Blondels Lied is dissimilar to any of Schubert’s Seidl settings, but there are Schubertian resonances nevertheless. The phrase ‘Suche treu, so findest du!’ is similar to the conclusion of Schubert’s song Alinde, D904, where the singer finds his beloved after an exhaustive search. And then there is the poem’s historical context. Schubert was fascinated by the Crusades, and songs like Der Kreuzzug and Romanze von Richard Löwenherz, not to mention the libretto for his last opera Der Graf von Gleichen, show a partiality for medieval minstrelsy. The character of Blondel is even to be found in the 1818 Schubert song Blondel zu Marien. This enthusiasm may partly be explained as interest in local history: in 1192 King Richard I was imprisoned not far from Vienna by Leopold of Austria. In any case, the European fascination with the Plantagenet king’s rescue from captivity through the efforts of his faithful minstrel Blondel had been fostered by Grétry’s well known opera, Richard Coeur-de-lion. The international popularity of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe prompted further interest in the reign of Richard I. And interest persisted. In the poem Richard Coeur-de-lion, written during the Second World War in occupied France, Louis Aragon wrote (in Louis MacNeice’s translation):

All French men are Blondel, in each he sings:
Whatever name we called her at the start,
Freedom – like a whispering of wings –
Answers the song of Richard Lionheart.

The modern ear inevitably finds longueurs in the ballad style of old Germany. Schumann casts Blondels Lied as a ballad-cum-strophic song which belongs to another, less sophisticated age. But the surprise is how well the composer accomplishes something noble and interesting within the deliberately archaic manner with which he frames the work, half pastiche and half deeply-felt response to the concept of unswerving loyalty. In this way, Blondels Lied about the Lionheart is a companion piece to Die Löwenbraut (Volume 2) which achieves considerable power despite its ludicrous story. The song was composed shortly after the marriage of Robert and Clara, and the refrain ‘Suche treu, so findest du’ must have seemed like a justification of their own long struggle based on trust and loyalty through extended separation. It is one of the songs that gave much pleasure in the composer’s own domestic circle.

1, 2. The opening melody (repeated in the last strophe) belongs to the narrator. It is a sort of free variation on Blondel’s own song in the central sections of the ballad. The tune seems to be somehow instrumental, an impression reinforced by the fact that the unimportant words ‘bei’, ‘vor’ ‘und’ and ‘dem’ occur on strong beats. In the opening lines we hear of the castle of Dürrenstein (now known as Dürnstein in Lower Austria on the left bank of the Danube in the Wachau) and we are somehow reminded of the landscape of Auf einer Burg from the Eichendorff Liederkreis. The appearance of the music on the page is not dissimilar, with its foursquare tempo and predominance of minims and semibreves. For most of the song the piano leads and doubles the voice in a solemn chorale style, the sumptuous lower reaches of the piano well employed to capture the solemn and royal task at hand. Somehow we can hear we are in the realm of impenetrable thick-walled castles and craggy landscapes. Each of the strophes ends with the very simple but strangely haunting refrain ‘Suche treu, so findest du!’. At the beginning of the second strophe Blondel himself begins to sing. Despite a difference in melody, and the change of many small details, every strophe in this song seems closely related to the others, variations of the same melodic idea. This gives the impression of doggedly faithful repetition. The nature of Blondel’s tireless search (singing his song under the ramparts of every castle in Europe) is built into the music. In the same way, the vigil-until-death of Schiller’s Knight Toggenburg is admirably depicted by the tenaciously strophic structure of the conclusion to Schubert’s ballad Ritter Toggenburg.

3. This strophe continues Blondel’s song to his king. The placid G major melody is replaced by a minore variation. The solemn, chorale-like crotchets that have dominated the piece so far yield to a more passionate aria in quavers. The closeness between the king and his minstrel is emphasised by the use of the ‘du’ form. Any hint at untoward intimacy between king and servant (Richard I has sometimes been depicted as homosexual) is dispelled by the mention of ‘Margot’, whoever Seidl meant her to be – perhaps he was confused between the famous Margot of Navarre (a queen from a later epoch) and Richard’s Queen Berengaria, also from Navarre.

