The preparation of this opus number for publication (February 1854) must have been among the last things the composer did before he was committed to an asylum in March. The opus is a portmanteau of various songs: this stray Kerner, two of the four Heine settings which were originally destined for Dichterliebe (including the immortal Dein Angesicht), Schumann’s only setting of Strachwitz (Mein altes Ross) and the debut song of the composer’s maturity (an insubstantial Shakespeare setting from Twelfth Night). This is not exactly scraping the barrel, but there is a suggestion, in a lean period, of allowing certain songs to be printed which might have been withheld in happier times.

This song dates from the same time as Mädchen-Schwermut, as well as the other great Kerner settings which made up the songs of Op 35. It is an 1840 orphan, one of the rare Lieder from Schumann’s great song-writing year that he seemed hesitant to publish. The extraordinary technical difficulty of Sängers Trost must have militated against its earlier appearance. Schumann was often inclined to place the tessitura of songs in a comfortable place for his own unschooled voice, accounting for a range (in songs like Ich grolle nicht) where the vocal line is placed uncomfortably low for most tenors and too high for most baritones (at the climactic high A of the last page). Here the composer seems to be making a conscious effort to write in a high tessitura (perhaps reprimanded by tenors and sopranos for his tendency to stay in the middle of the stave) and has thus succeeded in composing a song of ferocious technical difficulties. It ‘sits’ high in the voice and never relents except to climb higher still! One can imagine an unfortunate private performance of it in 1840 where everyone (the singer most of all) was most uncomfortable and where the song was shelved as a consequence. On the other hand it is possible that Schumann wrote it with a particular artist in mind, a tenor perhaps, with an easy top—the kind of lead singer that Schubert seems to have had in mind when composing his notoriously high four-part choruses for TTBB.

It is also possible to believe that this song was denied a place in the Kerner Liederkreis because the cycle of twelve items as it stands was considered quite long enough; there was yet another setting, Trost im Gesang, which was also held back. Another factor is that although the tune is haunting and there are flashes of Schumannian inspiration in the vocal line (the tessitura alone lends it a sort of moonlit brilliance, particularly at the perilous phrase ‘Stern und Mondenlicht’) the interaction between voice and piano is rather predictable and ordinary. Of course the title gives away that this is a song about a singer, a troubadour of old, but here he stands perhaps too strongly in the spotlight. The song Sehnsucht nach der Waldgegend (in the same key of G minor) is brought to mind by the opening piano figuration. That song is full of individual touches between voice and piano, however; here the pianist is reduced to the rôle of an acquiescent minstrel endlessly repeating the same accompanying formula—a left-hand dotted crotchet followed by five semiquavers in the right hand. It is only in the postlude that the accompaniment achieves any independence and eloquence—a marvellous little meditation on the nature of memory and the artist’s immortality in the minds and hearts of his admirers.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1996

This is a much greater song than Lehn’ deine Wang’, the song it was meant to precede in the original version of Dichterliebe. A musical relation of Die Lotosblume, it has the makings of a beautiful and memorable aria, an example of Schumann’s ability to simulate the warmth and spontaneity of Italianate cantilena. The accompaniment begins with one of those ‘empty’ bars of chords vamping in the root position (oscillating semiquavers wafting and hovering in expectation) which is a sign that Schumann knows that he has a distinguished tune up his sleeve. When the composer is on this form the listener can afford to sit back and allow the music to unfold – the bass line gently nudging the singer forward and providing unctuous support for the E flat major melody (the baritone transposition into D flat seems even more luxurious).

