The previous song on this disc was a stray Burns setting left over from Myrten; this is a similarly stray Eichendorff song. When Schumann published the Liederkreis Op 39 in 1842, Der frohe Wandersmann appeared as the first in the cycle of thirteen songs. In 1850 the great Eichendorff cycle achieved its definitive twelve-song form: Der frohe Wandersmann was removed from the set. Schumann put it to one side and published it separately the following year. From the point of view of the singer it is a hellish thing to begin the Liederkreis cold with the long-breathed melody of its first number, In der Fremde. A limber performance of Der frohe Wandersmann would be the ideal warm-up for a hearty baritone. The paradox of Schumann’s (surely correct) decision to remove this song is that there would have been many more poised and controlled performances of In der Fremde if that song had continued to be the second item in the cycle. On the other hand the cycle’s definitive incarnation rendered it infinitely more accessible to female singers.

Once can easily understand why Schumann was tempted by Der frohe Wandersmann: his Eichendorff cycle would begin on the open road in the same way as Schubert’s miller cycle. In that work the breezy Das Wandern is an upbeat introduction to a set of songs that inexorably turns to tragedy; nevertheless, there is a narrative thread that unites the first number with the last. If the mini-fanfares at the opening of Der frohe Wandersmann announce a musical event of some import, they do so too cheerily: the protagonist is not the same haunted, sentient being who hovers behind most of the other lieder in Schumann’s cycle. In the absence of a story line in Op 39 the contrast between the breezy tone of Der frohe Wandersmann, and the tortured introspection of In der Fremde, is too great. It is not good enough to imagine a chastened ‘Wandersmann’ suddenly becoming the bereaved narrator of the second song: these men address life in two irreconcilable ways, and religion is part of that difference.

Der frohe Wandersmann belongs to that genre of Eichendorff poem which was to be explored by Hugo Wolf precisely because Schumann had left it under-investigated. With some notable exceptions Wolf’s Eichendorffian world is inhabited by students and adventurers, carousers and devil-may-care chancers. This eternal-student side of Eichendorff’s character was the one he presented to the world as his opening gambit. In his ground-breaking Gedichte of 1837 the first subsection is entitled Wanderlieder. The opening poem, Frische Fahrt, was set by Mendelssohn in 1841 as Wanderlied Op 57 No 6. Der frohe Wanderslied is the third poem in this seminal collection of nearly 500 pages. Quite unexpectedly, Im Walde (Op 39 No 11) and Zwielicht (Op 39 No 10) are only a page-turn away, poems that seem to come from a different planet, no doubt thanks to Schumann’s music. This composer’s gifts are better suited to these because he is a master of the music of dreams and nocturnal landscapes.

In this context it is easy to see that Der frohe Wandersmann sticks out like a sore thumb. Yet in its own right it is effective and enjoyable. That Wolf knew it well (declining to set the poem himself) is demonstrated by that composer’s Fussreise (Mörike), and by the Keller setting Tretet ein, hoher Krieger – both songs in the same cheery key of D major.

Everything about Schumann’s song betokens energy and fresh air, but the impression of a rather cardboard character is reinforced by music which seems uncomfortably close to hearty thighslapping. A song that was no doubt meant to mine the popular vein has turned out to be anything but popular. As it turns out the world prefers its Schumann in a more highly-strung mode. God makes an appearance in the singer’s third note; this traveller is certainly devout, though one might imagine that his dismissive attitude to family life and the rearing of children leaves something to be desired in a good Catholic. Traversing the thicket of religious imagery with which the poem also ends clearly makes Schumann feel awkward. His relief to emerge from this hymn of gratitude is palpable, and as a result the postlude seems almost comically upbeat. The modern listener is left thinking of Percy Grainger, and not without pleasure. Even if this ‘German Country Gardens’ was unsuitable for the beginning of the exalted Liederkreis, it is still fun to play, and a bracing song for a good singer.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2003

