There is nothing like this turbulent beginning in all the Schumann songs: a flurry of demisemiquavers, syncopated between the hands, an octave apart, in a passionate, unbarred cadenza. If there is a similar passage in the lieder it is at the heart of Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden from the Heine Liederkreis, Op 24. There, a vocal line referring to the madness born of frustrated love is accompanied by the pianist’s hands chasing each other a semiquaver apart, a musical dislocation symbolic of the whirling of emotional disorientation. In Sehnsucht, Schumann’s marking is ‘Mit leidenschaftlichem Vortrag’ – to be performed in a passionate manner – and there is not much choice but to obey this direction: a profusion of black notes scuttle frantically across the stave as if they were desperately attempting to escape from each other as much as from incarceration. The unaligned rhythms in both songs are a metaphor for mental instability, a notion romanticised in the literature of the time, but ominously threatening in Schumann’s own mind.

This outburst obeys no rules of musical measure and unashamedly flouts the mathematics of the unprecedented 12/16 time signature; somebody who longs for freedom here demonstrates what freedom actually is. In a work which is slightly musically schizophrenic, drawing on Schubert as much as Liszt, the inspiration for Geibel’s poem is also a combination of the classical and romantic: Goethe’s eighteenth-century Kennst du das Land (Mignon’s hymn to her homeland) and Eichendorff, some fifty years later, in his laddish Italian phase. The poet, like many a German before and since, aims to escape from the constraints of the North, and Italy seems to provide the key to open the door of many a personal prison. In this large-scale music for a free spirit it is tempting to find something of a homage to Franz Liszt, for this is a song which is barnstorming and refined at the same time in that composer’s best conjuring manner. In August 1840 Schumann’s friendship with the great virtuoso was still new and unblemished: it was only later that he was to be consigned to the enemy camp. Liszt was yet to set to music Petrarch’s sonnets (those expansive songs date from 1844) but he was already a dab hand at Italian stylisation, and there is also a certain rhetorical looseness about the form of Sehnsucht which seems Lisztian, an adjective that might have seemed to encompass something modern and adventurous (even if slightly outlandish) as far as Schumann was concerned.

The composer was rather proud of this song, finding it ‘quite exceptionally inventive’, and he wrote to Clara that he thought she would find it especially appealing. Eric Sams avers that the original D minor tonality (it is sung here a tone lower in C minor) is Schumann’s melodramatic key. The extravagant introduction lands on the dominant without being allowed a satisfyingly loud resolution on the tonic chord. Instead a new elegance is suddenly manifest in the suavity of the vocal line. Quelled and cowed by the arrival of the singer, the piano is required to take a completely different role, no longer an acrobatic sky-diver but a navigable magic carpet powered by a purring engine of silken semiquaver triplets. So much for the accompaniment. Unfortunately Schumann betrays here, and not for the first time in the 1840 songs, inexperience in writing for the voice itself. He tends automatically to site the singer’s line within the range of his own baritonal voix de compositeur; one can imagine him (and who would not long to have been there at the time!) developing improvised ideas at the instrument, singing a melody the while above his own pianistic musings. Real singers with practised vocal support, however, operate a couple of notches higher than the crooning amateur, their instruments more honed to the technical challenge of smoothly climbing the stave. The introduction promises high-flown passion because it is written for the piano where Schumann is a master, but the tessitura of the vocal line fails to dovetail with the tension generated at the opening. When the voice begins it can easily sound apologetic, even taking into account that the opening words of the poem are rather introspective. This is surely why Sams finds the song ‘curiously sedentary and passive’. Although the music does have its moments of passionate conviction reflected by higher notes, far too much of it is placed on the bottom two lines of the treble clef. Another handicap is the key signature in compound time which ties Schumann to a triplet movement with a constantly rocking rhythm. This is admittedly suitable for a bel canto stylisation, but it is in danger of sounding banal, and too dance-like, after a while. The occasional stretched duplets in the vocal line where the composer varies the rum-ti-tum, shows that he was aware of the problem.