As in all the best Schumann songs, the word-setting mirrors the meaning of the words in uncanny fashion. The way the vocal line rises to ‘schön’ in the opening line (as if looking up to an unattainable feminine ideal) is a beautiful touch. It is also a challenge to the singer’s ability to cope with the passaggio – he has to float a phrase in an ‘innig’ manner which would be easier to sing in an ungracious forte (and so it is often performed, unfortunately). In the matching phrase (the song’s second line) exactly the same challenge occurs in the singing of ‘engelgleich’. With this mention of a heavenly state we have the first intimation that this song is about death. Much else in the music arises from this intimation of mortality including the heart-stopping off-the-beat syncopations at ‘Und doch so bleich, so schmerzenreich’ as if the singer were stifling a sob. It is notable that Schumann here changes the poet’s original ‘So bleich, so schmerzenbleich’ to ‘So bleich, so schmerzenreich’, probably because this repetitive insistence on ‘bleich’ (a word which also appears in the second strophe) seemed rather ghoulish for a song originally intended for Dichterliebe. The shift into the mediant for ‘Und nur die Lippen, die sind rot’ signals a moment of pathos expressed in two bars of more simple music, but this is a deceptively stable interlude. At ‘Bald aber küsst sie bleich der Tod’ the bass line descends in inexorable chromatic steps as if the bottom were dropping out of the singer’s world. This instability reflects his fear of losing the beloved: all he can do is watch dumbstruck, his vocal line transfixed, as if hypnotised, on a single note while deep in the bass subtle harmonic transformations depict her transition into the next life.

At ‘Erlöschen wird das Himmelslicht’ the modulation into the mediant key of G flat major (in the song’s original key of E flat) is a marvellous spiritual moment. The only drawback is that Schumann is so intoxicated by the image of the beloved’s eyes (thus Clara’s) that the music is bathed in ‘Himmelslicht’ rather than deprived of it as the words suggest. Under ‘Das aus den frommen Augen bricht’ (which should signal the end of the song) the piano’s right hand entwines itself around the vocal line in loving unanimity, and then leads it by the hand, via a beautifully arranged modulation, back into the home key for a recapitulation of the opening strophe. Although we have to sympathise with Schumann (that opening tune is too good to use only once), this backtracking alters Heine’s intention and takes away the drama and surprise essential to his poetry and, more particularly, to the deadpan ending that is the trademark of his poems. In giving in to the temptation to make a rounded song in ABA form (Schumann was neither the first nor last to compromise the poet’s intention through a composer’s pride in his melodic invention – Wolf’s Benedeit die sel’ge Mutter comes to mind), something is sacrificed, something economical and understated that is essential to the world of Dichterliebe.

This last strophe is a modified version of the first with ‘schmerzenreich’ modulating back into the tonic rather than mediant (as had been the case previously). It sounds like a blessing at the beloved’s deathbed – beautiful and moving, and yet in the context of Heine’s text redundant and even sentimental. The postlude has a counter-melody in the alto line (quavers off the beat underpinning the semiquavers in the soprano voice) which contributes to the sense of the narrator’s bereavement and emotional disorientation. This type of rhythmic dislocation is familiar from the Heine settings of Op 24. On the musical level the song’s great achievement is in the seemingly effortless combination of spacious peace and a claustrophobic inner turbulence. The latter quality makes itself evident beneath the glorious melody and the outer layer of seemingly imperturbable lyricism.

It must have been difficult to jettison a song of this quality from the cycle. But it simply does not fit in with the other Dichterliebe poems, and in 1844 Schumann, better able to judge the creations of 1840, realised this. Firstly, it is too long and too slow for its assigned place in the sequence. And then we realise that dreams are a dominant theme of this cycle, whereas death is not. We may fear for the poet’s death through grief (particularly at the end of the work) but it is not appropriate that we should also be concerned with his faithless lover’s state of health. To draw our attention to her mortality is to displace the narrator’s central position in the work. It was Schumann’s intention that our sympathy with Heine should remain complete, and there is no room here for a second biographical strand. It is just that Schumann had momentarily forgotten who the real hero of his cycle was and, for all his fears about losing Clara in one way or another, she was not, after all, Heine’s beloved.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2001

