It seems that Schumann was in the business, even late in his career, of discovering poets who would prove useful to later masters of the lied. Thus Husarenabzug is his only setting of Candidus, but Brahms was to go on to set seven poems by that poet. Similarly, Frühlingslust is Schumann’s only Heyse setting, but this was a poet who would not only be set by Brahms, and at even greater length by Hugo Wolf, but who was destined to live into the next century as a Nobel laureate.
There is nothing of that import to this lyric, or to this music. The song seems reminiscent of that other perfumed miniature Jasminenstrauch3, just as delicate, and over in a trice. The image of the butterfly is central to the cast of the weaving accompaniment. In the introduction we hear it alight on a dotted quaver before hesitating for the same length of time on a note a fourth higher. And then, all dallying over for the moment, we hear its darting flight in and out of various blossoming harmonies and clusters of tones.
All of this has much of the charm and freshness of the earlier music, but other things are more typical of the late style. For example, there is the strange cadence following ‘du hilfst dir nimmer heraus’ where the melodic and rhythmic inflexions of ‘nimmer heraus’ are imitated in the piano at a distance of a dotted crotchet. The intrusion of this sort of contrapuntal gesture is not unpleasant, one gets used to it and accepts it as a different Schumann style (or the style of a different Schumann) but it seems more worked-out, and not nearly as inevitable, as equivalent passages in the 1840 songs. On the other hand, the shape of the simply accompanied cadence at ‘ich musste vergehen vor Leid’ is utterly touching, and charming in its pathos; we can hear the singer die of pain – though not permanently of course. Before the line beginning ‘Die lustigen Lieder’ the piano has an opportunity to shine as his fingers curl around new semiquaver figurations – patterns which seem Mendelssohnian in their spring-song note-spinning. This helps to launch the heavenward flight of ‘fliegen bis in die Wipfel hinauf’ most effectively, the vocal line hesitating aptly on the first syllable of ‘Wipfel’ within a forte dynamic. The postlude, also derived from these weaving semiquavers, is trickier to play than it looks, and typical of a certain obfuscating aspect of the composer’s writing at this time. A glance at the score will confirm that the song ends, perversely, on the same staccato note, D, in both hands. It has been hard enough in this trickily meandering chromatic passage not to get one’s hands caught up with each other, but at the last moment the composer, as if laughing from a ringside seat, delights in engineering this collision in the narrow space of a single piano key. When not boxed in, the pianist floats like a butterfly, but now he is stung by a D (this is the original key; in a lower transposition it might have been a B).
Johannes Brahms set this poem for women’s chorus and optional pianoforte accompaniment as part of his the first of Vier Lieder aus dem Jungbrunnen, a subsection of 12 Lieder und Romanzen für Frauenchor Op 44 composed in 1859/60. Adolf Jensen set the text as a solo song (Rosenzeit Op 22 No 1) in 1864.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2000