Nevertheless, there are many details here to please the Schumann enthusiast. The long arc of the melody encompassing four lines of the poem before coming full circle back to the tonic, has an operatic sweep exactly right for the breadth of the singer’s gaze (‘Ich blick’ in die Welt’) as he longingly surveys the world. The change into a major key tonality at ‘wohl leuchtet die Ferne mit goldenem Licht’ is appropriately illuminating. The phrase ‘O die Schranken so eng’ / Und die Welt so weit’ claws its way, in various stages, up the stave in a way that suggests the concentrated effort of clambering out of an abyss. Here, for once, there is an element of vocal heroism which seems at one with the piano introduction. The words ‘und so flüchtig die Zeit!’ are paradoxically placed within a ritardando which emphasises time’s relativity – it can both speed forward for those left behind, and drag for those caught in its coils, here depicted by extravagant tie-marks which look like strands of constricting rope on the printed page, as if tying down both the pianist’s hand as well as the soul of the singer.

Geibel’s second verse recalls both Mignon’s hymn to Italy (the ‘Lorbeer’ – laurel – also makes an appearance in Goethe) and the ‘halb-versunkenen Mauern’ of Eichendorff’s Schöne Fremde, a text that Schumann had set earlier in the year in his Liederkreis Op 39. It is here in particular that the melody, despite its intrinsic lyricism and not unappealing ardour, seems caught in the bottom of the stave, as if the composer had imagined the voice to have sunk as low as the ruined temples of antiquity. One must remember, however, that all this talk of a beautiful land is still the stuff of unattainable dreams (the last line of the strophe, ‘Ich kann nicht hin!’, says as much) and such constriction might be deemed true to the poem’s scenario. In a similar use of a vocal line severely constricted in range, Schubert had reflected the tense impatience of the imprisoned huntsman in Lied des gefangenen Jägers. And this is not the only echo of Schumann’s profound knowledge of Schubert’s published songs. In the phrase mentioned above (‘Ich kann nicht hin!’) one can hear a respectful reworking of the weary cadences of ‘immer wo?’ and ‘O Land wo bist du?’ from the earlier composer’s Der Wanderer. It should also be noted that in the restless triplets and strong bass line there is something very reminiscent of the mood and Bewegung of Schubert’s Schiller setting Des Mädchens Klage.

The song’s third strophe (‘O hätt’ ich Flügel, durchs Blau der Luft’) begins with a more expansive energy, climbing high in the stave in an attempt to breathe the air in the clear blue sky. Geibel’s reference to burying his songs sounds a Heinean note (a combination of the burying of sorrows in Dichterliebe and the extinction of songs in Mit Myrthen und Rosen at the end of the Op 24 Liederkreis). The repetition of lines from the first verse (‘O die Schranken so eng, und die Welt so weit’) sounds as if it may have been a composer’s idea, but this stems from the poet himself. These words are now set to similar music pitched a tone higher to enable the vocal line to finish (with its repetition of ‘Und so flüchtig die Zeit!’) on the dominant. The piano is thus called upon to bring the work back to the tonic in cyclic manner. The concluding piano cadenza is identical to that of the opening with the exception of the fact that the crucial concluding chord in the home key bring the proceedings to a forte conclusion. Because of the proximity of the phrase ‘Und so flüchtig die Zeit!’ these frenzied demisemiquavers now seem descriptive of the beating wings of time, like the flapping of a crazed bird trapped within a closed space. Perhaps this music suffers from a similar problem. It seems caught between describing two states of mind – the freedom of the South to which the protagonist impatiently aspires, and the downbeat claustrophobia he suffers in the lands of the North. In aiming to depict both simultaneously, it does full justice to neither.

