This poem, every bit as flamboyant as Gesungen!, is concerned with heavenly aspiration: everything in nature is drawn upwards. Mother Earth is united with heaven, just as man’s soul will be reunited with its Maker. In the poem’s concluding lines, the author, barely hiding his self-satisfaction, counts himself among the phenomena of Creation destined for higher things. (Wilfried von der Neun may well have won his place in heaven for good works, but his poems would earn him no place in the Poet’s Pantheon.) Schumann, the man of cultivated literary taste who had been among the first to set the matchless poems of Eichendorff, now finds himself inexplicably drawn to texts more fulsome and ambitious but infinitely less distinguished and suitable for music. The grandiose words are ill-suited to Schumann’s innate modesty. Another composer would have attempted something embarrassingly strident, but this setting is more thoughtful than expansive, and the markings ‘Feierlich’ (solemn) and ‘Innig’ (introverted) moderate any tendency to overweening musical grandiloquence on the part of the performers.
A bel canto melody in A flat major of a quasi-Italianate inspiration moves to a middle section in B major, and then back to A flat. The vocal line of Himmel und Erde is almost memorable (for example, an effective upward leap for ‘zu des Lichtes Höhen streben’), but not quite. It is in the aria style typical of late Schumann, where work on opera and oratorio has altered (some would say clouded) the composer’s original pellucid conception of the piano Lied. The accompaniment is busy in an orchestral manner: the right hand with continual triplets while the left enlivens the texture with dotted quaver-semiquaver figures which punctuate the vocal line and propel it forward. And then an echo of the distant musical past. The turn on ‘Himmels Wolken schweben’ is reminiscent of the ecstatic yet courtly idealism that has animated Er, der Herrlichste von allen from Frauenliebe und -leben. In very similar harmonies, reference to the graciousness of the Lord brings about a mordent similar to that inspired by the lordly husband-to-be (‘wie so gut!’).
The second verse modulates to B major and, in this sumptuous tonality, May flowers and autumn forests are hymned with delicacy and intimacy. Much of the vocal line is mezzo staccato, and the piano figurations are similarly inflected, sometimes echoing the voice at a distance as if in diffident duet. Vocal duplets stretch languidly against pianistic triplets, and entwine, creeper-like, with fragments of contrapuntal pianistic melody. This is undoubtedly the most successful section of this song, and it seems prophetic of Johannes Brahms who showed a propensity for this sort of rhythmical cross-current from the beginning of his song-writing career.
The third strophe returns to the A flat major of the opening. Despite a feeling of recapitulation, this music is nevertheless newly invented within a structure that is far from a straightforward ABA. Although the older composer set himself firmly against Wagner, such was the power of the man’s music and theory that one detects Schumann experimenting with the flexibility of continual melody almost despite himself, and much against the nature of his own gift. To mirror the words, as if to show that heaven and earth are musically united, the piano writing blossoms with fragments of vocal melody, including the prominent rising and falling sevenths after ‘O so seid ihr denn Verwandte’. This tiny instrumental-like interjection would be well suited to an oboe. This writing seems dense even by Brahmsian standards, and it reinforces the impression that Schumann is no longer truly interested in the piano as an accompanying instrument: here he seems to have constructed a short score where an array of instruments might do better justice to the various strands of sound promising, but never quite delivering, counterpoint. The result is earnest (no one can doubt the composer’s heartfelt sincerity) but rather leaden. The poem talks of striving upwards to the light, but Schumann is in no state of mind to achieve lift-off. The work appears shackled by his less than ecstatic preoccupations. In the postlude, fragments of solo melody are grafted onto accompanying figurations. This sets the seal on the impression of a rather awkward-to-play short score crying out for something vividly imagined by the composer, but not quite realised on paper.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 1999