4. For the first time the interlude, which has been firmly grounded in G major, takes us via a tonal side-step into another key. An A-major semibreve introduces the pedal note upon which the whole of the next strophe is built. At ‘Horch, da tönt es leise, leise, aus dem Burgverliess empor’ the very appearance of the music on the page illustrates what is happening: pianissimo minims, swathed and phrased in airy ties, are suspended, hovering in mid-air, above bass octaves. This depicts, also in visual terms, the sound of the imprisoned king’s voice projected from deep in the castle dungeons (the foundations of which are the austere left-hand semibreves). The king’s song resounds in empty space, waiting to be heard. When the connection is made at last, the uncertainty of harmony (which has been clouded by the lingering doubt of a B flat major chord) resolves into an unequivocal A major. This chord is deliriously affirmed in arpeggios in both vocal line and piano, and opens out into the dominant seventh and a high G natural on ‘klingt an Blondels lauschend Ohr’. This widening of harmonic scope is an analogue for the listening ear, cocked and straining to catch every sound. When the king sings again, the sense of excitement at the discovery is underpinned by the continuing pedal which presses the music forward (Schumann also asks for an accelerando) towards the resolution of a D major chord. This point is reached at the end of an ecstatic ‘Suche treu, so findest du!’ which is set a fifth higher than before.

5, 6. As a means of continuing to turn the screw of tension, Schumann dispenses altogether with the piano interlude that separates all the other strophes. We have returned safely and firmly to the key of G major as the discovery of the king is affirmed. The composer directs that the music should be performed ever faster and louder, and there is a sense of general exultation. Only the ritardando for the familiar refrain of ‘Suche treu, so findest du!’ at the end of the verse signifies that the long search is over and Blondel’s task is done. The final strophe allows the narrator to tie up the loose ends of the story, more or less re-using the music of the first strophe. Seidl refers to the sorrow (‘Leid’) at home, as well as the joy (‘Freude’). Presumably the former reaction refers to Prince John and his allies who had hoped to be permanently free of Richard. Schumann adds a few decorative touches in the piano part – notably dotted left-hand rhythms to depict the courtly entourage which returns to Austria to ransom the king. A similar depiction of grandeur is to be heard in the postlude which departs from the simplicity of the piano’s usual ritornello to add a pair of regal flourishes, in dotted rhythm, to end the song. Although Blondels Lied is seldom heard in the concert hall, Schumann lavished considerable care and ingenuity in its composition, much of which is hardly apparent at first glance.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1999

This miniature from the great song-writing year has somehow been submerged by the wave of masterpieces from 1840 (many of which are arranged into cycles) which dominate the first volume of the Peters Edition. In some ways this neglect is easy to understand: the song does not have the advantage of a well-known poet, and the text itself seems curiously bland – short on imagery and originality. Nevertheless, the music’s sinuous undulations are attractive, and all the better for not outstaying their welcome. They call for a skilled and sensitive singer who must be able to convey the other-worldly nature of this rueful, moon-lit plaint. The music is an etiolated sea-borne afterthought; we are permitted to hear only an echo of the Lorelei’s once-seductive song, a repeated ‘Gedenke mein!’ set to a descending phrase, traversing a falling fourth, which makes its appearance on two different occasions. In the first verse we hear these words in G sharp minor – the relative minor of the dominant, B; but the second verse reserves the surprise of A major (the subdominant of the tonic) for ‘Gedenke mein!’. This plagal progression reinforces the intimacy of the invocation, and also lends a certain prayer-like colour to the proceedings. Instead of the Lorelei’s song being in the present, it is as if poet and composer have constructed a tiny elegy for a magic spirit who has died; the waves roll gently over the house which has been the seat of her former destructive power.

A month or so later, Schumann was to write music for another, much more famous and far more formidable Lorelei: Eichendorff’s frightening creation in Waldesgespräch (from Liederkreis Op 39), a song which, interestingly enough, is also cast in E major. In both works arpeggiated ripples in the tonic key alternate with diminished-seventh arpeggios which combine the fluidity of water music with the uncertainty and mystery of magical happenings. The composer probably adopted this idea from the rolling diminished sevenths on a tonic pedal, daring and innovative for the time, which permeate the accompaniment of Schubert’s Die Stadt (from Schwanengesang). In this we hear the movement of water and wind, and we are made to scan the distant horizon of Heine’s opening line. One also remembers the crucial change to the diminished seventh in Schubert’s Nacht und Träume (at ‘Rufen, wenn der Tag erwacht’) where the harmony implies the act of calling out into a void, or perhaps straining to listen to something from across a long distance. Brahms uses the distancing effect of the diminished seventh in O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück, only in this case the distance is one of time rather than space. Loreley also shares its atmosphere, and its epigrammatic nature, with the watery-grave music of Herzeleid Op 107 No 1 (Volume 1) where the water whispers ‘Ophelia’ in a similarly elegiac fashion. It is perhaps little surprise that someone who was driven by his own inner lorelei voices to attempt suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine, seems fascinated by the soothing, rather than the frightening, aspects of death by drowning.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1999

In this trilogy, and in Schumann’s decision to set these poems, we once again glimpse the power of the composer’s own paranoia on two fronts: he feared something would go wrong with his marriage plans at the last minute and he would be condemned to watch helplessly as Clara went off with someone else – the stuff of his nightmares, this; and there was also his concern about the fact that he believed himself vulnerable to mental instability and breakdown – a justified fear, as it turned out. Indeed, the poor, confused composer of 1854 who attempted to drown himself in the Rhine has more than a little in common with poor Peter.