There is another setting of this poem which is performed at least as often as Schumann’s: this is part of Spohr’s Op 103 for soprano with obbligato clarinet. This Sehnsucht (1837, thus the earlier of the two works) has a sober piano part, but the clarinet writing is suitably florid within a Larghetto tempo.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2000

This beautiful little song is a potent illustration of Schumann’s insight into womanly behaviour, and also his sympathy with the spirit of folksong years before the subject became as much the scholastic province of musicians as of poets. It also shows an innate flair and imagination for situations which are more full of drama than they first may seem. The composer is able to flesh out characters beyond the scope of the poem: he can say in music more than can be said in words. This illustrates how a great song composer is closely related to (though quite different from) his opera-composing counterpart. Volksliedchen was composed (probably in 1840 but certainly no later than 1843) for a Mozart album to coincide with the unveiling of that composer’s newly erected statue in Salzburg. It is indicative of Schumann’s sensitivity that he should have contributed this piece, with its unforced Mozartian grace and economy, to such a project. Mozart was also one of the few composers whose genius bridged and encompassed opera-composing and song-writing with success. This music could easily have been sung by a Susanna – someone with feminine allure, but also someone canny and nobody’s fool.

On hearing Volksliedchen, so slight and yet so heartfelt, one thinks of such Schumann songs as Das verlassene Mägdlein1* and Die Soldatenbraut3 more than Frauenliebe und -leben. The heroine of that cycle is required to be nothing less than a standard-bearer for the humility, goodness and resilience of German womanhood. There is nothing wrong in this; it reflects what the composer hoped for himself and his marriage, and at its best that work can be an inspiring experience. But Schumann is just as good at ‘off duty’ pictures of girls – the abandoned serving-girl, the artlessly ambitious soldier’s wife, the self-absorbed little fortune-teller of Die Kartenlegerin3, and the dreaming bride-to-be of Der Nussbaum, as well as other female portraits in the Myrthen cycle. It is these little vignettes which were so to influence Hugo Wolf, a composer who might have allowed the grandeur of his vision to exclude portraits of the little people were it not for Schumann’s (also Schubert’s) example. To say that Volkslied is an antecedent of some of the best and most pithy female songs in Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch is no exaggeration. Its form is just as petite and perfect as the female figure walking in her garden which is imagined therein: there is not an inch of fat, and no inflated waistline, the music constructed from tiny cells and motifs without a suspicion of cellulite. Of course, there is little ‘politically correct’ in this version of womanhood in twenty-first century terms, but it chimes with its English nineteenth-century contemporary, the typical Dickensian heroine who is exquisite of feature, and ineffably dainty of hand and foot. In compensation for such unlikely physical perfection, these Schumann girls are not always goody-goodies. In some of these songs (including this one) there is also a touch of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp petulance and scheming (though female cruelty in song was destined to be a Wolfian development).

The music, with its staccato accompaniment tripping along the garden path, has a delightful suggestion of flounce. The melody is a divine gift, as any song with the title Volksliedchen must be; like the tune of Schubert’s Heidenröslein it seems always to have been in the air. The exquisite part-writing of the accompaniment might have been conceived for a divertimento for three stringed instruments by Mozart. No dungarees here, or sensible gardening clothes with Wellington boots; folksong or no folksong, this excursion is still a fashionable one in petticoats topped off by a raffish hat of which she is proud – this too is a Susanna touch. Or so the music tells us. Looking at these words, a completely different song might have been the result – devoted, even abject, moping and star-struck. But no, Schumann gives this girl spirit. She is devoted, of course, but there is more than a suggestion of impatience in her musical demeanour. She loves him – and the words tell us how very much – but not, one suspects on listening to this music, at all costs. Much depends on his behaviour, and her thoughts about what he may, or may not, be doing. This suggests that no philandering would be tolerated. As if he would want to … As if he would dare …

In the first verse the emotions are simple and carefree. We can take quite literally the dreamy thoughts of her garden ramble. There are some wonderfully deft touches: the emphasis on ‘erster Gedanke’, a protestation of priority for which the boyfriend is expected to be duly grateful; the tiny acciaccatura in the piano beneath ‘Liebster’ implies there is still a genuine playful frisson in the relationship. The phrase beginning ‘Am Himmel steht kein Stern’ is a rueful, almost pouting, passage which is flattened into minor tonality – a sadness which seems to protest the lover’s absence in the light of the starry gifts which would be given to him at a moment’s notice. Enriching this phrase (after the words ‘Stern’ and ‘gönnte’) there are tiny gestures in dotted rhythm in the accompaniment; these are no more than quixotic moments of musical punctuation, but enough to add individuality – like spontaneous gestures of affection – to a passage where the vocal line is otherwise dutifully doubled by the piano.

