This is an outburst of a song which Sams rightly labels ‘too effective for comfort’. There is not only the swagger of the professional soldier here, but the grim insistence of a man obsessed by regimental pride and the ritual of boys’ games extended to the deadly earnest adult world. This blood-brotherhood spells terror and death for whoever gets in the way, and the song is strangely balanced between being a ditty of blustery nonsense (with all its ‘traras’) and something much more disturbing. The Eichendorff settings of Wolf which deal with mercenaries and men of fortune are much more genial than this, but perhaps there was something about Schumann’s fairly recent exposure to the world of revolutionary violence in Dresden which made this hussar more menacing than the average Lieder toy soldier. In any case the hussar is specifically a Hungarian cavalryman, and Lenau writes poetry which exults in the death-defying mystique of the soldiers from his homeland.

The song is in 6/8 and the accompaniment canters back and forth with insolent arrogance. One musical idea dominates the proceedings – the opening motif of four notes hammered out in fortissimo octaves in both hands. This sets off the voice in its climb up the stave – a rising (and rousing) B flat major arpeggio F–B flat–D. With the highest note the harmony switches from B flat major to D major, and this opens up the possibility of a G minor swagger in the piano after the rhetorical ‘Was ist die Gefahr?’ and a softer vocal phrase (as if sung through clenched teeth) which cockily claims an ability to flirt with death and danger – ‘Sein herzliebster Schatz!’. This returns the music to B flat major and, inevitably, we hear the pounded fanfare motif again, this time in the left hand. A few bars later it also occurs in a weird type of canon within the accompaniment as if the left hand’s aggressive posturing has set off the right in similar braggadocio. Sams notes that the basic motto theme is heard, in one form or another, no fewer than twenty-seven times during the song. A limited number of ideas are repeated in short, sharp, sabre-like phrases – something like a brainwashing technique to mirror the mind of a young soldier programmed into action by regimental mystique, and whose ‘traras’ are meant to get his own courage up as much as terrify the enemy. If this song is resoundingly well sung, one notices the music’s limitations less.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1998

The energetic enthusiasm of the young soldier (which has been the mark of the previous song) is here counterpointed with the grim musings of a veteran who craves the glory of warfare. The composer’s marking of ‘Nicht schnell’ and a rather steady metronome mark emphasize the mirthless and determined mood of the music as the soldier regards the world with a baleful, rather than a gleaming, eye. That he is out of step with the rest of society is obvious from the title of the lyric alone. Schumann casts the accompaniment in a march rhythm which seems to prophesy the military manner of Gustav Mahler, whose enthusiasm for the soldier-boy lyrics of Des Knaben Wunderhorn led him to compose some of the darkest and most savage songs about army life ever written (Der Tambourg’sell, Revelge). Of course Schumann here lacks Mahler’s sense of symphonic depth and cataclysmic emotion, but the insistence on the dotted rhythms of the march throughout, as well as the sudden explosions of sound in the tiny interludes, would have been worthy of the later composer. Perhaps the song which this music most recalls is the last of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen which is not a war song at all but is fashioned into a dead march. One must also not forget that in 1840 Schumann had set the Andersen/Chamisso poem Der Soldat which chillingly depicts a deserter’s execution using the controlled and implacable rhythms of military music.

The pianistic means are rather simple throughout, and the mood strangely laconic. We detect flickers of emotion from the singer at rare moments – for example, the way the music slightly mellows and modulates into the major key at the mention of wine (obviously a favourite passion, even if not quite as satisfying as killing). Mention of sampling the vintages one by one is less the sign of a dedicated wine-taster than the poet’s means of describing the passage of time, years of peace when most people are grateful to concentrate on the making of wine rather than war. The most chilling aspect of the setting is the way that when war once again flares up (‘Ist endlich entglommen Der heisse Streit’) there is no trace of pleasure or relish in the music; indeed it continues to be marked piano. Here Schumann achieves, intentionally or not, a note of menacing depravity. Indeed this soldier has the reptilian patience of a professional hit-man, and his pleasure requires no display of youthful exuberance. (The vocal range required of him has a suitably Sparafucilian depth.) Also chilling is the laconic last line of the song (again marked piano) where the pleasure that the soldier feels is so great that his tongue cannot express it. The literal translation of Lenau’s line is that his throat ‘rusts over with joy’ – both things, the rust and the joy, sharing a reddish tinge. In this strophe the poet emphasizes the contrast of ‘du’ (the sword) and ‘mir’ (the narrator): the instrument of death, treated like some bloodthirsty pet at last allowed to gorge itself to the full, is nourished by blood, whereas the poet himself rusts with a hollow joy that can bring no happiness. This ironic contrast is ignored in Schumann’s setting, but the similarities between drinking wine and drinking blood are played upon in a way that suggests the taking of life has all the sacred earnestness of Holy Communion.

The music moves into slightly more excitable rhythms at ‘Im brausenden Moste, Mein durstiges Erz’; this is Schumann’s one concession to moving the action from the wine cellar to the battlefield. Eric Sams points out the felicitous setting of the word ‘hingst’ in the second verse; this verb, accompanied by hollow double octaves denoting loneliness, is suspended motionless across a bar line in a way which suggests a solitary sword hung on the wall. Such specific touches of detail are rare in a song somewhat in the popular style, and governed by blinkered obsession. The postlude contains some unusual jarring discords. We believe the song has ended in D major, but the return to G minor for the very last note, a staccato quaver, has the surprise of a sudden stab in the back – probably the fate of this sinister killjoy sooner or later.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1998

This is perhaps the least memorable of this group of songs, not because Lenau’s words are any the less effective but because the music has more than a touch of the commonplace about it, suggestive of too many other drinking songs and student ditties. We begin well enough as the soldier tells us of the innocent concerns of his youth – wine, women and song – although with music of this brusque heartiness one does not envy any girl with ‘roten Wangen’ who might have hoped for a touch of tenderness and a less than brutal caress. The doubling of piano and voice suggests a sing-song with a bunch of the lads; in the accents of the music there is a sign of the aggression that enters into musical renditions when combined with heavy drinking.