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

This is among the least well known (and least performed) of Schumann’s songs, and yet it is a highly effective piece—an absolute must for a thematic recital where there is a group of songs about animals, for example. We all know the horse-riding songs of Schubert (Erlkönig, Auf der Brück and so on) but here we discover what might have happened to those noble steeds once they have been put out to pasture. Schumann set the poetry of Strachwitz only once, but he finds in the poet a collaborator who loves animals as he does, and also understands the problems of old age. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Schumann was moved by the fact that Strachwitz had died at the age of twenty-five (as he had been earlier by Lenau’s untimely exit, and was later to be by Elisabeth Kulmann’s—all as if pondering the brevity of his own allotted span). The once-valiant horse and its owner have both seen far better and happier times, and so has the composer. In July 1850 the composer was still capable of writing a fine song—particularly when he was not led astray by indifferent poetry—but he could see the pathway that lay ahead and it frightened him. The great days of 1840 when he wooed his bride and fought for her in the courts are long over. Robert had changed, love itself had changed; memory alone was capable of restoring the energy of the composer’s responses when a younger man. The bitter-sweet nostalgia that animates both this poem and its musical setting is a perfect marriage for unsettled times.

Schumann leaves out a verse of Strachwitz’s eight-strophe poem (the sixth) but otherwise respects it entirely. It is indeed well made for music and the composer’s response is admirable and surprisingly simple—Sams goes so far as to describe the opening as Schubertian. The marking is Mässig and the accompaniment begins with dotted rhythms rendered less than sprightly by a piano dynamic and the sombre E minor tonality. The down-in-the-mouth tone of the music, a march for a soldier with nowhere to go, is exactly right for a heroic picture that is deprived of its star-turn; it is surely no coincidence that an earlier song about the absence of the idealized lover (Jemand from Myrten, Op 25 No 4) is also in E minor with a similar mournful repeat of a descending two-bar phrase. In Mein altes Roß the once-glorious steed is only a shadow of its former self, but by the end of the first strophe the accompaniment has modulated to the relevant major. There is a way out of the present depression and this lies in clearing a pathway into the past via the power of memory.

At the beginning of the second strophe the piano’s dotted rhythms are pressed into service to depict the horse’s shaking head and his whinnying as he greets his former master. After ‘Ich glaube, du träumst, Kamerad’ the composer directs that the music should be performed with intensifying expression (mit steigendem Ausdruck). This is an old trick of Schumann’s; in some cases it unfairly shirks the creator’s burden and shifts it on to the performer, but here it is relatively easy to implement. The key of G major is established for music that suggests military pomp and circumstance—the lover described in these lines is surely also a soldier or, at the very least, a proud aristocrat like Strachwitz himself. In bars 19–20 (the beginning of the poem’s third strophe) the piano-writing breaks into triplets for the first time and leaps into the air across the keyboard (twice) to land two octaves higher in the stave—this is music for a journey to the beloved that includes steeplechase challenges. But after this boisterous outburst the music calms down for ‘Ein rauschend Gewand, / Eine weiße Hand’; this horse is not so battle-scarred that it is incapable of responding to the gentle touch of its master’s beloved. The little piano interlude at this point (bars 28–30) is reminiscent of Mein Garten from the same month; in this tiny interlude we hear something of the horse’s pride and innate elegance.

Now it is time to look back on the glory days and relive their excitement. The music for the fourth verse is the most chromatic in the song and the most rhythmically bracing: the accompaniment gallops gleefully in dotted rhythm in both hands and generates considerable élan. Schumann had delighted in uniting the battlefield with love in a song like Hauptmanns Weib (Myrten, Op 25 No 19) and here he adopts the rhythms of Schubert’s Normans Gesang to do the same thing. On the printed page this passage looks remarkably prophetic of passages in Hugo Wolf (Der Jäger, Der Feuerreiter); the bass rising in tones and semitones (E–F–G–A flat) steers the music into D flat major for ‘blauende Nacht!’, then (via the second inversion of A7) into D major for the more triumphalist ‘mit Macht, mit Macht!’. In this harmonic map we cover a great deal of terrain at full tilt.

