No one should expect consistency from the volatile, impulsive Robert Schumann. His outpouring of song in 1840, the year of his marriage, may seem like a Pauline epiphany, yet he’d already composed a dozen Lieder while a student in the late 1820s, several inspired by his unrequited love for Agnes Carus, a doctor’s wife and gifted amateur singer who, crucially, shared his passion for Schubert’s songs. Schumann was left dissatisfied by Agnes’s singing of his early Lieder, and indeed with singers in general: a prime reason, surely, why he abandoned song composition for more than a decade, during which he drew rich and fanciful new sounds from his own instrument, the piano.

The winter of 1839-40 is a period of anxious uncertainty for Schumann. The previous summer he finally resolved to seek the court’s permission to marry Clara Wieck against her father Friedrich’s implacable opposition (the pair became secretly engaged in 1837). But success is far from assured. Schumann’s income remains erratic. Indeed, during the 1830s he earns more from journalism, as founder and editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, than from his compositions, many of which prove too daunting for the amateur market. Even Clara complains that his piano music is too abstruse and demanding – ‘sheer revellings in strangeness’, as one critic puts it. Friedrich Wieck brands it ‘impossible to perform’.

During a protracted legal battle, Clara’s father tries every trick in the book. At a court hearing in December 1839 he accuses Schumann of, inter alia, being lethargic, irresponsible, childish, unmanly, a pauper (Wieck has grand visions of his daughter’s future), a libertine and a drunk. All but one of the charges are quickly dismissed, though it takes some months for Schumann to assemble witnesses to defend him against accusations of drunkenness. (He himself recorded many an earlier drinking bout. The word Katzenjammer – ‘hangover’ – often crops up in diary entries from his early twenties.) In January 1840 Schumann writes to Clara that ‘we can do absolutely nothing except wait calmly’. A week or so later, after months of composing relatively little, he plunges into writing songs. Over the next six months, while awaiting the court’s final verdict, Schumann writes more than a hundred Lieder, many to become some of the world’s best loved. Another two dozen will follow after he and Clara finally marry on September 12, 1840, the eve of her 21st birthday.

What propels Schumann’s creative effusion in a genre he has long considered ‘inferior to instrumental music’? One factor may be the example of his friend Mendelssohn, who has successfully published songs and part-songs in Leipzig. Another may be the publication of swathes of Schubert songs in 1838-39. But the chief catalyst for Schumann’s great Liederjahr is Clara. On a practical level, as a husband-to-be, he is only too aware that he needs more reliable sources of income. Songs are far more readily saleable than his piano works in the lucrative domestic market. After selling his first batch of Lieder to a publisher in May 1840, Schumann informs his fiancée that he has been ‘earning money nicely, too, which makes me very happy’.

Baritone Christian Gerhaher with Gerold Huber giving a Schumann song recital which included the Op 35 Kerner songs plus another set from 1840 – Salzburg Festival, July 2024 (photo: Marco Borrelli)

Beyond this, in his Lieder, this most confiding and confessional of composers can express overtly what is so often implicit in his piano music: his passion and longing for Clara, his pain and frustration at their enforced separation, his vision of sexual and spiritual fulfilment and, not least, his recurrent fear of losing her.

In February 1840, during his first flush of song composition, Schumann enthuses to Clara: ‘I can’t tell you how easy it has become for me … It is music of an entirely different kind which doesn’t have to pass through the fingers – far more melodious and direct.’ Schumann’s keyboard music, from Papillons to Carnaval, proclaimed him the master of the vignette, of fleeting, concentrated moments of feeling. Typically, these vignettes and mood pictures were gathered into cycles. The same instinct to create cycles from vignettes and epigrams underlies most of the songs of 1840.

The poet that Schumann is most often drawn to in the early months of the year is Heinrich Heine, writer of the poems behind the Op 24 Liederkreis and Dichterliebe cycles and the Lieder Die Lotosblume and Du bist wie eine Blume (the most set German poem of all time). As a student, Schumann met the famous poet in Munich. Biting his habitually acerbic tongue, Heine evidently charmed Schumann and his companion. They laughed together at ‘trivialities of life’, and shared their passion for Napoleon – a dangerous sentiment in Germany in 1828. More than a decade later, the mingled Romantic afflatus and disenchantment in Heine’s poetry collection Buch der Lieder – which the composer dubbed ‘Heinismus’ – strikes a deep chord with Schumann, still uncertain of the outcome of the court case.

