The identity of this song’s poet is uncertain. The initials ‘J.B.’ at the head of the score possibly stand for the Düsseldorf publisher Julius Buddeus (the acknowledged author of another Schumann song,
Die Meerfee). The poem is perhaps not quite the ‘sickly drivel’ of Eric Sams’s description but it is difficult to see what Schumann saw in this gushing piece of Victoriana (for some reason it has always suggested English poetry in translation to me) except if it is something written by a colleague and set to music in a spirit of friendly indulgence. The subject matter is not of the kind that usually appeals to Schumann—there is nothing like this in the other romantic settings during the great period of Robert’s wooing of Clara, nor is there a reference in any of the mature songs to a love that will achieve its dubious consummation only in the afterlife (the ‘Jenseits’ of the poem). Schumann’s triumph after all was that he had won Clara as his bride in the here and now, and with only a few minor exceptions he avoided the composition of religious music. If we knew of an incident where the composer, ten years into his marriage, had conceived a hopeless passion for someone else the setting of this poem might have made more sense, but this scenario has never been proposed by even the most inventive of the biographers. Of course it is possible that the poet, in confessing to an extra-marital romantic dream, required his friend Schumann to be discreet regarding the lyric’s authorship—thus the enigmatic ‘J.B.’ instead of a full name. It was certainly not the composer’s usual habit to fail properly to acknowledge poets with regard to their contribution to his songs. Another motive (as opposed to motif) for non-disclosure of authorship is suggested below.
One can only think that Schumann was searching for a lyric—a kind of thinking aloud in music—that enabled him to practise a new kind of composition where melody and melodic shape were less important than an ongoing confessional, part recitative and part arioso. The marking Nicht schnell, mit freiem Vortrag (‘Not fast, to be performed with freedom’) is itself an indication of this. Schumann has chosen a text that sounds like an excerpt from a libretto, and the song itself begins in mid-stream as if it were part of a larger work, an opera perhaps. In fact Schumann has set this poem like a letter aria, imagining either someone writing it, like Tchaikovsky’s Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, or someone reading it; the flexibility implied by the encouragement of rubato (mit freiem Vortrag) suggests the singer creating the words on the spur of the moment, or perhaps reacting to them while reading them. The motif that opens the song, a sighing chromatic figure with adjacent semitones in the alto register, suggests in its short and constrained musical journey a passion that is stunted by circumstance; its reappearance throughout the song is indicative of the obsessional nature of a blighted love affair.
The title ‘Resignation’ says something of Schumann’s mood in the ‘down’ times of these later years but the song is far from down in the mouth. Rather it is passionate, and in the right hands it can be surprisingly persuasive. In the absence of a printed source, the poem, I would suggest, was originally in six quatrains with the composer leaving out either the first or the last line of the third (the rhyme scheme is essentially ABAB with a large number of approximate or near rhymes—something that could indicate a translation from another language). The two-line interjections (printed above in brackets) make no metrical sense but they are in the spirit of the poet’s explosive ‘Gewiß! doch trostlos nicht!’ in the poem’s fifth strophe. It is possible, even likely, that these extra lines are by Schumann himself and these are surely indicative of the sort of song he was attempting to write in the wake of his own opera Genoveva. Like Wagner, and like Debussy in Pelléas et Mélisande, Schumann is trying to express the naturalness of speech; the formality of more strait-laced word-setting, as in the Heine or Eichendorff songs, must have temporarily seemed old-fashioned and a thing of the past. If Schumann had indeed interpolated his own words into the poet’s structure this would go some way in explaining his diffidence in terms of placing a poet’s name at the head of the music.
