Robert Schumann – Liederkreis, Op. 39 (1840)

I’ve loved Schumann’s Dichterliebe (also 1840) ever since I first heard it during my sophomore year of college.  The easiest way for me to convey why is with an anecdote.  A couple of weeks ago, I read an article by W.H. Auden for a class I’m taking on contemporary opera.  Part of Auden’s argument was that emotional ambiguity is impossible in music because “whatever is sung is the case” — that is, because the emotional impact of music is so direct and immediate that listeners can’t take a distanced or critical approach to it.  I can hardly even express how wrong I think this position is.  Not only is emotional ambiguity possible in music, but it’s one of the things I value most in a piece.  And when I raised that point to one of my classmates, his immediate reaction was:  ”Yeah, hasn’t he heard ‘Ich grolle nicht’?” — “Ich grolle nicht” being, of course, one of the songs from Dichterliebe.  And pretty much every song in the cycle is like that:  perfectly balanced between tranquility and melancholy, or between ecstasy and heartbreak.  ”Smiling through tears,” as the professor who introduced me to it would say.

I got to know the piece through the recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Alfred Brendel.  The other piece on that CD is the Op. 39 Liederkreis (I’m specifying the opus number because there’s another song cycle with the same title — which just means “song cycle” — that was published as Op. 24).  I remember starting to listen to it once, finding it much less evocative than Dichterliebe, turning it off, and then forgetting about it.  But last week my composition teacher recommended that I check out the song “Zwielicht” (“Twilight”) as a possible model for a piece I’m working on, so I figured it was time to give the whole cycle another listen.

(Aside:  I’m writing this in my office at school, and someone is playing “Im wonderschönen Monat Mai” (“In the Wonderfully Beautiful Month of May”), the first song from Dichterliebe, in the next room!)

This time, too, my first impression was that Liederkreis is less emotionally sophisticated than its companion.  The first few songs in particular seem very straightforward — beautiful, to be sure, but lacking the sense of mystery that draws me to Romantic lieder.  But things get stranger later in the cycle.  Although the poems, taken from Joseph von Eichendorff’s novel Premonition and Present (1815), don’t add up to a clear narrative, themes begin to emerge.  The narrator repeatedly associates himself with birds, makes references to traveling in a foreign land, and implies that there is something sad or sinister about the natural world.  Most strikingly, Eichendorff repeatedly associates marriage with pain.  At the end of “Auf einer Burg” (“In a Castle”), a wedding procession passes by, the bride inexplicably weeping.  In “Im Walde” (“In the Woods”), the narrator again sees a wedding procession, and when it has passed, it leaves behind an eerie nighttime landscape that makes the narrator shudder “im Herzensgrunde,” literally “in the root of his heart.”  By the end of the piece, the third song, “Waldgespräch” (“Forest Conversation”), seems to have taken on a new meaning.  It initially comes across as a fragment of a  fairy tale, the kind of thing everyone in Germany was obsessed with in the first half of the 19th century:  the narrator encounters the witch Lorelei in the forest and she lays a curse on him:  ”You will never again leave these woods!”  But she also says that her heart has been broken by the treachery and cunning of men.  Is the image of the weeping bride an echo of Lorelei’s pain?  Do the cycle’s numerous references to foreign lands mean that the protagonist is lost in the forest the whole time, that the curse lasts for the entire cycle?  Is that why, in “In der Fremde” (“In a Strange Land”), his beloved is dead?  Is that why, in “Frühlingsnacht” (“Spring Night”), he weeps with joy when the moon, stars, trees and nightingales murmur, “She is yours, she is yours?”  Has Lorelei sentenced him to an incomprehensible dream-world as a punishment for the crimes of his sex?

The music also becomes more ambiguous as the piece goes on.  In the later songs, there’s often a direct contradiction between the emotional content of the text and that of the music.  When the text of “Im Walde” moves from wedding to strange silent landscape, for example, the music registers the change only with brief ritardandi, while its harmonic language remains cheerful;  when the narrator sings about shuddering in the root of his heart, there’s only a single chromatic note, a C natural in E major, to hint at the pain he’s feeling.  ”In der Fremde” is the other way around, or seems to be at first:  a poem about the mysterious beauty of nature is given a rapid minor-mode setting full of nervous grace notes.  It’s only at the end, when it’s revealed that the narrator’s beloved is dead, that the song’s tone makes sense.  And “Wehmut” (“Melancholy”) is actually about this sort of emotional layering:  with utter tranquility, the narrator sings, “Then all hearts listen and everyone is glad / Yet no one feels the sorrows, the deep pain in the song.”

As for “Zwielicht,” the song that got me interested in the cycle in the first place, it’s not exactly emotionally ambiguous, but it certainly is creepy.  The narrator is consumed with dread as twilight falls, and warns the listener that you should never trust your friends or let your deer graze alone at this strange, liminal hour, because danger is waiting, and “much is lost in the night.”  The setting is spare, full of disquieting cross-relations and aching 3-2 suspensions over V chords.  At times it reminds me of the more melancholy Scarlatti sonatas, especially the one in B minor, K. 87.  At the end of the song, the word “night” is accompanied by a iv7 chord with an unusual, almost jazzy voicing:  from low to high, E-E-G-A-C-A.  The top A is doubled by the voice, but it soon moves to a G, creating a mild dissonance with the piano.  Unsettling.

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