Generally, however, Schumann did not make this mistake. In nearly every other one of the Dichterliebe songs he found music which was as gossamer, as little fundamental, as Heine’s words. To some students they may seem at first cold and pedantic. Certainly they do not draw their greatness from melodic charm. Merely as melodies, few of these songs would have lived to this day. Undoubtedly their first appeal is a technical one—to the musical theorist and the pianist as well as to the singer. But this is by no means to say that they lack poetry. It is merely that their poetry is concealed and reveals itself only to him who has mastered and understood their finer technical appeal. Take, for instance, the ninth song, Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen (‘I hear the flutes and violins’). The rejected lover hears from a distance the orchestra playing for dancing at the wedding of his beloved. The accompaniment is a waltz rhythm, with repeated notes deftly inserted to suggest perhaps the trumpets of the band. The waltz is steady and continuous. It has none of the sensuous softness, none of the simplicity and balance of phrase which we are accustomed to in popular waltzes. It tinkles on continuously, without an opportunity to draw a breath—and hence seems at first glance aimless. Instead of the engaging warmth we expect from waltzes, it gives a chilling effect. And that, of course, is exactly the effect it had on the rejected lover. It is a tinkly, monotonous waltz, perhaps heard through the winter air. The voice has a little half melodic, half declamatory complaint, but it seems almost independent of the piano part. When the voice rests that waltz is still going on, throbbing, monotonous. Now, any indifferent pianist will make a sorry affair of this accompaniment. It demands the most delicate and exact finger work, the nicest regard for rhythm, the most delicate modulating of tone power. It must be played almost without pedal, and it reveals instantly any slip in the pianist’s technique. It might almost be published independently as a piano étude. The singer must deliver his part with great delicacy of diction and achieve expression on the most limited scale. The piece has no contrasts. It is so closely bound together that a single omission of a note will spoil the whole design. Decidedly this is not an interesting song to a bad musician. Every detail is a difficulty. If he cannot master it, it remains to him cold and austere. But to him who can master it, it becomes a rare delight. Each technical difficulty becomes an expressive quality; the austerity becomes only poetry more delicately refined. The whole is a challenge to the taste of the singer and the accompanist. The song, within its limits, is without a flaw.
Much the same can be said of every one of the Dichterliebe songs. There is no superficial similarity between any two. Each one uses technical means which are employed in no other. In each the technical means are nicely adapted to the character of the music. Each one of the accompaniments calls upon a different department of the pianist’s art. Each is developed, technically, in its own manner and in the manner of no other one of Schumann’s songs. In other words, each of these remarkable songs has that thing known as style. Each has a personality as distinct as the personality of one interesting man is distinct from that of another. The accompaniments might be published alone as Essays in Style. Such an achievement marks a development of detailed technical resource hitherto unheard of. From it all later German and French song writers directly derive. Nor must it be assumed that the voice parts are uninteresting or unvocal. Quite the contrary. Only in these songs, as in none that had preceded them, the voice parts are not the songs, nor a small part of the songs; the songs are inconceivable, are non-existent, except as voice and piano parts intimately combined.
Songs 1 and 2, ‘In the Wondrous Lovely Month of May’ and ‘From Out My Tears,’ are simple melodies, charming, but little self-conscious, demanding something of the singer’s art and learning if they are not to sound trivial. The third song, ‘The Rose, the Lily, the Dove, the Sun,’ is a technical tour de force, an extremely brief and rapid little piece, demanding the utmost delicacy of intonation and enunciation, which might almost be sung in a single breath. The fourth song, ‘When I Look Into Thine Eyes,’ is a sort of duet between the voice and the piano. Each phrase from the singer is tenderly echoed in the accompaniment. The whole melody has a touching simplicity. Number 6 looks austere. Here Schumann’s effort to maintain a single style (both technically and poetically) throughout has perhaps led him to dispense with detailed expression. ‘In the Rhine, the Holy River,’ runs the first line, and the accompaniment depicts the Rhine flowing, ever so slowly and majestically, past the Cathedral of Cologne. And, since he is particularly interested in these songs in homogeneity of style, he makes the whole song flow along to this type of accompaniment. If the singer is chiefly interested in exhibiting his voice, he will leave this song in disgust as cold and unpoetic. But let him beware that his real motive be not the difficulty he experiences in singing it well.
The following song is the famous Ich grolle nicht[25] (‘I do not complain’), which is easily one of the great songs of the world. Accepting the words as real tragedy, we must pronounce the music one of the noblest expressions of emotion in all song literature. The quiet and dignified melodic line of the voice part seems to suggest the hero’s stoic acceptance of his fate. The repeated chords of the accompaniment, moving in solemn progression, reflect the calm of a great soul. And the marvellous bass part, moving deeper and deeper down the scale, calling forth from the modern grand piano its most terrible and wonderful tones, till the very soul seems to quiver in response—this furnishes a foundation of grandeur which might have served for a tragedy of Æschylus. But Schumann rarely repeated this achievement. He was a gentle poet or an ardent technician, or, in his later years, a verbose bore, but only rarely, as in this instance, a tragedian.