Resignation alternates between full-blooded recitative (where the accompaniment seems orchestrally conceived) and arioso (with piano-writing that is familiar in style from such better-known late songs as Liebeslied, Ihre Stimme and so on). The song opens in its home key of D flat major (with an accented passing note as part of an ongoing inner chromatic motif) but almost immediately shifts to the subdominant and from there to the supertonic. It is as if we have discovered the suffering hero in mid-song—not actually a new device if we remember the brilliantly disorientated opening of Im wunderschönen Monat Mai from Dichterliebe. The accompaniment suggests lower strings and winds giving the voice a certain amount of unaccompanied freedom. Schumann sets the poet’s first quatrain in this wide-ranging and harmonically unsettled manner; the additional two lines possibly by Schumann himself (‘Wie’s kommt? Wie kann ich’s wissen?’) are a musical throwaway, eerily prophetic of how Hugo Wolf set the parenthetical ‘Wo find’ ich’s nur’ in the song Was für ein Lied? (Italienisches Liederbuch No XXIII). Wolf’s inspiration in that finely judged piece of prosody was undoubtedly Die Meistersinger and it is not impossible that Schumann was influenced here by what he had heard from Wagner’s earlier works in terms of both word-setting and harmony.
At ‘Wohl höher schlägt mein Herz’ we return to the world of the more conventional lied. The vocal line blossoms into something of a melody built on repetition and sequence. The obvious (and inexplicable) absence of one of the poet’s lines is felt in the slightly awkward phrase lengths of this section; the stop-start accompaniment with rather too many off-beat syncopations between the hands seems mannered. But this is piano-writing as opposed to orchestral make-believe and it serves as an intended contrast with the recitative section. After ‘Wechseltausch’ there is another sectional break: the motif of the opening returns transposed up a tone, leading to another of the composer’s interpolations, in this case a rhetorical expansion of the poem’s opening words (‘Lieben, von ganzer Seele’) to include the rather exaggerated repetition ‘lieben, lieben’—it must have been this corner of Resignation that tipped Sams’s unforgiving verdict towards ‘sickly drivel’. These lovesick words adorn a strong cadence on the dominant and we expect to return to the tonic key of D flat major.
In fact the next section is in the tonic minor of C sharp with a key-signature change to four sharps for ‘Du wirst mich nie umschließen’. Once again the chromatic slidings of string-writing are here replaced by oscillating passagework in semiquavers that could only be intended for the piano. After this fourth strophe the rhetorical first line of the fifth (‘So hoffnungslos mein Lieben?’) prompts a return to recitative, while the response to the beginning of the second line (‘Gewiß!’) is spacious minims followed by semiquaver accompaniment for ‘doch trostlos nicht!’. A repeat of this line (with heightened tessitura for the second ‘Gewiß!’) allows for a combination of the song’s two styles—part piano arpeggio, part chromatic contortion—but this merely adds to an impression of melodrama that renders the song rather less natural than Schumann surely intended.
There is now a return to a key-signature of five flats before the poet’s quatrain has ended. The composer delighted in tricking eye and ear by disturbing four-square symmetries. At first we believe that ‘Will Gegenwart nicht trüben’—a return of the opening motif with its rising semiquavers—is the beginning of a new musical section but it stands on its own before the setting of the poem’s final quatrain. This introduces an accompaniment in triplet quavers for no clear reason apart from the fact they appear as a kind of default in many a late Schumann song. At ‘Lächle mit bleichem Munde’ we are uncertain whether we are in recitative or arioso mode, and this is surely as the composer intended. Six bars from the end (incorporating a five-bar postlude) the now-familiar motif, rising hopefully but with nowhere to go, reappears in the alto and tenor registers and brings the song to a muted conclusion. We are left with some admiration for a structure that is experimental and forward-thinking (actually always a characteristic of Schumann’s songs) but the question arises as to whether a song of this kind, unnecessarily complicated for Schumann’s own lyrical gift, defeats its communicative objective. If we find ourselves wishing that the composer had expended all this effort on a better poem, the composer might have replied that such a musical experiment was better performed on a lyric that had little to lose in being tinkered with and pulled apart.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2009