Peter, however, unlike Schumann, seems to have been a pathetic figure from birth, mentally handicapped and more or less tolerated in a rough rural community as long as he behaves. It is clear, however, that his utterances are dysfunctional rather than stupid; Heine would have said that philistines regard poets as mad simpletons. Peter does his bet to fit in; he thinks of himself as ‘vernünftig’ (sensible) when he is anything but. And it is the intensity of his feelings, and his capacity for overwhelming emotion (all of which are suppressed), which drive him to suicide. The shy and awkward Vašek in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride comes to mind – his stutter makes him a figure of fun (Peter bites his nails), but he is a touching character when given a chance. Poor Peter’s tragedy is that even though he is an ungainly hobbledehoy he has the capacity to fall in love like anyone else. No one takes the romantic predicaments of misfits seriously. The community discovers too late that he is potentially dangerous – most of all to himself. Heine is quite an expert at these sorts of characters in his poems: cf ‘der bleiche Heinrich’ in Die Fensterschau (No XII of the Romanzen in the Buch der Lieder) and the sickly Wilhelm in Die Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar.

Schumann has a special line in catastrophic weddings, or rather catastrophic wedding guests. Three of his songs feature an outsider observing nuptial proceedings in aghast horror – rather like spectators at their own funerals. The most famous of these is Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen from Dichterliebe (track 29); Der Spielmann (Andersen translated by Chamisso) features a crazed violinist, and Der arme Peter opens with the jollifications of the wedding of Hans and Grethe, who are stock ‘Jack and Jill’ characters in German folklore. Hans und Grethe is the title of a comically rustic dance song in 3/4 by Mahler, and the same two characters are to be found in the pages of Arnim and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn anthology, always a major source of Heine’s imagery.

The two introductory bars evoke the raw sound of the Dudelsack – the German bagpipe. Schubert adopts similar (though more slender) means to evoke the drone of the hurdy-gurdy in Der Leiermann at the end of Winterreise. After this a sweet little melody, as naïve as it is tuneful, unfolds in lilting Ländler rhythm. One is strongly reminded of Berg’ und Burgen from the Heine Liederkreis Op 24 – another song which features betrayal by a beautiful woman. The rocking accompanying Bewegung in oscillating octaves is similar in both songs, and Eric Sams hears in the wave-motion of Der arme Peter ‘effortless dancing for joy’.

Effortless for the dancers, maybe, but not the observer, poor Peter himself, and it seems to me the music is written from his shell-shocked viewpoint. It is notable that the accompaniment for this song sounds a full octave higher than that for Berg’ und Bergen. The left hand interlocks with the right (these figurations are wretchedly awkward to play, as if Peter himself were clumsily attempting to sit at a keyboard) so that both staves are written almost entirely in the treble clef. This makes the song rather etiolated, drained of the grim zest of Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen for example, and without warmth or even anger; it is no surprise to find that Peter is as white as chalk. It is as if a music-box were accompanying the dancing of Hans and Grethe who are stiffly rotating automaton figurines rather than real people. This eerie effect seems to mirror the distortion in Peter’s own brain and his inability to cope with rejection. The tinkling of a music-box has become a common cinematic image for mental instability (such sounds signal the madness of Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire for example). Music like this with its associations of the nursery signifies the childlike helplessness of the mentally disturbed, as well as the childhood trauma that has often triggered madness. This rocking little moto perpetuo, scarcely anchored to the bass, accompanies a scene as if at one remove from reality – as if Peter were watching events through the wrong end of a telescope. He has had great difficulty in tumbling to the truth of the situation. In any case it is clear from this almost grotesque musical naivety that he is damaged goods. There is an eight-bar postlude where the graceful little Ländler melody is decorated by tiny clashes and passing-notes which are more indicative of Peter’s disorientation than of the plodding incompetence of the village band.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2001

There is a sudden shift from the G major Ländler to an E minor scherzo, and the vehemence of the music sung by Peter himself comes as a shock. In Tragödie a declaration of love in the first person begins the set which thereafter fades into narrative. Here Peter’s own words are framed between songs, as if he were held upright between two bookends. His words are blurted out (the verb ‘zersprengen’ is a violent one) as if pouring from the sluice gates of an emotional dam. There is in this dance-like little melody (‘In meiner Brust, da sitzt ein Weh’’) something of the petulance of an uncontrollable child. The movement of the vocal line which snakes in and out on itself also mirrors Peter’s uncertainty about how to handle his dilemma. He tells us that he is driven to be near Grete and it is clear that he makes a terrible nuisance of himself by visiting her again and again to look into her eyes. Today he would be labelled a stalker; in the repetitive nature of this vocal line we hear this obsessive behaviour. The music becomes slightly less hectic (marked ‘Etwas ruhiger’) for an eight-bar passage (beginning ‘Es treibt mich nach der Liebsten Näh’) a melodic sequence with a pathos and lyricism bordering on, but not quite falling into, sentimentality. This is love music as Peter sees it, but it is of course not the real thing as his emotions are unreciprocated. Schumann’s setting conveys this one-way longing and self-delusion perfectly. In these swooning sequences, the clichés of popular café tunes are touched, and almost transfigured, by the deepest emotion – all in all a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous which is astonishingly prophetic of Mahler’s use of musical irony.

