Robert Schumann Song Cycles

Robert Schumann Song Cycles James Gilchrist tenor Anna Tilbrook piano Robert Schumann Song Cycles James Gilchrist tenor Anna Tilbrook piano Liederkreis, Op. 24 q Morgens steh’ ich auf ................................... 1:06 w Es treibt mich hin ......................................... 1:15 e Ich wandelte unter den Baümen ................ 3:45 r Lieb’ Liebchen ............................................... 0:45 t Schöne Wiege meine Leiden ........................ 4:14 y Warte, warte, wilder Schiffmann ................ 1:43 u Berg’ und Burgen schau’n herunter ............ 3:30 i Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen ................. 1:04 o Mit Myrthen und Rosen ............................... 3:46 Liederkreis, Op. 39 a In der Fremde ................................................ 1:55 s Intermezzo .................................................... 1:31 d Waldesgespräch ............................................ 2:00 f Die Stille ......................................................... 1:27 g Mondnacht .................................................... 4:21 2 h Schöne Fremde ............................................. 1:13 j Auf einer Burg ............................................... 3:01 k In der Fremde ................................................ 1:24 l Wehmut ......................................................... 2:36 ; Zwielicht ........................................................ 3:04 2) Im Walde ........................................................ 1:25 2! Frühlingsnacht .............................................. 1:07 Dichterliebe, Op. 48 2@ Im wunderschönen Monat Mai ................... 1:30 2# Aus meinen Tränen sprießen ...................... 0:56 2$ Die Rose, die Lilie .......................................... 0:37 2% Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’ ..................... 1:53 2^ Ich will meine Seele tauchen ...................... 1:02 2& Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome ...................... 2:25 2* Ich grolle nicht .............................................. 1:39 2( Und wüßten’s die Blumen ........................... 1:10 3) Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen ...................... 1:36 3! Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen ..................... 2:36 3@ Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen .................... 1:04 3# Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen .............. 2:43 3$ Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet ........................ 2:26 3% Allnächtlich im Traume ............................... 1:27 3^ Aus alten Märchen winkt es ........................ 2:24 3& Die alten, bösen Lieder ................................. 5:06 Total Running Time: 76 minutes 3 Recorded at Wyastone Concert Hall, Monmouthshire, UK 5–7 March 2014 Produced and recorded by Philip Hobbs Post-production by Julia Thomas Cover image The Lorelei Rock (c.1817) by J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) Leeds Art Gallery, UK By permission of Bridgeman Images Design by gmtoucari.com Bonus track available as a free download from http://www.linnrecords.com/recording-schumann-songs.aspx 4 Robert Schumann Song Cycles What, exactly, makes a ‘song cycle’? It is conspicuous that apparently the earliest formal definition, in von Dommer’s 1865 revision of H.C. Koch’s Musikalisches Lexikon (1802), comes a quarter of a century after Schumann’s Dichterliebe and its two companion cycles – all date from 1840, his miraculous Liederjahr – let alone 40 years after Schubert’s cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. And although von Dommer does not mention the work by name, it is Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816) which lies behind his words; subsequent definitions were quick to adopt Beethoven’s work explicitly as the ‘model’ of the genre. The difficulty is that there are important aspects of Beethoven’s cycle – it begins and ends in the same key, for example, and uses linking passages between songs so that the whole forms a continuous musical statement – that are simply not consistently characteristic of the cycles by Schubert and Schumann (though read on for Schumann’s key schemes). It may have been the palpable unity of An die ferne Geliebte, indeed, that led to its being regarded as the standard-bearer of its type, for it was in 5 the 1860s also that public performances of complete Schubert and Schumann cycles took hold. This was largely thanks to the baritone Julius Stockhausen, who gave the first complete performance of Dichterliebe with Brahms in Hamburg on 30 April 1861 and that of the Eichendorff Liederkreis with O. Smith in the same city on 6 May 1863 (the premiere of the complete Op. 24 has not been established). If unity is an important factor, then the Liederkreis, Op. 24 – Schumann’s first published vocal composition, dedicated to the French mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot – is an interesting case from the perspective of both composition and reception. Writing to his beloved Clara on 24 February 1840, he enthused that ‘in recent days I have finished a large cycle of (interrelated) Heine Lieder’. By ‘interrelated’ (‘zusammenhängend’) Schumann was probably referring to the fact that he had set the nine