Alongside
Meine Rose the popularity of this song has overshadowed the other Lenau settings. It has a stirring climax and it burns with a message. I fell in love with it on an HMV plum-label ‘78’ recording by the mezzo soprano Flora Nielsen accompanied by Gerald Moore, both of whom were mentors in my student years. Despite a certain mawkishness in the text (not on a level with the Lenau poetry that has preceded it in the opus) the song was composed with such a full heart that it convinces by its sincerity—assuming it is well sung, for this is a real test of singing ability and breath control and Schumann in his last period is not particularly considerate with singers. Right at the end of the poem angels harps are mentioned, and it is this which encourages the composer to re-string his lyre and sweep the piano strings with harp evocation once again (Schumann was a dab hand at harp-inspired music at the time: the Harper’s songs from
Wilhelm Meister lay behind him, and the Op 139 harp songs were yet to be composed). After this is said, of course, this is piano music par excellence, impossible to envisage without a pedal and the singing tone of the piano. Some of the Chopinesque traits of
Einsamkeit (composed the day before) are to be heard here, such as the tune in long note-values in the little finger of the right hand; even the snaking figuration that governed that song—a descending pattern of ascending seconds—is introduced on the phrase ‘seligem Verein’ in the first verse as if all great composers (perhaps Schumann’s elite group of artists, his ‘Davidsbund’, is also a ‘Musik-Verein’?) will meet again one day in heaven. Perhaps there is also a community of great lovers in Schumann’s mind, and the composer believes that he and Clara were of their number. The poem (which begins in its original Latin: ‘Requiescat a labore / doloroso at amore! / unionem coelitum / flagitavit / jam intravit / salvatoris adytum’) is Héloïse’s lament for the death of Peter Abelard (1079–1142) many years after the scandal of their illegitimate child, secret marriage, and Abelard’s castration at the order of her uncle. (As early as 1831 Schumann had struggled to read the philosophy of Abelard and found it difficult but illuminating—the background to this poem clearly meant something to him.) Héloïse writes these words as an abbess; she remembers her love for Peter as a thing of the past. He had once been a great lover but ended his life as an old monk, an original thinker who had been stripped of his manhood and was now exhausted by the hostility of the church. The golden legend of ‘Abelard and Héloïse’ is here a glorious memory, but only a memory nevertheless; could it be that the composer, exhausted by the hostility of Dresden and fearful for his future, mourned the fact that the great days of ‘Robert and Clara’ were also long since over?
The text of this poem, as Schumann read it, calls for a chorus of monks—which may explain why the composer seems to have had a scena in mind, a grand lament with suggestions of something staged, with orchestra and chorus. The music seems composed in layers. The vocal line is a counter-melody to a harp or piano piece—to be heard off-stage perhaps, or floating from the gallery of a cathedral, rather than a tune which was born with the accompaniment as a single thought. It is this which both de-personalises the music and gives it a certain public grandeur. This applies most of all to the music of the third verse which becomes really imposing with the rhetorical question ‘hörst du? Jubelsang erklingt’. At ‘Feiertöne’ semiquavers are replaced by quintuplets and the music works up into a fine frenzy. Unfortunately Schumann gives the performers very little time to come down from their high for the recapitulation (Schubert made a similar mistake at the end of Gretchen am Spinnrade—his only miscalculation in that great work). Adopting the same tactic as in Meine Rose, Schumann repeats the first verse and thus vitiates the fervour of the poem which started on a personal note and moved triumphantly to the universal. Nevertheless we are reminded by this return to ‘Ruh von schmerzenreichen Mühen aus’ that Requiem is a Lied, as opposed to an aria; there is a return of the personal and cherishing note. The elongation (five beats) of ‘trug Verlangen’ suggests the infinite patience of a long-suffering soul to rejoin his Maker. An ascent into heaven is depicted by the rising scale of ‘ist gegangen zu des Heilands Wohnung ein’. The final note of the vocal line, no less than ten beats long, is one of the composer’s most inspired perorations; as the singer holds that note (if she can) it seems to merge with the piano and imperceptibly dematerialise—surely a metaphor for the soul slipping out of the body and becoming at one with the angelic harpists and heavenly choir.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 1996
Schumann: The Complete Songs
Schumann: The Complete Songs, Vol. 1 - Christine Schäfer
Le Bestiaire
