When Poetry Marries Music: Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39

The joy of art song is, yes of course, in the beauty of the music, but it is especially in the interaction of music and poetry. Last month I went and saw the film A Complete Unknown and it featured some nice excerpts of Bob Dylan’s classic sixties songs, plus some Joan Baez and others. It struck me that Dylan and Baez were really torchbearers of the art-song genre, since so much of their output is “poetry set to music.” Of course one could argue that all song lyrics are poetry, but I’ll make a slight case for a distinction here on the basis of how “heightened” or “artsy” or “abstract” the lyrics may be. In Dylan’s case, it often feels like the music is in service to something unusually serious and cerebral in the poetry. Another group that gives me this feeling is the Grateful Dead, when they are playing songs on lyrics by the ever-imagistic and mood-building Robert Hunter. Lots of others could fit this bill, too, and I’m certainly not here to argue against any songwriter for inclusion in this lineage. My point is just to highlight this concept: poetry set to music. Not just a catchy lyric to go with a catchy tune, not just a single straightahead sentiment (like “please be mine,” “I love you,” or “I’m sad you’re not mine”), but something more ethereal and complex. This is the gift, too, of art song.

Robert Schumann is one of the big daddies of all art-song composers, writing classics such as his Dichterliebe (“a poet’s love”) and Liederkreis (“song cycle”), Op. 24, both on poetry by the German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, and the cycle Victoria and I will be presenting on 2/6 and /7, Liederkreis, Op. 39, on poetry by another German romantic poet, Joseph von Eichendorff. I have really been enjoying getting into the poetry of Liederkreis, Op. 39, also sometimes called the “Eichendorff Liederkreis” to distinguish it from the Heine Liederkreis.

The title Liederkreis translates, ever so simply, to “Song (Lieder)-round (Kreis)” or “Song-cycle.” The art-song tradition in Western Art Music finds some of its most exceptional exponents in the German genre of the Lied, about which the music critic Jon W. Finson writes (again pointing to the art song’s form as poetry-set-to-music),

We must always understand that the Lied is a literary experience as much as a musical one, and we can translate the word itself either as “lyric” or “song.” In fact, during Schuman’s day, poets regularly gave public readings of their Lieder before literary societies as well as releasing them in print.

Jon W. Finson calls the Eichendorff Liederkreis part of “the long tradition of ‘Wanderer’ cycles documenting a young man’s adventures in the wide world.” This certainly seems to be a through-line in the cycle, of which two different songs (#1 and #8) are titled “In der Fremde,” or “in a foreign land,” and another (#6) is titled “Schöne Fremde,” or “a beautiful foreign land.” In the opening song, one of the two titled “In a Foreign Land,” the poet speaks of being far from home, casting his thoughts back “beyond the red lightning,” to his distant homeland:

From my homeland, beyond the red lightning,
The clouds come drifting in,
But father and mother have long been dead,
Now no one knows me there.

How soon, ah! how soon till that quiet time
When I too shall rest
Beneath the sweet murmur of lonely woods,
And no one knows me here either.

It’s important to know that, although the words of each poem are by Eichendorff, the wanderer’s overall journey is really the work of Schumann: it was Schumann who chose and ordered the twelve songs of the Liederkreis out of the many candidates in Eichendorff’s collection Intermezzo. The wanderer’s journey is not a straightforward one (nor would we wish it to be!), with many of the movements being static meditations on forlorn love—though not so stormy and melancholic as the failed-love story in Schumann’s Dichterliebe—and some being being scenes of fantasy, like the knight in song 7, who has slept for centuries in a high tower until his “hair and beard are grown together, and his breast and his collar-ruff have turned to stone.” 

Overall, the Liederkreis songs feel more reserved and compact than those of Dichterliebe. Eichendorff’s verse forms are less adventurous than those of Heine. Eichendorff almost always writes in quatrains, strongly favoring an alternating rhyming scheme, and almost always in lines of three or four feet. Thus, the songs of Liederkreis, Op. 39 end up feeling like charming miniatures.

Although our recital, as many in the last 160 years, will present these two songs in a concert format, as performed by two professional performers, it may help our appreciation of these poetic miniatures to remember that (again quoting Jon W. Finson):

Musical Lieder, whether published in cycles or miscellaneous collections, formed one of the many varieties of Hausmusik—compositions made primarily for talented amateurs to perform at home. One or two Lieder might occasionally appear on a concert program (along with a scattering of opera arias, individual pieces of chamber music, and then, if an orchestra was available, a symphony). But Germans during Schumann’s day never considered Lieder the province of professional singers and musicians, let alone appropriate in a public setting devoted entirely to them. The Liederabend (a professional chamber-music concert devoted solely to songs) as we know it today did not make its appearance until the 1860s.

It is curious to think, however, of amateur pianists tackling Schumann’s intricate and sometimes finger-tying accompaniments. We will be blessed to have ours played by the masterful Victoria Kirsch, about whose biography you can read more in my last blog post! Schumann’s piano parts always do more than merely accompany the singer, or provide a scaffolding for the vocalist’s melody: they are always integrally expressive of the meaning of the songs, and at times provide ironic contrast or commentary on the meaning of the lyrics. As an example of the expressive power of the accompaniments, consider the beautiful introduction and accompaniment to song #5, “Mondnacht,” in which the piano’s descending, harmonically-melting figures evoke the moonlight dripping down upon the pastoral scene in which the poet is immersed. About this unique song, Finson writes:

Schumann’s setting suspends all sense of motion for the first two stanzas of the poem through a series of incessantly repeated notes in the piano, a constant repetition of a single melodic phrase for each couplet, and a lack of clarity about the centering key.[...When the poet’s] soul leaves his body [in the final stanza] and flies over the landscape “as if flying home.” Schumann underlines this uncanny experience, expanding the melodic range (“spread[ing] wide its wings”) and finally confirming the actual key to bring the setting “home” (“nach Haus”). Many critics consider this song the most perfect and beautiful combination of text, melody, and instrumental writing in the history of the German Lied.

For attendees at our February 6th and 7th concerts, I would recommend keeping the translations of these songs close at hand, because the interaction between the poetry and the music is so profound and lovely. Of course, simply sitting and enjoying the beautiful sounds is, of course, always a valid option as well.

Because we believe Schumann’s work to be a point of reference for all the later composers we present on our “Liederabend,” Victoria and I will be taking the unusual step of using the Liederkreis, Op. 39 as a “frame” for the rest of our recital: we will divide the 12-song set into four groupings of three, which we will present before, between, and after the other three song-cycles on our program. Thus, Liederkreis will appear as the “background” against which our offerings of Ravel, Barber, and Carlson are set.