The year 1840 was Robert Schumann’s “Year of Song.” Though he had previously only dabbled in song composition, concentrating instead on piano works, suddenly that February he became possessed by the excitement of setting words to music. By the beginning of 1841, he had created more than 130 songs, including his greatest song cycle, Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love). Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau explains that the cycle’s title was probably drawn from a line by Rückert: “The love of the poet has always met with ill fortune.”
Words were always as important as music to Schumann, for he came from a literary family; his father was a writer and book publisher. From childhood, he was a voracious yet discriminating reader; by adulthood, he was earning some of his living as a music critic and the founder-editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. In October 1840, he articulated a thoughtful approach to setting verse to music: The song composer must strive “to produce a resonant echo of the poem and its smallest features by means of a refined musical content.” Using his experience writing piano music, Schumann made the pianist far more than an accompanist, for often the pianist is the dominant partner revealing the true emotions and nuances beneath the singer’s relatively straightforward declamation.
The son of a Jewish textile merchant, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) became one of Germany’s greatest lyric poets, though he lived most of his life in France. In 1828, the 18-year-old Schumann met him in Munich and left a vivid word portrait: “A bitter, ironic smile played only at the corners of his mouth: at once a lofty smile over the trifles of life and a sneer over small-minded people; and it was precisely this bitter satire ... and this deep inner resentment over life ... that made his conversation so compelling.” It also made his poetry compelling, for Heine’s slightly cynical, always ironic wit kept his verses from lapsing into conventional 19th-century sentimentality.
Matthias Goerne has chosen three Heine songs as prelude to Dichterliebe, and two of them were in the cycle’s original manuscript, which included 20 songs. When Schumann came to publish the longer work in 1844, he eliminated four songs, including “Es leuchtet meine Liebe” and “Mein Wagen rollet langsam”; thus, both these lieder, though written in 1840, bear higher opus numbers (indeed, the latter was published posthumously).
Marked Fantastisch, “Es leuchtet meine Liebe” (“My love gleams”) is one of Schumann’s dramatic ballads, which likens the poet’s love to a ghoulish tale of a medieval knight slain by a giant in a dark wood while he attempts to woo his lady. The music is driven by a lurid piano part of thick, dissonant chords roaring up and down the keyboard. Near the end, the story moves back to the poet’s own situation, where Heine delivers a wry punchline while Schumann appends a melodramatic postlude.
Opening as a bucolic drive through the countryside with the piano’s arpeggios mimicking the sound of the wheels, “Mein Wagen rollet langsam” (“My cart rolls slowly”) runs into an eerie encounter. A group of shadowy faces gapes through the window, nodding and laughing. Are they sinister or benign? While Heine seems to favor the latter, Schumann—with his jagged motif of staccato short notes—chooses the former interpretation, mulled over in the piano’s postlude.
The first Heine song we will hear, “Abends am Strand” (“Evening by the Sea”), bears no relationship to Dichterliebe. Though it begins peacefully with arpeggios lapping like waves on the shore, it, too, will veer in strange directions as the couple’s conversation meanders from topic to topic. A ship passing in the distance animates the tempo as the couple discusses the dangers sailors face. Then their words digress to xenophobic portraits of the peoples and their customs that seamen encounter on their travels. Here the people of India receive a sympathetic musical treatment while the citizens of Lapland get quite the opposite. Musically, the song ends as peacefully as it began.
Dichterliebe incorporates 16 poems drawn from Heine’s collection Lyrisches Intermezzo. Schumann arranged them into a narrative drama of love briefly enjoyed, then irrevocably lost. Simplicity and brevity characterize the first five songs in which the poet moves from the bliss of love to the first intimations that his love may not be returned. The majestic sixth song, “Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome” (“In the Rhine, the holy river”) is the first unambiguous expression of love lost. The image here is the magnificent cathedral of Cologne on the banks of the Rhine. In music inspired by J. S. Bach’s chorale preludes, the piano dominates with a powerful descending motif, and the singer’s lines follow the simple but expressive shape of a Baroque chorale.
In “Ich grolle nicht” (“I bear no grudge”)—one of Schumann’s most famous songs—the highly dramatic style, large range, and heroic weight seem to be drawn from grand opera. Yet Heine’s irony is captured by this exaggerated musical rhetoric: the vehement pounding of the piano’s chords, the massive octaves in the left hand, and the singer’s angry repetitions of the title phrase.
“Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen” (“What a fluting and fiddling”) boasts another brilliantly dominant piano part: a whirlwind of a nightmare waltz as the poet imagines himself at his former lover’s wedding feast. In the exquisitely poignant 10th song, “Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen” (“When I hear the song”), the piano takes the lead more subtly with an illustration of weeping that grows stronger and more painful in the postlude. Contrasting with this sincerity, “Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen” (“A boy loves a girl”) is a bitterly sarcastic recital of the “old, old story” of unrequited love. It masquerades as a bluff folk song with a pedestrian three-chord cadence.
The most beautiful of the songs, “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen” (“One bright summer morning”) is enhanced by a ravishing piano part whose eloquent postlude will appear again. The unexpected harmonic progressions in the vocal line are wonderfully expressive of sorrow and regret.
The next three songs explore the world of dreams, both realistic and fantastic. In “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” (“I wept in my dream”), the singer carries the song’s burden of misery in stark, unaccompanied recitative while the piano is reduced to muttered interjections. In “Aus alten Märchen” (“From fairytales of old”), the piano’s heraldic theme summons the legendary dream world of fairytales, where the poet tries vainly to escape his real-life sorrows. Schumann delights in the verse’s colorful, sensual imagery. But later the song becomes more personal, and in music marked “with inmost feeling,” the singer expresses his longing—but also his understanding that there is no true escape.
Fischer-Dieskau calls the cycle’s final song, “Die alten, bösen Lieder” (“The bad, old songs”), “a grotesque and extravagant showpiece.” The piano sets the mock-heroic tone with brawny octaves, then underlines the humor by exaggerating the first beat of each measure. The singer’s phrases, too, are grandiosely dramatic. At the close, he utters Heine’s punch line in conspiratorial tones. Here Schumann adds a touch of genuine feeling that the ironic Heine probably never intended. And he closes with a beautiful postlude of consolation expanded from the 12th song, which serves as a sublime summation for the entire cycle.
In his guide to Brahms’s songs, British musicologist Eric Sams calls the composer “the supreme master of Romantic isolation … Throughout the Brahmsian lied … singer and pianist unite in a lament for loneliness, usually because of separation from the loved one.” Born in a poor area of Hamburg, growing up as a teenage pianist in a brothel, falling passionately in love at age 20 with a woman he could not have (Clara Schumann), and then choosing lifelong bachelorhood despite the many women he attracted, Brahms became the ultimate outsider, always gazing ruefully through the window at others’ happiness. No matter how successful he became, the pain of early sorrows and frustrations never eased, and it is this sense of unhealed trauma that makes his music so distinctive and so moving.
Less discriminating than Robert Schumann in his choice of poets, Brahms set verse by great literary figures like Heine, but also by lesser versifiers who touched on themes of particular relevance to his own life. However, whether setting poetry of the first-rank or verse of more pedestrian quality, Brahms gave it close analytical attention, often reading it aloud or having others who were especially gifted speakers read it to him so he could ascertain the exact rhythms, natural stresses, and pauses needed. “Brahms meant his songs to mirror their poems down to the last detail,” writes Sams.
The first four songs Mr. Goerne has chosen are all settings of poems by Heine. From Brahms’s Opus 85, we hear two songs that were written as a pair in 1878: “Sommerabend” (“Summer evening”) and “Mondenschein” (“Moonlight”). The first of these features a serenely lovely vocal melody suited to this restful time of day, but the syncopated piano part is initially uneasy. The harmonies grow more troubled in the second strophe, then pause in expectation as the poet hears a mysterious splashing in the water. As the moon brightens the scene, he sees a vision of a beautiful water nymph bathing in the stream; the piano surrounds her with ecstatic arpeggios. A sadder partner, “Mondenschein” also portrays the healing power of moonlight pouring down on a weary, heartsick wanderer. The opening harmonies reveal he is near physical and emotional collapse, but the appearance of the moon brings back the soothing melody of “Sommerabend” to comfort him.
The other two songs come from the composer’s Opus 96 collection of 1884 and share themes of long-enduring love darkened by regret. Sams suggests that they may relate to Brahms’s thwarted love for Clara Schumann, whom he loved from young adulthood until death. Thus with “Meerfahrt” (“Sea Voyage”), he wrote a dark, harmonically tormented barcarolle in the minor mode, in which the small boat cresting the waters is a metaphor for their journey together through life. The singer expresses passionate sorrow that they did not choose to stop at the enchanted island where music and dance waft toward them. As they glide away from that possibility of bliss, the word trostlos (“desolate”) receives a cry of pain. Before this, we hear one of Brahms’s greatest songs, “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht” (“Death is cool night”). It is a song about the weariness of old age, in which the singer embraces the cool embrace of death more eagerly than the heat and stress of life. The sense of profound fatigue is captured in the constant short-long rhythms of the accompaniment and the low tessitura of the vocal lines. But in the second strophe, everything changes as the appearance of the nightingale singing of love outside spurs the piano into radiant arpeggios and the voice to soar aloft. Love lives on eternally in the heart of the singer, even as the piano’s deep tolling announces that death is near.