La musique pour le texte d’Eichendorff (Der frohe Wandersmann) est une œuvre où Schumann semble explorer l’incroyable richesse du volume des Gedichte (1837) sans avoir encore découvert le cœur de la poésie d’Eichendorff. Dans la première édition de l’op. 39 (Liederkreis), Der frohe Wandersmann était le premier lied d’un cycle de treize; il a été supprimé lors de la seconde impression.

extrait des notes rédigées par Graham Johnson © 2010
Français: Marie-Stella Pâris

Die Vertonung von Eichendorffs Der frohe Wandersmann ist ein Werk, in dem Schumann den erstaunlich reichhaltigen Stoff der Gedichte (1837) erforscht, ohne bereits zum Kern von Eichendorffs Versen vorgedrungen zu sein. In der Erstausgabe des Liederkreises op. 39 war Der frohe Wandersmann das erste Lied eines dreizehnteiligen Zyklus, das in der zweiten Auflage gestrichen wurde.

aus dem Begleittext von Graham Johnson © 2010
Deutsch: Henning Weber

Un lied d’un calme et d’une douceur infinies—comme si une jolie femme cueillait des fleurs en les nommant, tout en dansant une pavane lente et gracieuse.

extrait des notes rédigées par Graham Johnson © 2010
Français: Marie-Stella Pâris

Ein Lied von unendlicher Ruhe und Süße wie eine schöne Frau, die beim Pflücken und zarten Benennen von Blumen graziös eine langsame Pavane tanzt.

aus dem Begleittext von Graham Johnson © 2010
Deutsch: Henning Weber

Love in adversity was always a theme dear to Schumann (particularly in works composed in the months leading up to his marriage in September 1840). Here the composer returns to this subject that had haunted his past – the fear that Clara just might have married someone else. Long after this danger was over, he continued to respond to stories of the misfortunes of lovers abandoned by their girls. In 1850 he came across a newly-published set of eight wedding poems by the poet Halm whose plight – his beloved had married another man – seems to have reminded Schumann of his own fears over a decade earlier. Instead of setting the whole cycle, however, Schumann settled on the last poem (which hardly gives the flavour of the whole). For this reason, Geisternähe is a fragment without a story. It is hardly terror-stricken or dramatic like Der Spielmann, or even Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen from Dichterliebe. The protagonist, unlike those of the two former songs, is not even present at the wedding. But the setting is born of the same pathos, which seems at best a mannerism and at worst a type of helpless masochism with the self-limiting mute adoration that we find in such songs as Mein schöner Stern. On this disc it follows Frauenliebe und -leben, and its final un-set poem, as if to suggest the consolatory stirrings of remembered love from long ago. Indeed, without knowing the poem’s context, one would have thought this music was related to the yearning, but essentially optimistic, mood of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte.

The piano writing is, at first, delicately evocative; the curling triplet semiquavers waft chromatically through various keys and descend the stave in insinuating sequences; the delicacy of the rubato suggests the freedom of movement appropriate for perfumes of spring. This is a good start. The singer’s curiosity as to the nature of the breeze is reminiscent of the first of Schubert’s Suleika songs and the eponymous heroine’s questions to the East Wind. In this atmospheric meandering, Schumann is at his most characteristic. There is little in the first four bars to anchor us to any tonality; at ‘laue Frühlingsluft’ the music settles briefly into the home key of A major, and hovers beside the ghost of another spring song in that tonality – Er ist’s (Op 79, Mörike). At the end of the first strophe the words ‘wie süsser Rosenduft?’ occasion a temporary excursion to E major.

