liebe Bronne,
Ist Rose und Lilie und Taube und Sonne.
[The rose and the lily, the sun and the dove,/I loved them all once with the bliss of love./I love them no more, I love but her only,/The holy, the lowly, the lovely, the lonely;/Herself the fount of every love—/The rose and the lily, the sun and the dove.14]
This is the original wording of Heine’s poem. Schumann turned the word Bronne (fount) into Wonne (joy) and at the very end repeated the lines “I love but her only,/The holy, the lowly, the lovely, the lonely.” Such a change would hardly represent an improvement to the poem if it had not been set to music, but within the context of the music it does not detract from Heine’s intention. Heine’s original is an emphatic love poem with a sense of elation that has become altogether breathless in Schumann’s setting. Heine’s poem comes close to creating the impression of a series of childish rhymes but triggers a veritable whirlwind from the composer, a naïve children’s game becoming a virtuosic form of expressive dance. Schumann understood Heine—although he could easily have misunderstood the poem—and yet he still went on to create something new and different.
Is it possible, however, that he failed to hear the note of irony in Heine’s poem? After all, the lovesickness from which the poet suffers incurably is thrust aside for a moment in order to allow him simply to enjoy himself as a child might do.
This brings us to the heart of a fundamental debate about Schumann’s lieder. Debussy, for example, argued that his predecessor had not understood the subtle irony of poems that Heine himself characterized as “pain plunged in honey,”15 but the real roots of this suspicion lie in German nationalist (and, later, National Socialist) anti-Semitism: commentators refused to accept that Schumann, as a sentimental German, could ever derive any pleasure from the “games played by the deracinated” Heine,16 which is from two points of view a hazardous assumption.
In the first place, it is difficult for us today to imagine the extent to which Heine’s love poetry struck a nerve with enlightened contemporaries, who did not need Schumann’s literary appreciation to sense the element of irony even at those points where it is not obvious—not that this precludes the possibility of their ignoring it in specific cases. The breathlessness that informs Schumann’s setting of “Die Rose, die Lilie” can be seen from the standpoint of the man who is in love and who takes himself and his enthusiasm entirely seriously. But it can also be seen from the vantage point of the observer who greets such effusiveness with the hint of a smile.
By dint of the fact that Schumann has complete control of the poem (rather than merely keeping it under control), he is able to write music that does not simply fit it like a glove but enters into a true symbiosis with it. Modern semiotics provides us with an appropriate mode of perception when it speaks of different voices, voices found not only in the novel but also in music. For a composer who had already completed Papillons, Kreisleriana, the C Major Fantasy and the Humoresque, it was self-evident that a piece would not speak with a single voice but that—to quote from Eichendorff’s poem “Twilight”—“voices” would “wander to and fro.”
The listener’s pleasure and task consists in acknowledging each of these voices in turn. The voices do not need to be those of the poet and the composer. Vocal line and accompaniment can also function as a pair of voices. This may be a nonconflictual process, as is the case with “Die Rose, die Lilie,” but it may also be profoundly effortful, as it is in another song from the same cycle, “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet,” in which the listener must keep switching between close and sympathetic attention to the vocal line and an equally close interest in the piano part.
Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet,
Mir träumte, du lägest im Grab.
Ich wachte auf, und die Träne
Floss noch von der Wange herab.
Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet,
Mir träumt’, du verließest mich.
Ich wachte auf, und ich weinte
Noch lange bitterlich.
Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet,
Mir träumte, du wärst mir noch gut.
Ich wachte auf, und noch immer
Strömt meine Tränenflut.
[In dream I lay
a-weeping,/I dreamt, in the grave thou didst lie./I waked again, and the tear-drops/Still ran from my streaming eye./In dream I lay a-weeping,/I dreamt thou forsookest me./I waked again, and awaken’d/Awhile wept bitterly./In dream I lay a-weeping,/I dreamt thou wert kind to me still./I waked again, and yet ever/Streams down the deep tear-rill.17]
It is difficult to structure a poem in a clearer or more memorable way, difficult to deliver a more straightforward account of this tale of love’s endless anguish than Heine does here. Schumann leaves everything as it is, while at the same time turning on its head the traditional aesthetic of the piano-accompanied song. For two of the three verses, the vocal line is unaccompanied:
The opening of “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” from Dichterliebe, op. 48 (1840).
