One more of Schumann’s ballads should be mentioned in this place—the universally known Die beiden Grenadiere (‘The Two Grenadiers’). Technically the song offers little of interest beyond the composer’s clever and appropriate abbreviation of the Marseillaise at the end. The overwhelming gusto of the ballad is too obvious to demand more than passing mention.
III
The twelve songs to words by Kerner, opus 35, include several of especial interest. In this group we see Schumann’s development of the piano part well under way. Each song offers an accompaniment which is a study in pianistic style. Number 2, Stirb, Lieb’ und Freund, has an austere polyphonic support, in the style of Bach, suggesting the majesty of some old cathedral. Number 3, Wanderlust, is a buoyant and youthful melody, and number 6, An das Trinkglass, a fine romantic chorale. Numbers 6 and 8, Stille Liebe and Stille Thränen, are intimate psychological studies. In the former the sustained bass melody beneath the hesitating treble of the accompaniment suggests the apprehension of the lover who is obliged to wait in silence. The latter obtains a charming effect with the soft repeated chords of the piano part and offers a typical Schumann ending in the intermingling melodies of the close. The six songs opus 36 contain one which has become a German folk-song—An den Sonnenschein, a melody which concentrates the spirit of dignity and sincerity of German popular music.
In the Eichendorff Liederkreis, opus 39, there are four songs of the very highest rank. Number 2, Intermezzo, with its soft syncopation in the accompaniment, offers a suggestive contrast with the songs of Schubert and shows how far musical technique had moved in ten or fifteen years. It is the simplest of melodies, but one with a certain atmospheric indecision, strongly contrasting with the downrightness and clearness of outline which Schubert best loved. Number 3 in this group, Waldesgespräch, is as lovely a melody as Schumann ever wrote. It might be called a ballad, with its story of the knight who wandered into the forest at night, finding there a lady in distress, attempting to help her, and discovering that he was in the power of the witch, the Lorelei, who lies in wait for strong men. The lovely thirds of the accompaniment seem to spread the mystery of evening over the song, and when the witch announces her identity the music takes on a momentary grandeur that suggests the old tales of gods and heroes. The song is full of fine and expressive effects. But these do not exist in detail; they rather spring unconsciously out of the musical design. The singer who attempts to make the song too expressive is sure to go astray. If it is sung primarily for its musical beauty it becomes of itself a masterpiece of expressive story-telling. Above all, as so often in great songs, a good legato is the first and chiefest of the virtues. Number 12 of the Eichendorff series is the Frühlingsnacht (‘Spring Night’), with its magical triplet accompaniment. Number 5 is the famous Mondnacht (‘Moonlight Night’). Here again we have a song that quite defies analysis. The voice part consists solely of a two-line phrase several times repeated. The first three times it closes on the dominant, the last time on the tonic, with a deep and satisfying sense of repose. In any but a master hand this form would become monotonous. But with Schumann’s mysterious accompaniment it is all magic. The close is peculiarly characteristic. The voice part comes, as we have said, to a tonic close, but the accompaniment makes a false cadence of it and the piano part continues to its own logical ending. The piano part has become utterly organic and independent. Played by itself, it would offer no clew as to where the voice part ended. That deceptive cadence is Schumann’s ultimatum to the singer. ‘The song is not ended,’ he seems to say, ‘merely because you have finished singing. The song is the voice part and the piano part one and indivisible. If you hurry through the postlude, or belittle it, or treat it as a useless appendage to the voice part, you are no artist. If you consider the voice part more important than the piano part, or yourself more important than the song you are singing, go and give your feeble talents to vaudeville songs.’ And for audiences, too, this song has a message: the listener who begins to applaud before the piano part is finished (and there are few even to-day who do not) is no true listener. Let him go and listen to a brass band; he has no business with the art-song.