A shift back into the A major tonic would now seem to be obvious, but the second strophe initiates an interpolation into the subdominant, the better to make the final strophe in A major, when it at last arrives, the climax of the piece. For now, the easy rise of a tone in the vocal line (at ‘Es ist’) belies the slightly awkward shift sideways into the plagal (and thus rather reverential) reaches of D major. The singer answers the questions of the first strophe within a forte dynamic, as if in a state of exalted reassurance: yes, even if she has married another, she really loves me best – after all, it is her thoughts that circle my brow in caressing comfort. The triplet accompaniment denotes a full heart, supporting and amplifying the vocal line with passionate throbbings. This is something of a Schumann commonplace. We glimpse it in some of the Kerner songs, Op 35, but it is particularly typical of this late period. The same could be said for the harp music which begins on cue under ‘Und was wie Harfen klänge’ in the third strophe. This composer seems to have been much occupied with harp sonority in his later years, particularly as an accompanying device. The build-up of piano sonority (where the harp-writing seems anything but ethereal) seems counterproductive for the verbal imagery: the poet’s name is supposedly being whispered by the beloved – or so his hopeful fantasy informs him – but here it is sung to the rooftops. Another, rather more successful song in A major with an accompaniment in rolling demisemiquavers comes to mind – Aufträge (Volume 1), which is actually part of the same opus number.

The peroration, the final strophe, is in A major, and this finishes the song with almost operatic fervour. Any reference to soft, floating winds and spiritual whisperings is swept away by the forte dynamic and the piano writing churning with triplets and demisemiquavers. Such is the radiance and confidence of this music that any original sympathy we might have felt with the emotional plight of the singer seems misplaced. Perhaps Schumann intended this flood of unrealistic confidence to engender our pity, as if the young man were going off his head. (The determined and alarmingly misplaced confidence of Mein! from Die schöne Müllerin come to mind.) He claims that he is drawn back to her heart by these spiritual messages, but this is all pie-in-the-sky. As if to remind us of this, the postlude, fashioned from the introduction, is once again wistful and shy. The song ends humbly and crestfallen, and the final impression causes confusion: is the singer a winner or a loser? The song’s lyrical touches are individually effective, but they fail to come together to make an unforgettable song.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1999

Ce chant est un extrait d’une séquence plus longue de poèmes de Halm et reflète les craintes antérieures de Schumann: Clara aurait pu finir par épouser quelqu’un d’autre. La présence en esprit de la bien-aimée est par conséquent beaucoup plus compliquée que dans un chant d’amour heureux normal, et la musique, dont le déroulement n’est ni facile ni évident, reflète la complexité un peu autodestructrice de la conception poétique.

extrait des notes rédigées par Graham Johnson © 2010
Français: Marie-Stella Pâris

Dies ist die Vertonung eines Auszugs aus einer längeren Folge von Halm-Gedichten, mit der Schumann frühere Befürchtungen verarbeitet, Clara könne einen Anderen heiraten. Die Darstellung der im Geist anwesenden Geliebten ist deshalb sehr viel komplizierter als in einem herkömmlichen glücklichen Liebeslied, und die Musik, kaum einfach oder offensichtlich in ihrer Entfaltung, spiegelt die etwas zur Selbstaufgabe tendierende Komplexität der poetischen Konzeption.

aus dem Begleittext von Graham Johnson © 2010
Deutsch: Henning Weber

Both Sams and the Schneider catalogue agree that this song originally dates from 1840, and refer to one of the composer’s periods of alienation from Clara. Bearing this in mind it is perhaps surprising that with its halting spareness of texture, and an arioso style derived from recitative, it seems happily typical (if that is an apt expression for something so melancholy) of the late-Schumann style. By comparison, the inflated eventfulness of Schneeglöckchen seems an aberration – its jollity somehow forced and inappropriate, and its dimensions out of proportion with its subject-matter, as if a tornado has been created to uproot a snowdrop.

This song begins weighed down with the legacies of the past: old wounds have long healed with a protective crust so that the blood no longer flows. The musical pathos of dried-up inspiration and exhausted creativity is a fitting (if unwitting) metaphor for the poem. But once the chords begin to move in their chromatic grooves, old issues reassert themselves. There is the feeling that something rusty is creaking back into life as the wounds re-open. But not quite. There are no fresh crimson colourings of feud, passion or hate; instead of gushing wounds there is only a trickle of old, rust-coloured blood. The pain has faded, the initial reasons for the anguish have been dulled, if not soothed, by the passage of time.