As is often the case, it is Schumann’s decision to repeat the opening strophe in order to bring the song full circle. The differences are tiny, but telling. The words ‘erster Gedanke’ are pitched a third higher, betraying a note of impatience and petulance. In the first verse the words ‘was nun mein Liebster tut’ had been set gently, even imploringly; now they trip off the tongue in the only sequence of semiquavers in the piece. Is there a suggestion in this change that she believes the lover is having an enjoyable time somewhere else when all she can do is to worry about him? By the time we have come to the last line, a repeat of the foregoing words, the subtext is ‘why on earth is he not here with me … he’d better have a very good excuse!’ The repeat of the words ‘erster Gedanke, was nun mein’ incorporates a descending scale, partially chromatic in deference to her disappointment. She then stops short and recovers her self-possession, taking only a crotchet rest to do so. She is nobody’s victim after all. With the concluding ‘Liebster tut?’ she resumes a tempo, and in the old mood of assurance. No longer is there any sign of self-pity. The seven-bar postlude is among Schumann’s most delightful. The joie de vivre here is reminiscent of the Chamisso setting Verratene Liebe with its pianistic panache and merry phrasing across the bar-lines. This is pianism for the upper hand. ‘How silly of me to worry’ it seems to chortle, ‘I can always handle him’, and the final spread chord is the little coup de grâce which says ‘so there!’

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2000

Il est difficile de déceler dans la délicatesse de ce lied qui évoque le chant traditionnel, presque enfantins dans sa musicalité transparente et son côté mélodieux, que Schumann fréquente Franz Liszt avec assiduité et est chaque jour stupéfié par la virtuosité pianistique transcendantale de ce compositeur. On pourrait même penser que la simplicité de cette musique est une forme de réaction à cette expérience.

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

Der zarte Volksliedcharakter dieser beiden Lieder mit ihrer fast kindlichen musikalischen Transparenz und Melodik deutet mit nichts darauf hin, dass Schumann in dieser Zeit mit Liszt verkehrt und täglich von neuem über dessen transzendentale Virtuosität als Pianist staunen muss. Man könnte sogar meinen, dass die Einfachheit seiner Kompositionen eine Reaktion auf dieses Erlebnis ist.

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

This is music for the complete homebody. One might imagine Sehnsucht sung by an impetuous Florestan, and this by a domesticated Eusebius were it not for a glimmer of comedy in this old-fashioned ditty which does not quite suit the image of that poetic dreamer. The song is affectionately written, but it is a hymn to bourgeois stay-at-home values. As such, it has a certain rustic quality and a deliberate lack of musical sophistication which raises a smile. It is also a setting of a friend’s verses, someone who was not a professional poet.

Many pieces of this kind to locally written lyrics were written by Schumann’s earnest and less gifted song-composing contemporaries (what do the names Lindpaintner, Reissiger and Speyer – all names with Schumannesque connections – mean now?). These forgotten figures were so steeped in Biedermeier values that they had no idea how comical their musical cosiness must have seemed to someone like Schumann. But when he deliberately sets out to depict honest-to-goodness country attitudes (as in Der arme Peter or the duet Ländliches Lied) Schumann does it better than anyone, except perhaps Brahms. Schubert had a similar affection for, and a similar gift for depicting, simple working folk. There was, in any case, a strong Biedemeier side to Schumann, a man of paradoxes – a would be left-wing agitator who was in some ways a model of German conservatism, a composer with a world-view who hated travel and relished the security of a well-ordered life with all its local rituals. Above all we know that he was tempted at one time to take his bride to live abroad in order to escape the travails he suffered in the winning of her hand. In hearing this song we know that this was never really a serious option. Perhaps that is why he seems rather to have liked this song, publishing it twice (in 1843 and 1844) before gathering it into this opus number.