poems from the 1827 edition of the Buch der Lieder by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) in the sequence of the source text (something which is not the case for the Dichterliebe poems, which come from the same book, or for the Eichendorff settings; for those cycles Schumann ‘anthologized’ the sources for his own ends). But ‘interrelated’ could as well refer to the musical construction of Op. 24, which begins and ends in D major and exhibits great care in the tonal sequence from song 6 to song, provided of course that the songs are not transposed inconsistently. Heine grouped the nine poems under the title Junge Leiden. Lieder (‘Youthful sorrows. Songs’), which alludes to the familiar narrative of love and loss: as Jon Finson puts it, Op. 24 traces the persona’s anticipation of his beloved’s arrival (songs 1 & 2), hopes for her affection (3 & 4), rejection (5), rage and flight (6 & 7) and resignation (8), and concludes with a reflective account of healing that enshrines the whole story in verse (9). Finson also points out that Schumann’s manuscript shows that he originally planned Op. 24 in two volumes (it would be published as a single book). The division was to occur after the fifth song, the longest poem thus far and the turning point in the poetic narrative. From a musical point of view, this would have resulted in each ‘half’ of the cycle closing with a minor–major pair of songs, the first of each pair being pointedly terse, even sarcastic in tone, compared with the lyrical expansiveness of the second (an analogy to the recitative–aria pairings of opera and oratorio is not inappropriate). The pairing is particularly transparent when the penultimate song, with its unmistakable allusion to the chorale ‘Wer nur den 7 lieben Gott läßt walten’, closes on the dominant of its D minor key, and thus invites the resolving D major of the concluding ‘Mit Myrthen und Rosen’. Yet generations of singers setting out to learn this cycle will have been faced with the curious, not to say absurd, fact that Max Friedlaender, in his venerable three-volume Peters edition of Schumann’s Lieder, chose to print ‘Mit Myrthen und Rosen’ separately in Volume 1, as one of a series of ‘selected’ Lieder whose purpose was to fill out a volume otherwise devoted to complete cycles (including the other two recorded here); Op. 24 Nos. 1–8 were relegated to Volume 2. What Finson describes as ‘arguably Schumann’s most meticulously crafted cycle’ was thus summarily disassembled. ‘Cyclehood’, it seems, may be decided by the publisher over the wishes of the composer. But the status of the cycle need not be permanently fixed even in the mind of the composer. The version of the Liederkreis, Op. 39 to poems by Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) recorded here is not Schumann’s original, which was published in Vienna in 1842; that version began with a song in D major, ‘Der frohe Wandersmann’, which in its folk-like tone as well as subject matter would immediately have linked this cycle to the tradition of Wanderlieder. Nor was ‘Der frohe Wandersmann’ conceived together with the rest of the cycle, for its composition date of 22 June 1840 falls a month after that of the other songs. Eight years later, in April 8 1850, Schumann issued a new edition of the cycle (as he did revised versions of some of his early piano cycles, including the Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6, in the same year). That began with ‘In der Fremde [I]’: a song utterly different in tone and imagery from its predecessor (which eventually was to open the collection Lieder und Gesänge, Volume III, Op. 77, of 1851), it immediately establishes a quite different aura for this cycle, which Schumann described to Clara as ‘probably my most Romantic work, and there is much of you in it’. It was Clara who had copied out the complete texts of Op. 39 in the manuscript anthology of poems for setting to music which she and Robert maintained assiduously from 1839 onwards. The poems are taken from the section ‘Intermezzo’ in Eichendorff’s collected poems of 1837, and are replete with the dark imagery of forests, ruined castles (especially ‘Auf einer Burg’, with its strong intimations of the past glories of Germany), old folk tales (the Lorelei in ‘Waldesgespräch’) and the like, all of them celebrated tropes of German literary Romanticism. Another such is moonlight, which is celebrated in the fifth song, the best-known of the cycle and a staple of the recital repertory in isolation from its companions. Much has been made of the sequence of bass notes, E–B–E, which recurs several times: since in German the note B is designated H, the sequence spells E–H–E, or Ehe, the German word 9 for ‘marriage’; that would finally become a reality for Robert and Clara on 12 September 1840, the day before Clara’s 21st birthday. (H–E has also been understood as referring to the kiss between ‘Himmel’ and ‘Erde’ in the first two lines of the poem.) ‘In der Fremde [I]’ may serve as a more extended example of the relationship between Wort and Ton in Schumann’s hands. Eichendorff’s poem is cast as two quatrains rhyming ABAB and CDCD: entirely regular, save for an enjambment between lines 6 and 7. The first quatrain deals with events of the past, the second with those of the future.

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