For these sentiments, Schumann’s setting seems ideal. It looks phlegmatic on paper, in much the same way as songs by the Fauré of the third period appear bare and underwrought, although they are, in fact, packed with feeling of a less demonstrative kind. There is little excuse for the pianist to work himself up into a state of passion or excitement; apart from occasional szforzato and tenuto minims, and wilting cadences formed by mezzo staccato crotchets, the vocal line is underpinned by a discreet commentary – despairing gestures which never add up to a sentence, or soar into independent melody. Vocal declamation is all, but the singer has carefully to gauge the performance of intense words which are anti-intense in their intention. The mood is one of acceptance, even indifference. Joy and pain merge into one. Forgiveness is offered in the song’s final lines, but the song seems to belong to that genre of masochistic mute suffering which was a Schumannian speciality. At one point the poem seems to accept blood-letting as if it were a useful and casual first step to suicide.

The composer of 1850 who revised and prepared this already old song for publication is in no mood to feel superior in the matter of an old quarrel. He is only too aware that he too has sinned and, as if frozen by fear, awaits nemesis as if an execution. And this forges a link with an even later Schumann song: the shared A minor tonality, and the air of indifference and/or forgiveness grafted on to a background of bitterness, bring to mind Abschied von der Welt, the penultimate song from the Maria Stuart Lieder. In both songs the narrator has experienced too much pain and suffering to care about the world’s opinion; there is a similar mood of indifference to the sorrows of the past. Old enemies and friends seems as one; hatred and dissension will go to the grave, but then so will love. These two songs are different versions of Schumann’s need to absent himself from the world, and their similarities are not coincidental.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1999

This song is so deliciously charming in sheerly musical terms that it is almost churlish to point out that it is strophic. In three times delighting the listeners in the same way (and not attempting to vary the music for the different messengers—stream, dove and moonlight) the song reaches the limits of its appeal rather quickly. It has been compared to Liebesbotschaft of Schubert, but it lacks the depth and humanity of that masterpiece although it shares (in its first verse at least) a common theme of water-borne messages. It is a soubrette song through and through, made famous in the 1920s by a recording of Lotte Lehmann, and then again by Schwarzkopf for a new generation, with exactly the same coupling of Der Nussbaum on a 78rpm record. It is the accompaniment that challenges here, devilishly difficult and fleet, the left-hand chords jumping about in the most awkward way and the right-hand demisemiquavers negotiating some extremely tricky corners. Every accompanist would secretly love to respond to the singer’s imperious demand of ‘Nicht so schnelle, nicht so schnelle!’ (‘Not so fast!’) by obediently halving the tempo (after all we normally have to do what we are told), thus bringing the song to a standstill. Perhaps someone will do that in a sketch one day if the intricacies of Lieder are ever judged suitable for humorous entertainment. (Haydn’s Mermaid Song—‘Follow, follow, follow me!’—is another work which seems to define the relationship between soloist and accompanist.) It is the composer’s intention that there should be a sense of playful conflict between voice and piano, the singer attempting in vain to control the volubility of the accompaniment and only allowed a little capricious freedom at each ‘an die Liebste mein’ in the middle of each verse, and of course at the end where a sense of flirtatious rubato is an asset. This is one of the rare 1849 songs where Schumann seems to have re-discovered his joy in piano-playing; there is a suspicion, however, that he is not taking anything seriously, and in writing a song full of Viennese charm he does not care if there is shade of insincerity in its gush. On hearing this we are reminded that in the celebrated 1840 songs it is often the invention of the piano writing, and the sheer enjoyment in creating it, that the songs glow with vigour and life. There is at least an echo of that old relish here.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1996

C’est un lied, en dépit de sa triple répétition strophique, d’un charme et d’une énergie aquatique immenses, aussi vif que le Liebesbotschaft de Schubert.

extrait des notes rédigées par Graham Johnson © 2010
Français: Marie-Stella Pâris

Dieses Lied ist trotz seiner dreistrophigen Wiederholung ungemein charmant, voller aquatischer Energie und so quecksilbrig wie Schuberts Liebesbotschaft.

aus dem Begleittext von Graham Johnson © 2010
Deutsch: Henning Weber