This is one of Schumann’s strangest, one might even say baffling, lieder. The setting is an extended one, concluding with Schumann’s longest postlude (28 bars); but it does not seem nearly vivid enough – it is too diffuse perhaps – for Heine’s text where the poet conjures his own worst fears of his lover’s duplicity, and sees them personified as mocking spectres. This is a rare case when a later composer – Richard Strauss to be exact – understands the poem better. Certainly his Waldesfahrt (Op 69 No 4) is a more effective song than this. Perhaps one needs to have read grotesque literature of a later epoch, above all Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, to get the full measure of the personification of evil thoughts suggested by a text which seems more modern than much else in the Buch der Lieder, possibly because it borders on a Freudian interpretation of dreams.
As in a number of other Schumann creations, the song seems to have been born out of a dreamy moment of improvisation, the fingers lazily tracing poetic patterns at the keyboard at a magical twilight hour as Heine’s words obediently rearranged themselves into musical letters. The image of a carriage rolling slowly through the woods is a viable one for music, an antidote to many a famous and over-energetic horse-ride in the lieder repertoire, although I would wager that no nineteenth-century traveller ever experienced a ride as smooth as this. Even if German carriages of the time enjoyed the advantage of nineteenth-century Vorsprung durch Technik, they could never have been quite well sprung enough to glide on the cushion of air suggested by this music. The fact is, of course, that the mind has the power to make a magic carpet of any bumpy conveyance, and the poet is lost in thoughts so loving that he does not even notice the stones and potholes in the road. The tranquilly resonating bass notes, and the gentle whirr of descending sequences in the eight-bar introduction, suggest someone gently dreaming on a smooth aeroplane flight. Just to remind us that the music is descriptive of a carriage wheel, we hear a circular group of semiquavers on the last beat of each bar. One is reminded of the music for the turning mill-wheel – also a quick ascent and descent of the stave – in Halt! from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin.
There is not much of an independent tune when the voice comes in, but then one must have a certain amount of energy to invent (and sing) a real melody, and the singer of this song seems too lost in his thoughts to be bothered to do so. As a result the melodic line which descends in easy steps down the stave is a perfect reflection of the comfortable passenger who ‘goes with the flow’. The bass is anchored on B flat (the song’s original key, as performed here) for a full thirteen bars; then the ‘blumige Täler’ are glimpsed through the window with a brief change of harmony before the return to B flat and a modulation to the dominant of that key (F major). Internal vistas now replace external ones. The harmonic direction leads us inward to the intimacy of D flat and G flat major. The staccato setting of the words (‘Ich sitze und sinne [und sinne] und träume’ – the repetitions in brackets are Schumann’s own) is doubled by similarly staccato piano chords. This reminds us of the musings of Die Stille (Eichendorff Liederkreis Op 39 No 4) where the narrator also hugs to herself thoughts of her beloved. ‘It is our secret’ the music seems to be saying in both songs, and therein the sense of suspense as if something were being whispered in a confidential manner. Suspense certainly, but hardly menace. The phrase ‘Und denk’ an die Liebste mein’ suddenly reverts to a vocal legato which is full of lyrical affection.
There is now another eight-bar interlude (beginning in the new key of D flat major). This combines the already familiar whirring of carriage wheels in the right hand with a legato left-hand counter-melody which alternates between the tenor and bass registers- like the conversation of two characters, or the weighing-up of events first in one way, then another. The composer has abrogated much sense of responsibility for the interpretation of the song – the unhelpful marking is ‘Nach dem Sinn des Gedichts (‘In the spirit of the poem’, as if he assumes that we will of course understand one of Heine’s trickier lyrics) – but it is at this point that the pianist can begin to introduce a trace of menace into those left-hand interjections. They might even be made to sound like the stirrings of the subconscious.
The question is whether Schumann sees any real menace in this poem. We know how he played all sorts of supernatural games with his beloved Clara when he was younger suitor and she still a girl, and the apparitions here seem as harmless as their Halloween pranks. That they should be an embodiment of his own (or more importantly Heine’s) mistrust or loathing – a revelation about what he really feels about his potentially faithless beloved – seems hardly to have occurred to him. It is true that the tessitura of ‘Da huschen drei Schattengestalten’ (‘Es grüssen drei Schattengestalten’ in the Buch der Lieder) is suddenly in a higher tessitura and marked mezzo forte. This, in combination with the two-tiered left-hand counter-melody can make something quite mysterious and even alarming about this music. (The repetition of ‘Zum Wagen’ is another composer’s repetition which seems merely note-spinning in order to have a sufficient number of falling sequences in the accompaniment.) It is here that we notice that Heine’s tight metrical structure has been sacrificed to a much looser musical ramble. And now the setting of the poem’s third strophe seems far too tame. One would be more disturbed by a group of urchins making faces through the stagecoach windows than by this vision of supernatural malevolence. Perhaps Schumann really intended this last verse to be delivered in a fervid and terrified histrionic manner; we shall never know. Such an interpretation might be covered by the freedom of the composer’s marking, but it is unlikely that in this tessitura he would have imagined a singer being anything more than rather casual about these spectres.
The postlude goes some way to redeem the song, although it could hardly be claimed that it is a revelation of the poet’s (or the composer’s) ‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ as Yeats called it. There is some wonderful musical invention here: a cascade of descending semiquavers in the major key (cheeky rather than sinister), beautiful strands of heartfelt vocal melody as if written for strings, horn calls sustained over staccato semiquavers, a new counter-melody in dotted rhythm for the rolling carriage motif. All this persuades us that Schumann the lover is full of longing and, yes, also prey to occasional fears and fits of foreboding. But the three creatures who have waylaid him are elfin leprechauns, not his own murderous impulses, and the sight of the apparitions has made him miss his beloved rather than make him realise that he is well rid of her.
Compare the song by Strauss – not normally a composer, for all his greatness, given to great psychological depth in the Lied. The constant switching of tempi (between ‘Langsam’ and ‘Sehr schnell’) is not the only factor which makes of his setting something dangerous and darkly sinister, riddled by doubt and paranoia. He also repeats words, but to a purpose, not simply to spin out an atmosphere. The first time we hear the phrase ‘Denk an die Liebste mein’ it is set lyrically and affectionately. But when these words are made to return right at the end of the song there is a tremendous anguished outburst on ‘Liebste’ ending with a more reconciled ‘mein’. It is a superb way of showing that we all have ambivalent feelings about loved ones; or nearly all of us. It was probably impossible for Schumann to demonise Clara (at least in 1840); and we realise that Heine had a contemptuous way of thinking of women which was simply not in this composer’s emotional vocabulary.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2001