Schumann was not, like Schubert, a singer from his earliest years. He was at first a dilettante of the piano, and as he grew up dreamed of becoming a virtuoso. He was enchanted by the piano, told it his thoughts, and was fascinated by its undiscovered possibilities. His genius came to its first maturity in his piano works, and all his thoughts were at first for this instrument.
He did not write his first song until 1840; that is, until almost the end of his thirtieth year. When he did take to song-writing he wrote furiously. There was a reason for it. For after several years of passionate love-making to his Clara, and of almost more passionate stubbornness on the part of her father, the young people took the law into their own hands (quite literally, since they had to invoke the courts) and were married in 1840. The first happiness of married life and the anticipations leading up to it seem to have generated in Schumann that demand for a more personal and intimate expression than his beloved piano could offer. Though he had never been a rapid writer he now wrote many songs at a stretch, as many as three or four in a day. He seemed unable to exhaust what he had to say. By the time the year was over he had composed more than a hundred songs. He declared himself satisfied with what he had done. He might come back to song-writing, he said; but he wasn’t sure.
He did come back to it, but not until his creative powers were on the wane. In the last six or seven years of his life he wrote more than a hundred new songs, but hardly one of them rises above mediocrity. All the songs that have made him famous, and all that are worthy of his genius, date from the year of his marriage.
Just what, in a technical way, Schumann was trying to do in his first songs we do not know. It is probable that the ammunition for his unusual harmonic progressions and his freer declamatory style came from his own piano pieces. Fundamentally we know he admired Schubert almost without reserve, having already spent the best part of a year in Vienna, unearthed a number of Schubert scores, and spread Schubert’s reputation to the best of his ability. Yet there is hardly one of Schumann’s songs that could for a moment be mistaken for Schubert’s, so different was the musical genesis of the two composers in their song-writing. Schumann is a part of the Schubert tradition; but he is just so much further developed (whether for the better or for the worse may be left to the theorists).
With Schumann the tendency of detailed musical description is carried into a greater number of songs and into a greater variety of details. The declamatory element increases, both in the number of songs which it dominates and in the extent to which it influences the more melodic songs. The part of the piano is tremendously increased, so much so that the Waldesgespräch has been called a symphonic poem with recitative accompaniment by the voice. The harmony, while lacking in Schubert’s entrancingly simple enharmonic changes, is more unusual, showing in particular a tendency to avoid the perfect cadence, which would have hurt Franz Schubert’s ear for a time. Schumann’s songs are commonly called ‘psychological,’ and this much-abused word may be allowed to stand in the sense that Schumann offered a separate statement of the separate strands of an emotional state, while Schubert more usually expressed the emotional state pure and simple. No songs could be more subjective than some of Schubert’s later ones, but many, including Schumann’s, have been more complex in emotional content. But perhaps the first thing one feels on approaching the Schumann songs is that they are consciously wrought, that they are the work of a thinker. This is no doubt partly because Schumann, with all his gifts, did not have at his disposal Schubert’s wonderfully rich melody and was obliged to weigh and consider. But it is also quite to be expected from the nature of the man. While Schumann’s songs are by no means so rich as Schubert’s in point of melody, there are a few of his tunes, especially the famous Widmung, which can stand beside any in point of pure musical beauty. Still, it must be admitted that Schumann’s truly great songs, even from the output of 1840, are decidedly limited in number.
To understand better what is meant by the word ‘psychological’ in connection with Schumann’s songs, let us turn to his most famous group, the ‘Woman’s Life and Love.’ The first of the group, ‘Since My Eyes Beheld Him,’ tells of the young girl who has awakened to her first half-consciousness of love. It is hero worship, but it is disconcerting, making her strangely conscious of herself, anxious to be alone and dream, surrounded by a half sensuous, half sentimental mist. The music is hesitating and broken, with many chromatic progressions and suspensions in the piano part which rob it of any firm harmonic outline. In the whole of the voice part there is not a single perfect cadence. The melody is utterly lovely, but it sounds indefinite, as though it were always just beginning; only here and there it rises into a definite phrase of moody longing. In the second song, the famous Er, der Herrlichste von Allen the girl has come to full consciousness of her emotion. Her loved one is simply her hero, the noblest of men. The music is straightforward and decisive; the main theme begins with the notes of the tonic chord (the ‘bugle notes’). There is no lack of full cadence and pure half cadences. In the third song the girl has received the man’s avowal of love, and is overcome with amazement, almost terror, that her hero should look with favor upon her. The voice part is scarcely more than a broken recitative, and the accompaniment is largely of short sharp chords. Only for one ecstatic instant the melody becomes lyrically lovely, in the richest German strain: it is on the words ‘I am forever thine.’ In the sixth song the mother is gazing at her newborn baby and weeping. The voice part is free declamation, with a few rich chords in the accompaniment to mark the underlying depth of emotion. In the eighth and last song the husband has died. The form of the song is much the same as that of the sixth, only the chords are now heavy and tragic. As the lamenting voice dies away the piano part glides into the opening song, played softly; the wife dreams of the first awakening of her love. The effect is to cast the eight songs into a long backward vista, magically making us feel that we have lived through the years of the woman’s life and love.
This, easily the most famous of song cycles, is the type of all of them. Beethoven wrote a true cycle, but his songs are by no means equal to Schumann’s. Schubert wrote cycles, but none with the close bond and inner unity of this one. Nor are Schumann’s other cycles—‘Myrtles,’ the Liederkreis, song series from Eichendorff and another under the same name from other poets, the ‘Poet’s Love’ from Heine, the Kerner cycle, and the ‘Springtime of Love’ cycle—so closely bound as this. The song cycle, on this plane, is a triumph of the accurate delineative power of music.
Almost as much as of this type of ‘psychology’ Schumann is master of the delicate picture of mood, as in Die Lotosblume, Der Nussbaum, and the thrice lovely Mondnacht. His musical high spirits often serve him in good stead, as in Kerner’s ‘Wanderer’s Song.’ In ‘To the Sunshine’ he imitates the folk-song style with remarkable success. In the short ballad he has at least two works of supreme beauty, the Waldesgespräch, already referred to, and the well known ‘Two Grenadiers.’ There is a certain grim humor (one of the few lyrical qualities which Schubert never successfully attempted) in his setting of Heine’s masterly ‘The Old and Bitter Songs.’ And, finally, one song that stands by itself in song literature—the famous Ich grolle nicht, admired everywhere, yet not beyond its deserts. Here is tragedy deep and exalted as in a Greek drama—though it is disconcerting to note how much more seriously Schumann took the subject than did his poet, Heine.
IV
In 1843, when Schumann had made his first success as a song writer, he received from an unknown young man a batch of songs in manuscript. With his customary promptitude and sureness, he announced the young man in his journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. This man was Robert Franz, who, many insist, is the greatest song writer in the world, barring only Schubert.[92] Franz, it seems, had had an unhappy love affair, and had taken to song-writing to ease his feelings, having burned up all his previous compositions as worthless. Schumann did for Franz what he did for Brahms and to some extent for Chopin—put him on the musical map—and that on the strength of an examination of only a few early compositions. Through his influence Franz’s Opus I was published, and thereafter, steadily for many years, came songs from Franz’s pen. He wrote little other original music, save a few pieces for church use. His reputation refused to grow rapidly, for there was little in his work or personality on which to build réclame, but it has grown steadily. The student of his songs will discover a high proportion of first-rate songs among them—higher, probably, than in any other song composer.