The eleventh song of the cycle, ‘A Young Man Loved a Maiden,’ has a simple melody suited to the spirit of the words, supported by a lilting accompaniment admirably unified in style. The next song, ‘On the Bright Summer Morning,’ is dignified by the device of the continued downward arpeggio in the accompaniment. The thirteenth song, ‘I Wept in My Dreams,’ is especially interesting. The voice part is almost a recitative, and the accompaniment a sort of orchestral commentary. Sometimes deep chords form the only support for the singer, sometimes little rhythmical phrases tell their message. The whole suggests admirably the effort of the speaker to disentangle his dreams from the mental mist that surrounds them. The fourteenth song, ‘Each Night in Dreams,’ is one of the most appealing melodies Schumann ever wrote. The last of the series, Die alten, bösen Lieder (‘The Old and Evil Songs’), is a magnificent example of Schumann’s power to put subtle moods into his accompaniment. The mocking spirit of the words, the grandiose strutting of little emotions, the legendary paraphernalia which is invoked by the poet—these seem to be embalmed in this tricky but brilliant accompaniment. The postlude to the cycle is the melody of song number 12, freely developed.
The later songs of Schumann can be summed up in a few lines. There were a few written in the 1840 period, apparently cast aside as unworthy and inadvisedly published later when Schumann’s matchless faculty of self-criticism had become weak and dim. Opus 51 contains a delightful folk-like song, ‘When I into the Garden Go.’ Opus 53 contains the fine ballad, Blondel’s Lied, already described. Opus 79 is a book of songs for children, containing two or three, notably Käuzlein, Sandmann, and Marienwürmchen, which bring back a breath of the youthful romantic Schumann. But nothing could be more pitiful than the settings which Schumann about this time gave to some of Goethe’s finest poems—especially the Wilhelm Meister and the ‘Western Divan’ songs. The settings of Queen Mary Stuart’s poems, published in 1852, are perhaps better than the other pieces of the period, especially the prayer, which has an appealing melody and much harmonic freedom in the accompaniment. But the ballads of this later period—including Schiller’s ‘The Glove,’ Hebbel’s ‘Fair Hedwig,’ and others—are mere collections of musical bombast. Let us draw the veil. For soon Schumann was to throw himself into the Rhine in attempted suicide, a martyr to the vigorous activity of fifteen years—years, one of which produced the remarkable songs which we have just been studying, by which alone his name need be known in song literature.
IV
Among Schumann’s contemporaries in song literature we may mention his wife Clara, his friend and rival Mendelssohn, together with several lesser known composers—Reinecke, Volkmann, and Jadassohn—and, finally, two important men, Chopin and Glinka. Clara Schumann (born 1819, Clara Josephine Wieck, died 1896) was a talented composer and a virtuoso pianist who worked throughout her married life in closest sympathy with her husband. Three of her songs appear in Schumann’s opus 37—namely, numbers 2, 4, and 11, Er ist gekommen, Liebst du um Schönheit, and Warum willst du and’re fragen? These songs must be ranked high, for their scholarly command of style and their general finish, though they are obviously not works of special inspiration. The best of the three is probably the second, in which the composer makes extensive use of one of her husband’s devices, that of repeating a single phrase in various forms and building up the song as out of a single shape of stone. The last named of the three songs also has a good melody to its credit.
Mendelssohn wrote many songs during his short lifetime and was probably the best known of all song-writers of the forties. But his work in this department has all but passed into oblivion. They are not ambitious efforts. They make no attempt to strike out new paths; they have no interest in sounding depths of emotion; they are content with the old forms and the old formulas of accompaniment. The best that can usually be said of them is that they are pleasing in melody and faultlessly graceful according to canons of correctness. On the whole, the ones best worth singing are those which are consciously volkstümlich. Among these we may name the very beautiful Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rath, opus 47, No. 7; O Jugend, O schöne Rosenzeit, opus 57, number 4; An die Entfernte, opus 71, number 3; and Das Lieblingsplätzchen, opus 99, number 3, words from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. ‘Italy,’ in opus 8, and Im Herbst, in opus 9, have a very real charm. Neue Liebe, in opus 19, suggesting the elf riding through the forest, is about as near as Mendelssohn ever got to descriptive music in his accompaniments. The Frühlingslied in opus 71 is by all means one of the best of his songs, showing contrast and depth of mood and rising to a thrilling climax on the words Bist nicht allein.
Another song writer of peculiarly Germanic cast was Karl Reinecke (born 1821), friend of Schumann and Mendelssohn and protégé of the latter, who was for thirty-five years director of the Gewandhaus concerts at Leipzig. Reinecke’s songs cannot be called great, but they have to a remarkable degree insinuated themselves into the affections of the German people. They are at their best when they are nearest to the Volkslied, showing the German genius of achieving deep and noble expression in the simplest forms. We may mention especially the Children’s Songs, opus 37, of which the best are the lilting lullaby, Wenn die Kinder schlafen ein, and the moving Gebet zur Nacht. The essential wholesomeness of his talent is shown in the Singspiel, Ein Abenteuer Händels (‘An Adventure of Handel’s), of which the very simple song, Lied so treu und herzlich, is typical. His song cycle, Schneewittchen (for soprano and contralto with chorus of women’s voices), is excellent in its way. The simple prologue is a thing of great beauty, and Schneewittchen’s song, In seiner Kammer, has a charming archaic style, recalling the long and flowing lines of the Minnesong. Salomon Jadassohn (1831-1901) and Robert Volkmann (1815-1883) were likewise successful song writers whose lyric work has largely passed into obscurity. Carl Friedrich Curschmann (1805-1841), a pupil of Spohr, was a prolific and extremely popular writer of songs in a sentimental and popular vein, marked by the sensuous quality which Franz Abt used so richly. An artist of more varied talents was Karl Gottfried Wilhelm Taubert (1811-1891), who held important official positions in Berlin, chiefly in the Royal Opera, and composed numerous songs. The best of these are the Kinderlieder, of which the charming ‘Lullaby’ is still popular.