If the opening of this single-paged little song has been a manic outburst, the depressive side of Peter’s condition is shown by the next section (verse 3 of the poem). He is only able to contain his emotions, it seems, by violent exercise. The mountain-climbing music betokens great physical effort and is accordingly in a slower tempo, accompanied by stoic minims and semibreves. Peter’s disturbed view of the world is emphasised by the descending vocal line which describes the ascent of the mountain in complete contradiction to the meaning of the words. It is clear that even at these heights his spirits are in the depths. (One wonders whether this plunging line following his gaze into the valley below is a clue as to his future means of suicide.) The poor man’s bleak loneliness is wonderfully caught by the music for the strophe’s third and fourth lines: it seems frozen on the stave with tied notes, long note-values, and a lack of real melody in the vocal line. The postlude is a sudden, and rather disturbing, pianistic recapitulation of the song’s opening music – this time a fourth higher than Peter’s own voice, a tessitura which gives the music a nasty, mocking edge. The suddenly manic Peter makes a descent down the mountain in various sequential stages, half flippant and half tragic. Only in the inner voice of ominous quavers of the last two bars is there an intimation of the final tragedy.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2001

This music continues in E minor although there is a complete change of tempo and mood. Once again Mahler comes to mind, and in particular the last song from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Schumann here strikes a note of real Mahlerian tragedy avant la lettre – something to do with the mixture of madness and the grotesque, allied to the implacable march rhythms associated with death and burial as well as the bitter and unfair workings of fate. Schumann’s music is in 3/4, as if poor Peter were one beat short of a march. The harmonic movement of the piece is at first also rather limited – basically variations on I, IV and V – but this economy of means is ideal to convey the almost claustrophobic sense that there is only one way out of Peter’s predicament. ‘Then sink the boat. D’you hear? Sink her. Goodbye Peter’ are Balstrode’s last words to the anti-hero at the end of Peter Grimes. Heine advocates another type of suicide, but with no less urgency.

This is music of the greatest solemnity although Schumann also cleverly builds into this plodding movement various other pictures – most effectively the gossipy girls who whisper to each other that Peter looks as if he has come out of the grave. This occasions a brief flirtation with major-key harmony showing that they are having fun at his expense; indeed the character of these little witches is emphasised by the fact that the notes and rhythm of their question (‘Der stieg wohl aus dem Grab hervor?’) are almost exactly the same as for ‘Ich bin die Hexe Lorelei’ in Waldesgespräch Op 39 No 3 – another moment where a male victim is taunted by feminine superiority. After the rough and tumbril of this taunt there is a curious shift of narrative position. It is as if Heine himself has decided to drop his neutrality in telling the story and confront the boy’s tormentors himself (‘Ach nein, ihr lieben Jungfräulein, der steigt erst in das Grab hinein’). The poet himself accompanies the rest of the poem to its conclusion as if he were the boy’s defence lawyer, come too late into town to save him but at least able to speak the graveside oration. It is notable (and here one realises again how bad Heine’s relations with women often were) that it takes the appearance of these ‘lieben Jüngfräulein’ to summon a stinging and sarcastic rebuke. After all, the poet is a kind of ‘arme Peter’ himself: ‘There but for the grace of God go I’.

The music for the poem’s last verse takes on a military tinge with its punctiliously dotted rhythms and muffled funeral drums in the bass. This is like a procession to an execution, and as such sounds more Mahlerian than ever (Der Tambourg’sell, Revelge). There is a type of bitter triumph at the shift into the relative major (first heard in bars 8 to 10 when the girls mock Peter) at mention of the fact that the grave is ‘der beste Platz’. The four-bar postlude is simple but extremely moving. The use of the major key for the very last chord suggests that Peter is in a better place than he has ever known, and that he is at last released from life’s tribulations. Those who see Heine as a poet with a specifically Jewish temperament might aver that the bittersweet pessimism and defiance of this setting about a social outcast, make this Schumann’s most successful response to that side of the poet’s creative genius. It is perhaps for this reason that the spirit of Mahler is prophesied here with such uncanny accuracy.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2001