E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten
Sams The Songs of Robert Schumann
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28099-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-28099-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Eric Sams (1926-2004) was exceptional both as a musicologist, specialising in German lieder, and as a Shakespeare scholar. His fascination with lieder was first inspired by hearing recordings of Hugo Wolf songs in the collection of one of his schoolmasters. He had an exceptional gift for quoting at length the texts of almost of any verse, including the complete works of Shakespeare. He studied modern languages at Cambridge and then joined the Civil Service. He became a highly respected music critic, with a witty and allusive style, reviewing regularly for, among others, the Times Literary Supplement. He wrote several books, and specialized in the relationship between music and language, particularly the text settings of the Romantic song composers.
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Songs were among Schumann’s first works, at seventeen (in 1827); they were among his last (in 1852). All his life, most of his music was associated with words, whether as texts, titles or programmes. Well over half of it is for voice; well over three-quarters is for (or with) piano. His inspiration ebbed and flowed in ten-year cycles,1 with crests of activity in 1840 and 1849; so each of those waves of music broke in song for voice and piano.
These songs mirror the life of the man and his music. They tell a life story of genesis, growth, maturity and decline; they have an unchanging spirit that animates them still. Most of this book follows the vital process through two decades of life and song; this chapter tries to define the vital principles.
Schumann himself defines his music for us. ‘Everything that happens in the world affects me, politics, literature, people; I think it all over in my own way, and then it has to find a way out through music.’ In a review he writes:
Improvise at the keyboard, hum a melody, weave that melody into the piano texture; thus – if you are a Mendelssohn – you can write the most beautiful songs without words.
He might have added – sing that melody to words by (say) Heine and then you can – if you are a Schumann – write the most beautiful songs. The songs are an extension of the piano-music; and they too express Schumann’s own world of feeling.
By 1840 he had spent ten years in perfecting his unique mastery of the lyric piano piece. Of course he would continue to write what came naturally and what he knew best. The long expressive postludes are especially characteristic; they are piano solos. The best known of all (in Dichterliebe) reappears in the piano concerto. Some of the boyhood songs (Appendix I) were later adapted as piano-music. Conversely, Schumann tells us how he turns his piano-music into song (see Ich wandre nicht). Mit Myrthen und Rosen is like a re-reading of the first Novellette; Zum Schluss rounds off the songs of Op. 25 just as Zum Beschluss rounds off a piano-cycle (Op. 20); Sitz’ ich allein even has an optional Da Capo.
The two genres have not only common titles (e.g. Abendlied, Intermezzo) but common form. Both can be simple and repetitive (i.e. in so-called song-form). But this is rare; more usually they are varied or extended with climax and coda. Schumann thought those features very apt for the end of a song (as also for the piano piece Ende vom Lied, Op. 12) and he often repeats words in order to achieve a peroration.
Finally the songs, just like the piano works, are organized into groups or cycles. This reflects his passion for verbal expressiveness, order and symmetry. In his daily life, everything goes into books; a daybook, a project-book, a song-book, a correspondence-book, a notebook, a marriage-book, and a cash-book. The piano-music appears as Novellettes, Albums, and so on, complete with titles and headings. Among the songs, the cycles are the most famous (the two Liederkreise, Dichterliebe, Frauenliebe etc.) as they are the most characteristic (about four-fifths of all the songs form part of some group). Most are musically integrated, whether by key-sequence or by motto-themes, again just as in the piano music. Sometimes it is the same theme in both, as in the Davidsbündler, Op. 6, and the Liederkreis, Op. 24. The typical vocal lines:
like the themes mentioned on pp. 22–25, are fully as typical of Schumann’s purely instrumental melodies. Indeed, he habitually speaks of ‘vocal works’ or ‘works for voice’, much as one might speak of works for piano; never as if the words, or even the vocal timbre or compass, were significant as such.