The five children’s songs, opus 40, offer little of interest. But the cycle, Frauenliebe und Leben (‘Woman’s Life and Love’), is undoubtedly the most famous and possibly the greatest song cycle in all musical literature. The poet, Adalbert von Chamisso, selects eight crucial moments in woman’s life and puts into her mouth for each of the eight an exquisite lyric, expressing with wonderful delicacy her emotions and moods. The poems are perhaps a trifle exaggerated in the romantic fashion of the time and certainly do not altogether tally with the emotions of the modern woman. But the groundwork of typical psychology is expressed with such persuasive eloquence and such literary charm that no one can read the poems without feeling that he has lived through, in some measure, the experience of which they tell.
In the first song, Seit ich ihn gesehen, the young girl has just seen her hero; in a moment, almost, she has cast her young girlhood behind her; she feels strange presentiments; she no longer cares for the games of her sisters; she wishes to be alone; the personality of her hero seems to be ever present. In the second song she has come to know him. She makes no secret of her love; she sings it openly; she is proud of it before the world. In the next song she has heard his proposal. ‘Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben’ (‘I cannot grasp it, I cannot believe it’), she says, torn between joy and terror. But in the next song, Du Ring an meinem Finger, she is apostrophizing her engagement ring and looking at the long vista of life ahead. Number 5, Helft mir, ihr Schwestern, is sung on the bridal day. Next, she is in her own home, in the arms of her husband, vainly attempting to make him understand why she weeps when she is happiest. In number 7 she is singing a lively but tender lullaby to her newborn child. In the last song she is singing her grief at the death of her husband. ‘This is your first cruel act toward me,’ she says to the dead body. She sees before her a life of voluntary loneliness, assuaged by memories of her former happiness.
The music with which Schumann interprets these songs may justly be called psychological. The term ‘psychological’ is applied freely and indiscriminately to music and usually without justice. Properly, music is far too abstract an art to carry any precise meanings. Yet with the gradual and persistent process of six centuries, whereby certain musical styles and progressions have come to be associated with definite moods, there has grown up a technique which, with a properly sympathetic audience, may be manipulated to express states of soul. Whatever this technique is worth, Schumann, in his Frauenliebe und Leben, has used it with masterly power. In the first song he writes a simple, timid melody, the rhythmic flow interrupted as though by the hesitation of a fluttering heart. ‘Since my eyes first beheld him I seem to have been blind.’ The emotion rises. ‘I care no more for the games of my sisters. I had rather weep.’ Then comes a lovely phrase of tender sweetness. Weeping for love is a precious delight. The broken melody continues. Not until the last bar does the hearer become conscious of its full charm and formal beauty. The second song, ‘He, the Noblest of All,’ is in a very different mood—proud and exuberant expression. It has a grand lyric sweep which only a fine artistic taste can restrain from a somewhat cheap pompousness. The middle section returns for a moment to the girl’s feelings of timidity. ‘Turn from me before it is too late,’ she says; ‘I am not worthy of you.’ Schumann has chosen not to interrupt the flow of his song here. To express the more timid mood he employs dissonance and chromatic progression, which finally resolves into the original clear-cut strain. Throughout the symphonic unity of the song is preserved. The third song, ‘I cannot grasp it,’ returns to the spirit of the first. It is an agitated allegretto movement. The voice part follows the words with utmost faithfulness; it is almost a free recitative, interrupted only by one gentle lyric phrase on the words, ‘I am thine forever.’ Yet here, again, there is a true melody throughout, and a charming one, but it seems only to peep out from behind the detached notes. The fourth song, ‘Thou, Ring upon My Finger,’ has much the design and movement of the second, though quieter. In the fifth, too, melody is dominant. In the sixth the composer returns to the declamatory style. Here the delineative music lies chiefly in the accompaniment, with lovely modulations and snatches of melody suggesting the timid wonder of the wife in her happiness. The voice part hardly comes to an end at all, but fades away on the words ‘Thy picture,’ while the piano takes up the tale. The next song, the lullaby, musically the least important of the eight, is a simple strophic melody with a broken chord accompaniment. The last is recitative pure and simple. The rests between phrases seem broken with sobs, out of which there rises the heroism of a determination to face life alone and without complaint. The emotional power of those few notes of recitative is beyond description. The stark tragedy of the opening lines becomes clouded over, as it were, with tears, and the music melts into calm grayness as the woman sings, ‘The veil falls; I withdraw into myself, where I have thee and my lost happiness.’ And then, as the great quiet of loneliness settles down, the piano sings softly the whole of the first song, the early glow of delicate color when the girl first beheld her hero. And we seem to see ahead the years of loneliness softened only by sweet memory.
