This song is one of the earliest to show Schumann’s interest in what might be termed a musical style for children, and his ability to enter into a realm where childhood simplicity and wonder are written into his music. There is something about the melody, as well as the poem (despite the intended depths of Hebbel’s allegories) which suggests youthful voices piping and lisping in communal song. And what parent is not moved to hear the sound of bird-like voices, particularly if they belong to his own chicks before they have left the nest? Even the accompaniments in works of this kind seem geared to a child-like technical proficiency. Schumann had already written Kinderszenen, the piano pieces about childhood which should be played by adults, but it was not until the end of the 1840s, and the experience of having children of his own, that he was to write music which seems simplified for younger hands, voices and minds. However, in case one were tempted to regard Schumann as a musical educationalist, a Kodály or Hindemith for example, the composer simply seems to have been exploring, with great relish, that side of his own imagination which was to remain forever child-like. In other words, his children’s music, for the most part, seems written for himself. In his desire to re-visit those realms of Never-Never Land he idealises childhood in a way that suggests his own anguish at passing from that state. In the same way he lauds the idea of marriage (in works like the Rückert Liebesfrühling and Minnespiel settings) long after his day-to-day relationship with Clara had ceased to be happily uncomplicated. The importance of such aspects of happy family life was also part of the Zeitgeist. The celebration of these two cornerstones of respectable life – marriage and children – places the composer firmly within his bourgeois epoch. Indeed, these preoccupations separate the emotional worlds of Schumann and Schubert.
What Schumann does have in common with Schubert, however, is an ability to write tunes which seem as natural and as enduring as folksong. The accompaniment doubles the melody as if gently nudging uncertain young singers into the correct melodic grooves. But having sung through the melody once, we have learned it and are ready to repeat it in best folksong manner. In fact the first three strophes are identical, and the question-and-answer phrases suggest the schoolroom divided into two choirs. It is, however, part of Schumann’s genius to change hymn-like music that would be foursquare and dull in other hands into something genuinely touching and heartfelt. His melodies in this vein do not suggest the hopeless pedantry of the educational system of the time; rather do they seem to encapsulate deeply felt seriousness about even the little things of life which was one of the German qualities most admired by the Victorians – although it is difficult to imagine a lesson on bird migration given in this fashion at an English public school.
For the third strophe the adult composer, in the guise of father narrating a bedtime story, brings the song to a happy-ever-after conclusion. The bird is at last freed to fly outside the confines of the home key of C major, moving in sequences into dominant, subdominant and supertonic harmonies before happily returning to home base. The accompaniment flutters in right-hand triplets as the roving left hand navigates the twists and turns of flight. ‘Linde Luft’ prompts an ambitious arpeggio heavenwards, but this hardly disturbs the essentially modest and simple relationship between voice and piano. Eric Sams avers that this may be an early example of Schumann’s song-writing, pre-dating 1840. If so, it is astonishing how a young composer, renowned for his virtuosic keyboard writing in the 1830s, was able to rein-in his pianistic exuberance for the sake of the mood of a poem. But this sensitivity to literature, and a willingness to be guided by his poets, lies at the heart of Schumann’s genius as a composer of Lieder.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 1999