At the beginning of the poem’s fifth strophe (‘Verhängt den Zaum’) the excitement and intimacy of nocturnal assignations is signified by the doubling of the voice with the melody in the accompanying pianist’s little finger (in the passage beginning ‘Im Herzen ein Traum’)—this is the union of lovers, the blissful parting kiss still on the rider’s lips. In the lead up to this, the turn of the musical screw has continued with an ascent to a D sharp bass which in turn facilitates an eventual return to E minor—I say eventual because this tonality is reached only after a further twelve bars. The end of this fifth strophe and the first half of the sixth is a musical prevarication that leaves us suspended in time, as if the narrator is unwilling to return to the woebegone reality of the home key. During this musical verse the dotted rhythms cease for a single bar (under ‘Dumpf hallender Huf’) but they begin again in order to depict drumming hoofbeats and the song of the quail (a bird also voiced in dotted rhythm, and rather more effectively, by Beethoven, Schubert and Fauré). The poet’s mention of a murmuring river here fails to inspire any water music.

The first half of the sixth strophe is largely a dalliance in the subdominant. The idea of ‘a final look’ in the manner of Orpheus turning to see a vanishing Eurydice inspires music of chromatic hesitancy: the dotted rhythms alternate with an ascending motif that betokens pleading. But no, it is impossible to remain in these safe regions of memory. Schumann initiates the song’s closing section halfway through the sixth verse of the poem (‘Mein Kamerad / Wie Schad’, wie Schad’’) so that that the final strophe (the seventh, also beginning ‘Mein Kamerad’) runs on without a new beginning. Return to E minor we must, but Schumann is still fighting the inevitable final farewell—it is only at the very end of the postlude (some eighteen bars later) that we hear this chord in root position; seven of these bars have been given over to a dominant pedal with the left-hand octaves on repeated Bs, timpani-like, sounding an ominous death knell. By ‘Alles ist aus!’ we can take it to mean that the horse is destined that very day for the knacker’s yard; its master feels similarly at the end of his tether. The simple pathos of ‘Und das Tor verbaut / Und verloren die Braut’ adds to the air of quiet desperation that pervades the song to the very end—the final chords, repeated thrice, provide a final shudder: so much happiness, activity, energy and love, and it all has to end like this.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2009

Ce n’est pas l’un des lieder les mieux connus ou les plus appréciés de Schumann, mais c’est une belle réussite, l’un des plus beaux parmi les lieder de 1850. Il devrait figurer beaucoup plus régulièrement dans des programmes conçus autour du sujet des animaux. Le chanteur est un guerrier qui a connu des jours bien meilleurs et qui s’adresse ici à un destrier autrefois noble, envoyé à l’équarrissage. On sent la sympathie de Schumann jaillir de ces deux personnages en toute solidarité.

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

Dieses Lied gehört nicht zu seinen bestbekannten oder beliebtesten Vertonungen, ist jedoch eine schöne Leistung, zählt zu den besten Liedern des Jahres 1850 und sollte weit häufiger in Programme zum Thema Tierwelt aufgenommen werden. Der Sänger ist ein Krieger, der bessere Tage gesehen hat und sich hier an eine einst edle Stute wendet, deren Leben beim Abdecker enden soll. Man fühlt Schumanns Sympathie aus dem Mitgefühl dieser beiden Figuren fließen.

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

Twelve years have passed since the last track. We left Schumann’s youthful lieder phase with Hirtenknabe, a boy’s song in A minor and, lo and behold, we return to his great year of 1840 with a song in the same key, more grown up and laddish perhaps, faster certainly, but similarly confessional in tone. It is as if the composer has taken up the threads of his vocal music where he left off, revitalising the spirit of his 1828 postlude into a prelude for a new age of composing songs. And this setting of the clown Feste’s final lyric from Twelfth Night has even more in common with the mood of the Intermezzo Op 4 No 4 which swaggers with a similar air of confidence. The very name of the English clown brings different associations to the German-speaking mind: the adjective ‘fest’ is rooted in steadfastness and inner strength, while the noun ‘Fest’ promises feasts and celebrations.