The introduction, like that of Sehnsucht, consists of a phrase an octave apart between the pianist’s hands; there is even a slightly similar chromatic inflection in the snatch of melody traced in the descending phrase. But that is where the similarity ends. The opening of the Geibel song is awash with coruscating syncopations dislocated between the hands, the music’s turbulence a sign of impatience and passion. Here the hands are nicely together, entirely appropriate for a man who is also very ‘together’ and grounded. The music tells us this time and time again: almost every vocal phrase is accompanied by chords which follow the vocal line in the treble clef, but remain resolutely stuck on the same repeating bass notes. ‘I am happy where I am’ is the message of the song, and thus also the function of the harmony. The piano flourishes between the vocal phrases (no, they are too sober to be flourishes; let us rather say interjections) imply pauses for thought between various doses of homespun philosophy. This is strongly reminiscent of the Schubert settings of Zufriedenheit D362 and D501 (‘Ich bin vergnügt’) where he allows Claudius’s homily to be dispensed in various stages, pearls of wisdom interrupted by meaningful pauses where an imaginary audience listens as the magus puffs on an imaginary pipe. In the Schumann song one can hear some earnest finger-wagging perhaps, and not a little self-satisfaction. This is after all music for a simple soul.

But if we are tempted to find in this music merely a comical vignette of the German equivalent of a smug little-Englander, it would be to underestimate Schumann’s capacity for patriotism and real reverence for fatherland (the next song in the opus also emphasises this). The words at the end of the second verse ‘Die Heimat ist so schön’ occasion a truly lyrical top note (a five beats on the word ‘schön’ and a heartfelt cadence). This is no laughing matter, and it beautifully counterbalances the carefully controlled plodding of all those mezzo staccato quavers in the accompaniment which keep the singer rooted to the spot with the rustic insistence of a slightly lugubrious folkdance. Indeed this is a piece of folksong in its way, and one notices that in its unashamed strophic form. It is a charming little work which might have been truly comic in another composer’s hands (Wolf’s for example). But just as when Schubert attempts a comic song at Rossini’s expense, the note of parody gets lost as the composer falls in love with his task and with the sheer joy of music-making. So it is here, and it is perhaps the combination of real feeling with a bemused smile which denies the song performances. Puzzled would-be interpreters tend to pass over this music and sing something they take to be more typically of Schumann.

Eric Sams has identified the piano piece which is related to the genesis of this song: this is the ‘Scherzo’ of the Klavierstücke (Op 32 No 1 from 1839). The introductions to both works are identical in terms of notes, and in the same key. It is thus likely that it was the manuscript of this song (not of Der Nussbaum as was previously thought) which accompanied one of the composer’s most tender messages: ‘My dear Clara, I enclose a song I have just written. First read the poem carefully and then think of your dear Robert. As a matter of fact it is the Scherzino in another form’. Schumann obviously intended Ich wandre nicht to vouchsafe his constancy and his determination to be a steadfast homebody, a rock of dependability – in short, an ideal future husband. Despite this serious message, the music remains light-hearted.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2000

Malgré son titre, c’est un lied errant dans tous les sens du terme, à moins que le compositeur ait recopié au propre, à la fin de l’année 1841, une œuvre déjà composée en 1840. C’est l’avis d’Eric Sams qui lie le début du lied au Scherzo des Klavierstücke (op. 32 no 1, 1839). Une lettre adressée par Robert à Clara le 16 février 1840 associe un lied qu’il ne nomme pas à ce même «Scherzino».