Instead, the piano takes over the role of a fellow conversationalist whose silence is eloquent and who limits himself to helpless gestures in the pauses between the lines of the song. In the final verse the numbness dissolves at the words “strömt meine Tränenflut” (streams down the deep tear-rill), but even then the change is only temporary. Although Schumann brings the vocal line to an end on E-flat—the piece is in E-flat minor—he interprets this note as part of a dissonant six-five chord that then resolves in the direction of A-flat minor, so that voice and piano are again forced apart. Only after the voice has died away does the chord in the piano resolve and produce a consonance.
But this is not the end of the matter, for there follows what the Belgian composer Henri Pousseur has called “one of the longest, emptiest, and most irreconcilable passages in the whole of the classical and romantic repertory, prefiguring sounds that we can find in a good deal of modern music, especially post-Webern.”18 Only superficially is this a postlude in which the hesitant chords in the piano, familiar from earlier, are interrupted by lengthy rests. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of a rest interrupted by hesitant chords.
Since the days of humanism, the Generalpause has traditionally been seen as a symbol of the onset of death. In his oratorio, The Seven Last Words of Christ, Heinrich Schütz introduces a Generalpause into the choral writing after the phrase “and he gave up the ghost,” and in his notes on his Egmont Overture Beethoven writes: “Death could be expressed by a rest.” But few other composers create such a disturbing impact with this stylistic device as Schumann does. Heine experts with an interest in depth psychology have read an unconscious death threat into the line “I dreamt, in the grave thou didst lie,” but music lovers generally ignore such thoughts. Are they right to do so? Schumann must have been a hero if his long struggle to win Clara had not acquired aggressive and auto-aggressive aspects. Be that as it may, the “truth of the musical expression”19 that was so important to Schumann in his song settings undoubtedly extended to the “rare states of mind” that had always animated him as a composer.
In order to do justice to the varied treatment that Schumann lavishes on the subject of unrequited love, we would have to work through Dichterliebe song by song, for the composer is forever discovering new aspects of the theme with a rare mixture of boldness and imagination. And if we may compare him with Heine, then his range of expression is far greater than the poet’s, for in the Lyrical Intermezzo on which the song cycle is based Heine strikes a sentimental, generally ironical note without exploring the emotional extremes.
In this regard Schumann’s music is far more vivid and graphic than Heine’s verse. Not only does it create a poetic impression of the “most beautiful month of May, when all the buds were breaking,” it also encourages the dolls to dance, most notably in Heine’s tale of the young man who loves a young woman who has chosen another man who loves another woman, whereupon the first young woman in her annoyance chooses the first man to come her way. For most of the song, the piano strikes a note of boisterous high spirits appropriate to a wedding, and the voice echoes it almost against its will, at least until we come to a ritardando at the words “the youth is woebegone.” There is also the hint of a minor-key tonality at “anyone who has known it [i.e., this old story].” But by the punch line that follows immediately afterward (“his heart is broken in two”), the old boisterousness has reasserted itself, yet it is now so forced that it is no longer possible to ignore the ambiguities of the song as a whole.
A few years earlier, while discussing the poetry of Byron, Heine, Hugo, and Grabbe, Schumann had written that “for a few brief moments in eternity poetry has donned the mask of irony in order to conceal its anguished features; perhaps a friendly hand will remove it and its wild tears will be seen to have turned into pearls.”20
Is the composer of Dichterliebe an ironist? Perhaps he is merely a humorist in the way that he bathes pain and cruelty in a conciliatory light. This is certainly true of the poetic postlude to the final song, which serves as an epilogue to the cycle as a whole: after the “olden, ugly songs” have been sunk in the sea and, with them, “love” and “pain,” Schumann in turn immerses himself in the piano writing in order to explore the art that is genuinely his own and to forget all the emotional confusion that the poet has caused him. Even the performance marking adopts the Italian of professional musicians: “Andante espressivo.” We are suddenly among friends. In this context Beate Perrey has spoken of “the ironic glance back.”21
A great deal of fuss has recently been made about an earlier version of Dichterliebe that contains four extra songs and a number of important variant readings. In the early version of the opening song (“Im wunderschönen Monat Mai”), for example, there is no appoggiatura on the syllables “Herzen” and “-gangen”; it was only in the publisher’s corrections that Schumann introduced this change. And the same is true of the final line of the song:22
The revised (top) and original (bottom) versions of the line “da ist in meinem Herzen die Liebe aufgegangen” in the opening song, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” from Dichterliebe, op. 48 (1840).