No group of songs has ever more perfectly achieved the union of words and music. The faults of this cycle on the artistic side are the faults of the generation. People’s views of life have changed much since Chamisso set maiden hearts a-fluttering. The notion of the wife as the bounden slave of her husband—a notion only a step or two removed from the theory of the harem—has given place to the healthier view of the wife as one of two high contracting parties. One cannot help noticing in Chamisso’s poems how small a part the child plays in the woman’s life. And the idea that upon the death of the husband the woman’s thoughts should be solely of her own past rather than of her child’s future is little short of repulsive. These are the faults of an individualistic, a pessimistic, an over-sentimental age. They are reflected in the spirit of the music. Since then our art, if it has become more sensuous, has also become more vigorous. Schumann’s work was for an age rather than for all time.
In the singing of these songs the singer must avoid stressing too much the declamatory character of the three slow ones as well as the melodic exuberance of the others. The songs seem on paper to be detached and broken. All the more they must be sung smoothly, discreetly, without undue emphasis. The singer will not go far wrong in following the notes and the time signatures quite literally. Many a singer has been astonished by that old miracle of art—that if the notes are sung as written they will work their own magic. The composer has seen to that. If a song relies wholly on a ‘singer’s personality,’ the composer has failed. So in these songs pure intonation, just rhythm, and careful diction will interpret the poet truly. If the singer finds that with the observance of these values the songs do not express what they should, let him put them aside for a while. As his technical artistic powers grow he will find that the songs have grown along with them. If he is much concerned about bolstering up the song by giving it ‘expression,’ he is sure to be on the wrong track.
Of the ‘Romances and Ballads,’ opus 45, we need only notice the spirited Es zogen zwei rüst’ge Gesellen. Opus 48, however, is the immortal Dichterliebe series, probably the most individual of all Schumann’s song works. Here, again, we find Schumann suffering somewhat from the faults of romanticism. To put the case briefly, he took Heine seriously. Heine himself, we cannot but feel, was not so taken in by his own poetry. In addition to the ever-present grin which is in almost every one of his lyrics there is a certain playful quality, as though he were only teasing the sentimentalism of the human heart. If Heine suffered only a hundredth part of the pangs described in his mass of short poems he must have had more love affairs than any one man could attend to in three lifetimes. The truth is, Heine was dealing with moods, and Schumann supposed he was dealing with emotions. We see the contradiction to an almost grotesque degree in the song Ich grolle nicht (‘I do not complain’). Here the poet tells his love that he will not complain of his unhappiness because, though she goes about in diamonds, he has seen in a dream that she, too, is unhappy. This is pretty sentiment and charming playful heroics. Tragedy it is not. But Schumann’s music is tragedy of the noblest strain. It strikes an emotional depth which the composer rarely equalled. To such music the Puritans of Cromwell’s time might have left their wives and children to go out and fight on the side of the Lord. We have said that Heine has nowhere in his poems written words that might be put into the mouth of a hero. But in this case Schumann wrote music that a hero might have sung. Perhaps if Schumann’s sense of humor had been a little more human and a little less literary he might have seen the incongruity. But it would have been an unfortunate event, for it would have cost the world the wonderful music of this song. Indeed, many of the greatest works of art would never have been created if their authors had possessed a keen sense of humor.