Like Dein Angesicht, this is a song where Schumann is momentarily more concerned with his private agenda in winning Clara’s hand (and doing battle with the dreadful old giant, alias Friedrich Wieck) than in constructing a piece suitable for his Heine cycle. It is a marvellous song – one of the most difficult of all Schumann’s lieder to play – but its character is so dissimilar from anything else that it is little wonder that the composer chose to cut it from Dichterliebe. The way that Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen (No XII of the cycle) melts into Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet (No XIII) is so exactly right that we can scarcely imagine the interpolation of two further dream-like songs at this point (Es leuchtet meine Liebe and Mein Wagen rollet langsam), both substantial pieces of music where whimsy and nightmare play so extensive a role that the listener is in danger of forgetting the poet-hero himself.
The music is aggressive like little else in Schumann’s lieder. The key signature is 12/8 and one has only to glance at the first page of music where all the quaver chords are printed separately (instead of in groups of three which is the normal practice) to see that the composer has something special in mind. We discern here something of the nature of Schumann’s famous piano improvisations. The direction of ‘Phantastisch, markiert’ (not to mention the opening forte dynamic) leads one to suppose that Schumann wants those quaver chords played anything but mellifluously; indeed the pianist’s experience, when playing them loudly and separately, is akin to attacking a punch-bag in preparation for a bout in the ring. (There is no doubt whose head was the recipient for those blows in the composer’s mind.) Writing out the phrase in this way (Schumann does so for six bars before reverting to grouping his quavers more conventionally) is also a warning to the pianist against too fast or facile a tempo – each chord must sound in its own right. The word ‘Liebe’ in the context of the opening lines (‘Es leuchtet meine Liebe / In ihrer dunkeln Pracht – ‘my love shines in dark splendour’) does not mean ‘beloved’ but the violently glowing emotion of love itself – love which will do anything to protect the object of its affection. Here the composer would have us believe that he belongs to the heroic race of the German Held or hero, and as such is a dangerous adversary. Mention of fairytales (‘Wie’n Märchen traurig und trübe’) reminds us of the Grimm splendour, both dark and colourful, of the German folk tradition. Throughout this first verse the piano part is doubled by a vocal line which is only marginally less turbulent. Accented longer notes in the bass (spaced for a thick rather than a transparent sonority) parry and thrust from beneath, an early indication that the hands are meant to sound in conflict with each other. Whether with fisticuffs or swords this music is spoiling for a fight.
The original key is G minor. This momentarily melts into the lyricism of the relative major for the magic garden of the second strophe. But this is as dangerous a place as Klingsor’s garden, and love is seen through the distorting mirror of nightmare – the texture is muddy, the movements of the lovers inappropriately elephantine. The piano writing stays obdurately in the bass clef; music to accompany the nightingale, depicted here as more albatross than songbird, is enmeshed in galumphing hemiola where twelve quavers are pointedly phrased into six groups of two. This hiccuping continues for ‘Es flimmert der Mondenschein’ where the piano writing seems drunk on moonshine of another kind. In the music for the third strophe the lovers – ‘Die Jungfrau’ and ‘Der Ritter’ – are stiffly depicted as woodcuts in a children’s story book. This of course is exactly what the poem suggests (‘Die Jungfrau steht still wie ein Bildnis’). The vocal line here is restricted to a single note beneath which the piano limns contrapuntal detail – a sighing motif, as if for solo oboe, pricked out above pulsating quavers. The meaning of these falling phrases in the accompaniment becomes clear when we realise that the hero is kneeling before his beloved and on the point of plighting his troth: they signify gestures of courtly obeisance and the exchange of vows. The knight’s music (at least as far as the singer is concerned) is a musical sequence of hers, a tone higher and similarly transfixed on one note (‘Der Ritter vor ihr kniet’). The entry of the giant screws the tension to a higher pitch; his music lies a menacing semitone above that of the knight. At this point the hemiola in the accompaniment returns as if the giant’s clumsy feet were encased in seven-league boots. The singer’s distress and surprise is depicted in a vocal line which climbs a tone with each new turn of events. Thus ‘Die bange Jungfrau’ is set in a punishing tessitura worthy of her distress (a line of high F naturals in the original key) and the word ‘flieht’ rises to an anguished G.
The four-bar interlude which now follows is of a type seldom encountered in song – the opposition of two inimical forces signified by a ferocious bar of staccato quavers, first in unison, and then briefly in contrary motion – a veritable battle between the hands. This is the sort of music, deliberately grotesque, which should accompany Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. Heine’s fourth strophe is introduced by a return to the opening theme, this time hammered out in a key which is a perfect fourth higher than the beginning. Ominous left-hand octaves shudder as if played on the timpani. Against this cacophony the words ‘Der Ritter sinkt blutend zur Erde’ are set as a slower counter-melody which falls in stages, as if reeling, to the bottom of the stave. The giant stumbles back to the house (‘Es stolpert der Riese nach Haus’ – note the extraordinary melisma on that last word) his music an apt portrait of philistine clumsiness and growling ill temper. It is noteworthy that Schumann uses the same spacing of octaves between the hands for the giants’ music (particularly at mention of ‘der starke Christoph) in the concluding song of Dichterliebe.
For the moment violence has triumphed, but we are reminded that the knight will never give up the struggle. To his dying day, and however wounded he may be, he will go on fighting the giant until the fair maid is rescued. We hear as much in the poem’s concluding two lines. After an extended fairy story the narrator is allowed to emerge from allegory in order to speak his mind. For this the music returns to the home key with a restatement of the opening theme. Against this the poet tells us, in recitative-like phrases sung through clenched teeth, that the outcome of this legend is not settled until he himself is buried. These phrases, probably originally penned with the poet’s uncle Salomon in mind, resound through the song like warnings to Friedrich Wieck.
The postlude is one of Schumann’s most ambitious and most tricky; its thunderous ascending banks of quavers would have stolen the thunder of any other postlude in Dichterliebe, no doubt another reason why this song had to be cut. One is reminded of the postlude to Warte, warte wilder Schiffmann from Op 24 more than anything in Op 48. The piano writing here seems to denote a succession of ferocious efforts to vanquish evil. At first the harmony is caught and contained in the seventh chord: the piano’s octaves rise twice up the stave in a chromatic scale only as high as an F natural; then again up to the F and down again, this journey also repeated. And then, the breakthrough! The piano plunges through the F natural barrier and triumphantly reaches the chord of G major an octave higher. This is followed by a two-bar chorale (including plagal harmony) in dotted crotchets, as if sung at the conclusion of a holy war. Poet and composer promise that they will eventually succeed in slaying the tyrant, and the composer shows us how this will be done in the postlude. He even provides music for a final service of thanksgiving.
It is worth noting that this song was cannibalised for much of the Scherzo of Schumann’s String Quartet in A minor Op 41 No 2 (1842). The musical effect, however, is entirely different without the percussive aspect of the piano.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2001