On 12 December 1830 Schuman wrote to his mother telling her of his intention to write an opera entitled Hamlet; he claimed that the ‘sweet fairy-like sounds’ were already taking shape in his head. In the same period there were also sketches for a Sinfonia per il Hamlet. The late song Herzeleid Op 107 No 1 (to a poem of Titus Ulrich, Hyperion Schumann Edition, Volume 1) is based on the character of Ophelia from the same play. The third of the Novelletten, Op 21 for piano – originally titled Intermezzo – bore lines from the witches’ scene in Macbeth that were deleted before publication. In 1851 Schumann composed a massively scored Overture zu Shakespeare’s Julius Cäsar, Op 128.

Nevertheless this short song remains Schumann’s only setting of Shakespeare’s words, notwithstanding his lifelong enthusiasm for the poet, and his deep knowledge of the plays. In February 1840 the composer was anxious to obtain a degree from the University of Jena in order to bolster his academic standing – ammunition in the war with Wieck who claimed that the composer was unworthy of his daughter. In the light of his work as a composer and critic Schumann hoped for a Doctorate of Music, honoris causa, but if necessary he proposed to write a thesis on the subject of Shakespeare and his relation to music. In the end he did not have to write a paper and was granted an honorary Doctor of Philosophy.

It is surely this episode that sent the composer back to the great English poet in February 1840. But why should he have chosen this particular poem if not to contrast his former position as a ‘tiny little boy’ with his present ‘man’s estate’? The composer decides to leave out two strophes – the second referring to ‘knaves and thieves’, and the fourth referring to drunkenness. Perhaps the latter was too much of a sore point: just at this time Schumann’s drinking was being cited by Friedrich Wieck as legal grounds for forbidding the composer’s marriage to his daughter. (Pleasure in drinking, excised from the words themselves, might be thought to have remained in the piano ritornelli which are curiously suggestive of hiccups.)

In other respects the song perfectly reflects the battle-scarred, yet philosophical, state of mind of a thirty-year old with marriage very much on his mind. The original English is ‘But when I came, alas, to wive’; this cynical slant is rendered by the more ambiguous ‘ach’ in German, a word which could also be an expression of enthusiastic impatience. Indeed the composer’s identification with the poem seems to promise an end to ‘swiving’; he is soon to be a happily married man whose main aim must be to please Clara every day. Eric Sams has pointed out the similarity of the opening melody with passages from Mendelssohn’s overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and that the two composers had met the night before this song was composed. (For a commentary on Schumann’s debt to Mendelssohn see the introductory essay in the booklet accompanying Volume 7 of the Hyperion Schumann Edition.)

Schumann was deadly serious about fighting for Clara Wieck’s hand; her love for him was no longer in doubt when this song was written, but the outcome of the legal process was not yet certain. What was certain was a new-found determination to take the battle to a successful conclusion, and a fresh determination to compose songs. In this context Schlusslied des Narren sounds remarkably like a statement of intent. Sams makes the following point: ‘when Feste takes his bow with ‘our play is done’, the house lights go up in a bright A major’. This implies, surely, that this is no end but rather a beginning; this Schlusslied is a song for an opening rather than a closing. When Schumann sets the words ‘Das Stück is nun aus’ he is telling the world that he is finished playing the fool and that his clowning days (both as a man and as a composer of songs) are over. From now on we must expect serious things – Romeo and Juliet, or Robert and Clara, rather than Twelfth Night. But how could he find modern lyrics of equivalent power to Shakespeare’s, where the composer might play the role of the star-crossed lover?

We can imagine how he might have cast his mind back to a meeting in Munich in the late spring of 1828 when he encountered a certain famous poet for the first (and only) time in his life. Waiting on the composer’s bookshelf was a volume, already thirteen years old, but still relevant to his cause – the Buch der Lieder of Heinrich Heine. It was these thirteen years which separated the two artists in terms of age. The enmeshment of two creative lives was about to begin; a glance at the bare outlines of Heine’s separate life emphasizes the contrasts between poet and musician.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2003