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

Trotz des Titels ist dieses Lied in jeder Hinsicht ein Irrläufer, es sei denn, Schumann fertigte Ende 1841 eine Reinschrift eines bereits 1840 komponierten Werks an. Dies meint auch Eric Sams, der die Einleitung des Lieds mit dem Scherzo der Klavierstücke (op. 32 Nr. 1, 1839) in Verbindung bringt. Ein Brief von Robert an Clara vom 16. Februar 1840 verbindet ein namenloses Lied mit eben diesem „Scherzino“.

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

Even though the Schumanns’ stay on the Rhine (in Düsseldorf) was among the unhappiest periods of their lives, the Rhineland, and the music arising out of its imagery, play a happily creative part in the composer’s output. Indeed, the best of the Rhine songs had been written long before. This is perhaps proof that it is better to dream about a place than to visit it. Schumann was born, educated and married in Saxony, but there are no songs in praise of the Elbe; the nearest we come to this is the Spanish Ebro (Spanisches Liebeslieder Op 138). The Rhine, on the other hand, was more identifiably German than any other single marvel of nature, and the composer was always at his best as an avid armchair traveller. Apart from the so-called ‘Rhenish’ Symphony, the songs that come to mind are the Heine settings Im Rhein (from Dichterliebe) and Berg und Burgen (Liederkreis, Op 24), Eichendorff’s Auf einer Burg (Liederkreis Op 39) and Sonntags am Rhein (Reinick, Op 36.) This focus on the Rhine by poets and composers alike (all before Wagner came to prominence) was surely the result of a growing national awareness as the various smaller states of Germany gradually felt their way towards amalgamation. There was certainly more to unite a nascent nation in the legends surrounding a great river than on the barren parade-grounds of Prussia, and Brahms felt the same way on his Rhine journey some years later.

The song is cast in the form of that most German of specialities, a chorale. Its use here tells us that Schumann felt he was writing of something serious and almost holy, certainly in cultural terms. And this is also one of the lesser-known offshoots of Schumann’s enthusiasm for Bach (another great figure who provided a focus for nationalist pride) awakened by the revelations of Mendelssohn; it is surely right that for a river as old as time itself the music should be Uralt in style. Schubert had also composed comparable music for noble pilgrims’ choruses (Der Kreuzzug and Der Sieg – a song in the same key of F major with certain similarities to Auf dem Rhein, as Eric Sams points out), an idea which was to reach its musical apotheosis in Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. Thoughts of the music of the future are also prompted by Immermann’s mention of the Nibelungen in the poem’s first verse; the Rhine’s buried treasure was soon to turn to musical gold in hands other than Schumann’s. Premonitions of Wagner also remind us that the poet Immermann was working on a new version of Tristan und Isolde at the time of his death in 1840.

We also recall that ‘Vater Rhein’ was also the scene of Schumann’s attempt at suicide in 1854, and that he took off his wedding ring before jumping off the bridge, consigning it into the depths of the river in a way that suggests that he dimly remembered the imagery of this poem. The end of Immermann’s rather weak lyric attempts to turn the focus of the lyric on to his own romantic misfortunes, a half-hearted imitation of Heine’s habit of ending his miniatures with a sudden personalised barb. The composer’s response seems equally half-hearted, although the poem’s final words – ‘wird ewig drinnen sein’ – are amplified by the composer’s repetition of ‘ewig’ which is also the highest note in the piece. The postlude begins like the introduction, but falls into the bass clef regions, a deeper and more watery tessitura for the accompaniment. Schumann’s affection for the river, and what it represents in German history, is clear; but it is not evident that he is moved by the sufferings of the poet.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2000

The complicated background to this lyric has been discussed in the introduction to this booklet. If we are bemused by the poem for Liebeslied (Schumann’s rather too-ordinary title, not Goethe’s) one cannot help feeling that the composer would have been fascinated by its obscurities. All his life he had relished the use of codes and other mystifications, and it was an interest which had practical uses when he secretly communicated with Clara during the period of her father’s intransigent opposition to their match. Sams is severe on the poem (‘gibberish, and hopelessly unsuitable as a song text’) but Goethe enclosed it in a letter to Zelter in April 1816, and described it as ‘singable’. Zelter duly set it to music in the same year as Aus der Fernen. Sams’s point – that the poem does not exactly hang together as literature – is fair enough, but the poem may have seemed romantic for a couple like Robert and Clara who had exchanged letters (and thus perhaps songs) in code.