Written in September 1864, the nine songs of Opus 32 set verses by the eminent poet August von Platen and the less-gifted Georg Daumer, who enhanced his verse by modeling it after the poetry of the 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz, considered one of Iran’s greatest writers. “Wie rafft ich mich auf in der Nacht” (“How I leapt up in the night”) is an expression of the regret and bitterness of unfulfilled love. The poet is Platen, who was cruelly mocked by Heine and other contemporary writers about being gay, and led a lonely, guilt-ridden life. Eric Sams suggests Brahms here may be recalling memories of Robert Schumann’s attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge in Düsseldorf. The rhyming scheme revolves around matches for “Nacht.” The piano sets in motion the dragging steps of the insomniac wanderer; the range is oppressively low and dark. Only when the singer gazes up at the stars does the music lift and brighten. The singer’s anguish over his wasted life is expressed with wrenching pain.
The second song, “Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen” (“Never to go to you again”), moves to Daumer’s poem about a man broken by unrequited love, who cannot, however, control his impulse to visit his beloved every night. Over defeated octaves deep in the bass, the vocal lines are filled with start-and-stop hesitations. Only the thought of being able to stay and love her animates the singer’s mood and his will to live. He begs her to give him a clear yes or no, but his final downward-dragging phrases reveal what that answer will be. In the two terse strophes of “Ich schleich umher” (“I creep about”), Brahms moves back to Platen to portray a man in deepest depression who only has energy enough to cry out in pain. Even a strong autumn rainstorm cannot make his mood more downcast. “Der Strom, der neben mir verrauschte” (“The river that rushed by me”) picks up from the previous song, revealing more of the depressed man’s thoughts. Again, he is tormented by the passage of time and memories of things he once enjoyed. His regrets about the life he has wasted are expressed in a series of questions that rise steadily in pitch as the piano surges passionately around him. In little over a minute, this song vividly captures a crisis of angry despair.
Also setting verse by Platen, the next two songs describe the singer’s determination to finally break away from the love that imprisons him. For the poet, this may refer to his queerness that he couldn’t accept. For Brahms, the fatal love is Clara Schumann, whom he identifies by using the theme he’d created for her as the first five notes of the vocal part of “Wehe, so willst du mich wieder” (“Alas, would you once again”), immediately echoed in the piano’s bass. The anger of the previous song now rouses him to action, as he embraces instead the freedom offered by his love for the beauties of nature. The ceaseless tumult and orchestral richness of the piano part here is characteristic of Brahms’s personal style of keyboard sonority. Finally, the lovely “Du sprichst, dass ich mich täuschte” (“You tell me I was mistaken”) brings calm and resolution as the singer accepts that his beloved no longer loves him—although he urges her to admit that she once did. The song opens in the minor mode but finds release in a final turn to the major at the end.
Returning to Daumer’s translations from Hafiz, the final three songs are all in the major mode and, especially in the last of them, seem to resolve the singer’s unhappiness. But Brahms’s challenging harmonies in the last song tend to undercut a rosy conclusion. The lyrical “Bitteres zu sagen denkst du” (“You mean to say bitter things”) is the least troubled, because here the singer has managed to convince himself that no bitter words can be uttered by lips so sweet. But all is not well, as the next song “So stehn wir, ich und meine Weide” (“So here we stand, I and my heart’s desire”) expresses that while the two stand close together, they are far apart in their feelings. That Brahms is thinking of Clara is verified by the appearance again of her theme, both at the beginning and end of the song. The composer’s personal feelings of sadness and regret fill the drawn-out reprise of the opening lines with musical sighs. The longest and most famous of the Opus 32 songs, “Wie bist du, meine Königin” (“How blissful, my queen, you are”) is often sung out of context as a sensuous, untroubled song of love’s fulfillment. With its graceful, flowing lines and lilting repetitions of wonnevoll (“blissfully”), it seems a portrait of happiness.
But at the mention of tote Wüsten (“desert wastes”) in the third strophe, Brahms suddenly wanders off into a distant minor key that destabilizes the previous serenity. In John Daverio’s analysis, “Brahms exploits the minor Neapolitan harmony for a distinctly poetic purpose: to unmask the poem’s image of perfect bliss as an illusion.” Despite his emotional burdens, Brahms remained a tough, clear-eyed survivor, unwilling to embrace escapist fantasies or easy answers.
—Janet E. Bedell