The way that Rückert prints this poem it might have been entitled Sie und Er: perhaps this played a part in the composer’s choice of Er und Sie for the next song in the set. The composer found this lyric on page 81 of the second volume of Rückert’s Gesammelte Gedichte (1843) which he owned; there it appears under the fourth section of the Jugendlieder – poems written in Rückert’s early twenties (1810-1813).
Schumann here writes a duet which goes far beyond the Mendelssohnian models of the 1840s. We had an inkling of this new ‘antiphonal’ style in the Burns settings of Op 34. Schumann had a taste for contrapuntally dense (and complex) interwoven conversation in those early pieces, but this is the culmination of what may be termed the anti-duet: the singers seem to sing together while having totally different feelings and emotional agendas. The girl is lighthearted and capricious, determined to have a good time; her words are spoken out loud for all to hear. The boy is sullen, nervous and humiliated; his words are audible to us, but probably not to the girl; in this way his dampening comments are kept to himself rather than spoken aloud. He goes through the motions on the dance floor, but he would rather be anywhere else, and he simply cannot bear the fact that his girlfriend is allowing herself to be touched by all and sundry. She enjoys teasing him, saying that she will be totally his tomorrow, but today belongs to everybody. In this mismatch of temperaments it is obvious that he is more in love with her than she with him. Perhaps she finds him too devoted to be entertaining.
One somehow realises from this that Schumann must have been a thoroughly inept dancer – even if only because the very act of watching other people dancing seems connected with unhappiness whenever it features in his songs: one thinks of Es ist ein Flöten und Geigen, the first song of Der arme Peter, and Der Spielmann; in each case the composer casts himself as the outsider helplessly watching a social ritual which only serves to emphasise his exclusion from the day-to-day life of ordinary people. Clara on the other hand was no doubt physically well co-ordinated, and enjoyed the chance to let her hair down. It is not impossible that this song is a rueful comment on their incompatibility in this one area of their lives. (The disinclination of many musicians to dance is well-known. Perhaps a heightened consciousness of music breeds an awkward self-consciousness on the dance floor; after all, listening is ideally a stationary pastime.)
The music is in ¾ time – a fast waltz perhaps, as the text implies, although a slightly rustic tone to the music suggests a Ländler variation with a structured change of partners. It is the very lack of one-to-one intimacy while dancing which is the source of all the tenor’s anguish. It is this circular array of dancing bodies which is the ‘Kranz’; the girl’s opening lines refer to the lineup of young dancers milling around and waiting for the music to strike up. The accompaniment’s right-hand arpeggio soars upwards to the apex of the tune (a high B) before falling gracefully away. This is swirling music which betokens the soprano’s high spirits, as much as her determination to break free from the cloying possessiveness of her partner; this ascending figuration might even suggest taking centre stage and elbowing someone aside in the process. The sprung dotted rhythms of the left hand energise the music throughout and indicate exuberant physical movement.
As soon as the tenor enters there is a momentary change into the minor key. It is Schumann’s considerable achievement that when he layers this negative reaction with the girl’s cajoling replies she always manages to remain upbeat, he implacably downbeat. Quavers suddenly invade the piano texture, indicative of the man’s pulses racing in panic; those left-hand dotted rhythms suddenly seem just as appropriate to depict his thumping heart. At the girl’s second solo verse (the poem’s third strophe: ‘Eia, der Walzer erklingt’) the music is marked ‘Lebhafter’ as the dance gathers momentum. The word ‘Frisch!’ is cleverly made to appear early, and on its own, as if the young lady were commanding a musical recapitulation of the opening ritornello. This duly appears before the end of the poem’s third strophe, giving the musical structure a sense of a new beginning at an unexpected point. The girl then goes on to the end of her verse, tagging on a recycled mention of the ‘Mädchen und Bübchen’ from the third line of the strophe.
It is Schumann’s plan to blur the demarcation of the strophes and make us lose any sense of direction; it is if we were in the middle of the whirling bodies and giddily attempting to keep up with the ceaseless flow of movement and modulation. (This is at least how the pianist feels!) The tenor launches into ‘Wehe, mir sinket der Arm’ (verse 4) but he has sung only two bars before the girl embarks on the entirely contradictory ‘Eia, wie flattert der Kranz’ (verse 5). The man’s increasingly bitter complaints are now closely interwoven with the girl’s comments in party mood. Words in one stave clash with words in the other; at times it is impossible for the ear to disentangle the threads in performance, save when one or other of the voices emerges from the fray with a solo passage. This is a head-on collision of opposing feelings and Schumann must have had great fun in writing it. It all sounds easy enough, but one cannot emphasise enough the trouble that the composer has taken to superimpose one feeling on the other, major on minor as it were, keeping the sound-world of each character true to itself, while planning their conjunction with the greatest skill. Some of the piano writing in rippling quavers suggests a Chopin waltz, and the increasing density and harmonic richness works up to a fine old frenzy which is entirely typical of this kind of dance.
The song moves to its close with the clever juxtaposition and alternation of two harmonic worlds – the girl’s way-out E flat 7/A flat major for ‘heute für alle im Tanz’ and the boy’s insistence on the proprieties of the home key (D7/G major) for ‘möchte vergehen in Harm’. They eventually compromise in a C major exit from these entrenched positions, leading to an unsettled cadence in the first inversion of G major. The duet comes to a close with an extended cadential passage where the two singers lock horns, clashing in argumentative discords, and seeming to be stuck, on different words (‘morgen’ and ‘mitten’) before they bring the song to an end from completely opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. The girl is cast throughout as lightweight and ‘fast’, the boy as long-suffering and devoted. But he is also a killjoy, and we cannot help liking her better. There is no indication that the emotional chasm between the lovers has been bridged, but the band plays on in the major key. The fourteen-bar postlude reiterates the arpeggio figuration of the introduction; we hear this twice before echoes of that arpeggio, now calmer and lower in the keyboard, bring the music to a close. Two spread chords sign off in G major and leave us in little doubt that the girl has had a good time with no regrets. The listener, despite the tenor’s anguish, feels the same.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2002