The obscurity of the poem is emphasised in the Schumann setting by the separation of the lines into separate statements, a musical version of telegraphese – for example in the last verse, when the words ‘so recht’ are cut off from ‘im stillen’ which in turn seems unnaturally enjambed with ‘Was soll das werden?’ Also inscrutable, but heavy with hidden meaning, is the isolation of the phrase ‘Wie Sonnenaufgang ward mir ein Vorsatz!’. This contains a harmonic echo from Aufträge1, also a song about messages between lovers. In this way, Schumann (even if unwittingly) gives a musical dimension to the underlying sense that more is being implied by these short lines of coded texts than the casual listener could ever realise.

The date of the song is also something of a mystery. It was published in 1850, but there is no other evidence of its date apart from certain stylistic thumbprints (a similarity to the late von der Neun settings, for example, in the sudden and strange appearance of loping triplets in the accompaniment, towards the end) which Sams acknowledges. He also finds a number of motival reasons (relating, as ever, to Clara) why this music may also have been written in 1840s. Underneath the fingers of this pianist, however, it seems a late work, bearing a certain similarity to the song Abschied von Frankreich3 where Mary Queen of Scots feels as torn from her beloved France as Suleika from Hatem. The music is a passionate outpouring of specifically feminine emotion where the tempo (‘Nicht zu rasch, aber mit leidenschaftlichem Ausdruck’) is moderated by a certain gentle ruefulness typical of Schumann’s third period. It is also a real characteristic of the late style that the melody is assembled in fragments, like a gradually emerging solution to a puzzle, rather than in the more certain melodic sweep of the 1840 songs.

The descending six-note motif with which the song begins (first heard to the words ‘Dir zu eröffnen mein Herz’) is threaded through the accompaniment like a wistful sigh. This motif is even better suited to the yielding words of the last verse – ‘Kraft hab’ ich keine’. The vocal line is complemented by the accompaniment, rustling semiquavers in vaguely disjointed patterns which are all about aspiration and a vain search for happiness. If these seem lacking in direction at times, Suleika is similarly at a loss to make sense of the whirring emotions that spin around her. Above these pedalled murmurings, fragments of melody emerge led by the little finger of the pianist’s right hand, like the descant of a plaintive oboe. As in so many songs of the period, these tags suggest a unity which is more implied than actual, less thought-through than glued together by the performers’ ardour. The fervent repetitions of ‘Will ihn umarmen, und kann es nicht’ seem increasingly desperate as if Suleika realises that, after all, she is still unable to decipher the means whereby she can rejoin her beloved. The postlude includes one more oboe-like repetition of the tune which melts into a strangely awkward diminished-seventh figuration and a strangely elaborated V-I cadence. At the very last moment a touch of plagal harmony, sudominant to tonic, reinforces the feeling that this love, although it is certainly not part of the Christian tradition, is consecrated by the deepest and holiest commitment.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2000

C’est un lied isolé du West-östlicher Divan de Goethe, passionné, enthousiaste et curieusement différent des chants d’amour antérieurs de 1840. On a l’impression que ce lied s’inscrit d’une manière ou d’une autre dans un code secret de communication: comment Suleika et son amoureux plus âgé Hatem pourraient-ils communiquer secrètement, voilà le véritable sujet de ce texte.

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

Dies ist eine einzelne Vertonung eines Texts aus Goethes West-östlicher Divan, leidenschaftlich mitreißend und seltsam anders als die früheren Liebeslieder von 1840, als sei das Lied in geheimer Verschlüsselung geschrieben: Dieser Text hat zum Thema, wie Suleika und ihr älterer Geliebter Hatem heimlich miteinander kommunizieren könnten.

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