This explains the indifferent accentuation found throughout the songs. It explains such odd directions as ‘for soprano or contralto’. It explains the alternative vocal lines that Schumann was always ready to write if he found his piano tunes straying beyond what he thought was a reasonable vocal compass, as in the well-known example of Ich grolle nicht (in such cases the rule is to sing the piano line if possible). Above all it explains why voice and piano so often share the melody. This trait has been criticized on the ground that the piano only echoes the voice, which is a ‘weakness’. But on the contrary; since the piano concept is primary, it is the voice that borrows the piano melody, and this sharing is the heart and strength of Schumann song. Sometimes the shared melody is the same in voice and piano, as in Die Nonne; sometimes it is varied or decorated in the piano part, often very subtly, as in Aufträge or Resignation. But from Schumann’s first song to his last the melody is essentially the piano’s. If all the voice parts were lost we could deduce from the piano part and the words what the vocal line must be. This may seem exaggerated or over-simplified; but it will be found verifiably true of most of the songs, and not irrelevant to the rest.
If then the piano is primary, and if the music expresses the composer rather than the poet, it follows that both voice and verse are subordinate. Yet the music is all shapely melody, singable and beautiful; and Schumann is often acclaimed as among the most literary of all composers, sensitively attuned to the least poetic nuance, with a special affinity for the poems of Heinrich Heine. However, this is a myth, as we can discover from the Heine settings themselves.
Their source was the first edition of the Buck der Lieder – thirteen years, two editions, and several revisions out of date. Schumann’s selection of poems was indiscriminate. He foisted his own meaning on them, and not only repeated words or lines or whole verses for this purpose but added and altered and miscopied and omitted at will. He rarely offers any equivalent for Heine’s irony or innuendo, and sometimes seems not to understand them. Out of twenty-five years of composing he devoted some twenty-five days, spread over a year or two at most, to setting a few pages of one single volume; there is no evidence that he even so much as glanced at another Heine lyric for the rest of his life.
Schumann himself implied that he believed poetry to be an inferior art-form.2 Nothing suggests that he ever changed his mind. On the contrary, all his recorded comments on the relation of words to music instinctively award pride of place to the latter. The poem, he said, must be crushed and have its juices expressed like an orange; it must wear the music like a wreath, or yield to it like a bride. For him there was no contradiction, no problem; nor is there, unless one is created. His own music, as he very well knew, is expressive of ideas just as words are. In his songs (as in most songs) the meaning of the music takes precedence. Sometimes the two are in phase, so that the expression is enhanced; sometimes they are out of phase, so that new patterns and tensions are created from the interaction of music and words. The latter is the typical Schumann; original, rewarding, infinitely expressive of the composer, his life and his world.
Even his choice and treatment of poets and poems were self-expressive. He liked the poets to be known to him personally (most of them were) and to share his liberal and agnostic views (most of them did).3 The settings responded to some need of the moment. ‘Bring the Kerner volume’, he writes to Clara; ‘lend me the Geibel’, to a friend. From the volumes he chose poems which either directly mirrored his own feelings or could be adjusted to reflect them. Thus Eichendorff’s devotional Mondnacht is steeped in love-music until it takes on a different colour of devotion. Similarly, words or phrases or verses are repeated or altered to remould their meaning nearer to the composer’s mood. This treatment is typical of Schumann; and his prevailing moods and themes are typical of the Romantic movement.
In his own person he expresses a whole universe of life and feeling; the one becomes the infinite. The surest way is by self-abnegation, by losing oneself and being reborn in the love of another. His life as well as his work was dedicated to his wife, Clara. There are no more deeply-felt declarations in music than his love-songs for her in their marriage year (Liederkreis, Myrthen, Dichterliebe, the best of him). Indeed, many songs transcend even this degree of exaltation by identifying the music with Clara herself; by sharing the writing with her (as in Op. 47), or by seeing life through her eyes (some of Myrthen, all Frauenliebe and -leben) as well as by the continuous use of meaningful motto-themes signifying Clara. Of course there are other, more light-hearted, ways of losing one’s own identity, such as assuming various guises or disguises, a theme very dear to Schumann.4 He masquerades in the songs, with evident relish, as a Spanish grandee (Der Hidalgo), a smuggler (Der Contrabandiste), a clown (Schlusslied), and so on. Often Clara is brought into the masquerade (as in Myrthen and Die Karten-legerin) as she was into Carnaval.
However, such flights from reality take no one very far. The disguise becomes the man too well or too often; Schumann in...