There is no doubt that at least in the case of Dichterliebe these late alterations—something that Schumann’s publishers feared—are an improvement. What a loss it would have been if it had not occurred to Schumann to add the sob on “Verlangen” (desire) at the last moment! And he evidently had good reason to limit the cycle to the set of sixteen songs familiar to us today, with the result that there is little point in boasting about the “discovery” of an earlier version of the cycle. A discordant note enters the creative process only when there is the danger that audibly inferior alternatives not only elicit a scholarly interest but acquire a patent of nobility by being performed in public.
There are more important things for us to consider—namely, Eichendorff’s Liederkreis. This time it is not love that is the main subject, even though the final song, “Frühlingsnacht” (Spring night), ends with a jubilant outburst innocent of any sense of irony: “And the nightingales repeat it: Yes, she is yours, she is yours!” The few songs in this cycle that deal with love lack all sense of the violent despair and desperate violence that characterizes the relationship in Dichterliebe between Heine and Schumann on the one hand and a feminine “you” on the other, culminating in the formers’ feeling of rejection by the latter, much as a child might feel rejected by its mother. In the songs that make up the Eichendorff cycle, all this belongs in the past. Time and again the poet’s and composer’s thoughts wander back in time to the past while ranging far and wide in space. And often enough experiences and impressions are associated with phrases such as “as if.” Sometimes the poet seems to watch the world go by with a total lack of interest. The cycle’s overarching motto is “I know not where I am.”
Schumann was hardly exaggerating when he told Clara that the cycle was “arguably the most romantic of all my works.”23 Readers and listeners inclined to forget that at the turn of the nineteenth century romanticism was discovered above all in landscapes will be reminded of that fact by the Eichendorff songs, not one of which is not set in nature or at least redolent of nature. Of course, we are not dealing here with nature as such but with nat
ure as the origin of all things and as the home for which we long but which is repeatedly placed under threat. Schumann succeeds in depicting all this from the most varied perspectives, which sometimes shift even within a single song: seen from close quarters and from a distance, in a past that presents itself to us as the present and in a present that passes us by as if it were the past.
This certainly applies to the song “Auf einer Burg” (In a castle). The “aged knight” should long since have vanished from its ruins, but Schumann allows him to live on in his “silent cell” in writing that suggests a rough-hewn hymn tune stretching back to the Middle Ages but enriched with modern harmonies. Finally, something happens in the form of a wedding procession of musicians passing by on the Rhine, animating the musical landscape for little more than a moment. Then everything returns to its former state, and the tears of the beautiful bride that are mentioned in the very last word of all are emphasized by means of an emotionally charged melisma that could come from one of Bach’s Passions and sounds, therefore, to come from far away.
To describe the piano writing as “rough-hewn” might be seen as a euphemism, for from an academic point of view the various elements are joined together in ways that are “incorrect.” Only within the context of the poem are they “correct.” By rejecting the older aesthetic belief that the correct was beautiful and the beautiful correct, Schumann was writing a new chapter in the history of music, though he was still working within the tradition of the late Beethoven. One can sense why his music so unsettled Georgiades, a writer whose thinking was geared to unambiguous semantic structures. Impressive though his comments on Schubert’s song cycles may be, the constant shifts in Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis were bound to leave him feeling bewildered, for whereas the songs that make up Winterreise may differ from each other in detail, they are at least seen from the same perspective of the first-person narrator wandering through the winter’s cold. In the Eichendorff Liederkreis, conversely, the perspective changes constantly between “I” and “you,” between the inner world and the outer world, between narrow confines and distant horizons, and finally, between fantasy and reality.