The disappointment lies in the composer’s inability to suggest that the change in the man’s life when he becomes a soldier is anything more than routine: the song continues in more or less the same mode, and the hideous pleasure he feels in slashing the enemy’s cheek in order to make it red seems to have encouraged no heightened musical response. There are striding bass octaves, and modulations into various minor keys, but these are not enough to transfer the action effectively onto the battlefield; the down-beat word-setting takes all the new violence for granted. This lack of excitement in the music is probably a fine musical analogue for the casualness and banality of war, something commented on by all who have seen battle atrocities face to face. The beginnings of polonaise rhythm in the accompaniment (repeated E flats to characterize ‘Kanonengebrumm’) seem an underplayed effect, and the recapitulation of the first verse (the composer’s decision, not the poet’s) merely emphasizes the fact that the tune of green bushes and red cheeks is rather an ordinary one.

An unusual feature of the song is a postlude containing new material not derived from the main melody. After the repeat of the first verse, during which the singer has found himself back in the pub of his youthful carousings, he suddenly hears the call to arms with trumpet fanfares in the piano, and a fragment of a new drinking-song tune. All this is rather awkwardly written for the piano. There is a final flourish in the accompaniment – B flat to E flat octaves heard twice; these hark back to the piano motif (beginning with the interval of a fourth) which began Der Husar, trara! at the beginning of the set.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1998

In this ominous little song Schumann writes his equivalent of Mussorgsky’s Death, the Commander-in-Chief from The Songs and Dances of Death. Naturally it is not on the same scale, but it is a reminder that the great song composers of the nineteenth century lived in ruthless and bloody times, despite the fact that modern technology was not yet capable of the mass killings of our own century. Only a few years after this song was written, the butchery of the Crimean War would set new standards of horror in terms of the casualties and the wounded.

The main accompanying figure is in undulating triplets, an octave apart in the bass clef. The tessitura and musical atmosphere of this writing would be ideal to depict mist spreading across a plain, but the poet has furnished a much more grotesque image – a seething sea of blood which here seems to have seeped to the bottom of the stave. During the phrase ‘Sie liegt in ihrem blutroten Blut’ the voice also descends to these regions for a succession of low Gs as if wallowing in a viscous morass. These celebrated Hungarian soldiers are naturally the victors of the proceedings (one feels it would have been much less fun for them if they had lost) and the dotted figures in the piano interludes remind us that they wield their deadly sabres from horseback. Indeed this song may be said to be given over to the horse; springing figurations of canter and gallop dominate the second half of the music. For the most part the singer (here as elsewhere in the cycle) sits high in the vocal line just as the hussars sit on their steeds, high above the killing fields. On two of the three occasions when the singer returns to the bottom of the bass clef it is because he is either contemplating or describing the corpses of the enemy.

At the beginning of the second verse (‘Da liegen sie, ha! so bleich und rot’) the plagal move from F minor back to C minor seems apposite for the making of the sign of the Cross as the full horrors of the battlefield are contemplated. The poet’s words about souls still trembling on the dead bodies push the vocal line to low Gs against the undulating arpeggios we have heard at the beginning. The third verse also plays on the contrast between C major and F minor and includes sundry trumpet calls and fanfares. At ‘Und weiter springt sein lustiges Pferd’ the singer is required for the first time to jump and leap in the manner of the hussar’s steed. The dotted rhythms and other features of the accompaniment, here and earlier, are remarkably similar to Duparc’s Le manoir de Rosemonde; one cannot help wondering whether the French composer knew this song. The postlude implies the cavalry riding away from the scene of carnage and there is something about this which almost comically suggests toy soldiers playing at death. One realizes that if he wanted to set this poem at all, Schumann should have given it a much larger canvas (in the Mussorgsky manner, say) which would have done something like justice to the words. Sams points out that in the hushed notes of the last two bars, with their succession of C major chords rising over a rumbling bass, the composer lends a touch of humanity to Lenau’s text. But the impression is of too little too late. We remain uncertain of Schumann’s own viewpoint. Are these anti-war songs meant to shock us out of jingoism, or does the composer actively participate in the glorification of the darkly mysterious regiment? One theory is that the German spirit has always been fascinated with the forceful and bloody rites of the worshippers of Thor. For much of the time Schumann was a rather gentle soul, but he seems momentarily to have been drawn into Lenau’s dark, almost erotic, fascination with this merciless blood-brotherhood.

On the other hand it must be a sign of the composer’s sense of proportion that he keeps the songs short and musically simple. To take the texts seriously enough to write a magnum opus on them would have been more disturbing evidence of misplaced sympathies than the ineptness that leaves some of these poems less than fully translated into convincing musical imagery. As we noted in the first song in the set, a good performance goes some way towards settling our doubts. With a fine voice ringing in our ears it is much easier to take the songs at face value as cloak-and-dagger recital material for a dashing singer in operatic mood. That they are seldom heard on the concert platform is because they fall between two stools – they are neither light enough to be amusing trifles, nor substantial enough to be major battle songs in the manner of some of Mahler’s Wunderhorn Lieder or Schoenberg’s Der verlorene Haufen.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1998