Heine and Schumann: an ideal song partnership?

For many, Schumann and Heine are a perfect musical-poetic match, comparable to Wolf and Eduard Mörike or Mahler and Friedrich Rückert. Baritone Christian Gerhaher, whose recordings with Gerold Huber have won accolades in Gramophone and elsewhere, is not so sure. ‘If there is an ideal match, for me it’s not Schumann and Heine, but Schumann and Joseph von Eichendorff! The Eichendorff Liederkreis, Op 39, is perhaps his most perfect song-cycle. Heine, of course, was a master of irony. But irony is a tool of literature, not of music. It’s nonsense to say that Schumann, a highly literary man, didn’t understand Heine’s irony in Dichterliebe and the Op 24 Liederkreis. Of course he did. But in his choice of verses for Dichterliebe he tends to avoid Heine’s harshest, most sarcastic poems. In Op 24 it works slightly differently. Here Schumann mixes ironic poems, like the violent “Warte, warte, wilder Schiffmann”, with non-ironic ones, like the tender, lyrical “Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen”. “Berg’ und Burgen”, the song that follows “Warte, warte, wilder Schiffmann”, has the same music for all three verses. The poem’s mood grows bitter – the poet has been betrayed by his lover; but there is no deceit in the music, which continues its melancholy flow right to the end.’

For British baritone Christopher Maltman, ‘Berg’ und Burgen’, like many other Heine songs, lives from the tension between music and words: between the serenely floating melody, underpinned by the lapping waters, and a text that compares the woman’s heart to the river’s treacherous depths. ‘There’s a stark contrast here between the unceasing piano figuration and the poem: what Heine is saying is that the girl is a heartless bitch, but Schumann deliberately glosses over this. There’s a similar example in the fourth song of Dichterliebe, at the lines “Doch wenn du sprichst, ‘Ich liebe dich’ / So muss ich weinen bitterlich” – “but when you say, ‘I love you’ / I cannot help but weep bitterly”. Heine sticks the knife in the heart; but Schumann’s music is all loving devotion. As is so often the case, he allows the words to pull strongly against the music, in a way that the casual listener might not pick up.’

Pianist Julius Drake feels that it’s often up to the performers whether or not to point up Heine’s ironic twists. ‘Like so many of Schubert’s strophic songs, “Berg’ und Burgen” is inspired by an image in the opening verse – here the sunlit Rhine. He takes the spirit of one verse and grafts it on to the others. But with the right singer, and sensitive timing and colouring, you can make the bitterness of the words tell.’

If Heine had a love–hate relationship with Romanticism, Schumann was a Romantic through and through. All agree that irony has no place in the most famous of Schumann’s Heine songs, ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’, from the collection Myrthen (named after a traditional German symbol of marriage, the myrtle), which he presented to Clara on the eve of their wedding. The self-revealing Schumann seems to have chosen the poems of Myrthen – a world tour in song – in order to give universal significance to his fluctuating emotions during their long engagement. Heine’s ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’ is typically ambivalent: on one level a glorification of the Romantic muse, on another an implicit attack on hypocritical male notions of female modesty and virginity worship (as ever, you trust Heine’s polished surfaces at your peril). Schumann ignores the poem’s ambivalence to create an overt avowal of love to Clara – a Schumannised bel canto aria, touched with the composer’s characteristic inwardness and harmonic subtlety.

Amid the love songs and piquant character sketches in Myrthen (including delightful cameos of Schumann as solitary toper) are moments of darkness and doubt, most powerfully expressed in the setting of Byron’s ‘My soul is dark’ (‘Mein Herz ist schwer’) from the poetry collection Hebrew Melodies. Saul’s longing to be cured of his melancholy by David’s harp inspires music of painful chromatic tension, with shades of Bach at his most morbidly inward. Such a song might seem out of place in this bridal bouquet, but by 1840 Clara has no illusions about the depressive side in Robert’s make-up.

‘Oh, Clara, what bliss it is to write for the voice, a bliss I have lacked for too long’ – Schumann, February 1840 (photo: Adobe Images)

Although most of the songs from Schumann’s Liederjahr rapidly appear in print from May 1840 onwards. Dichterliebe – perhaps his supreme masterpiece – remains in his desk drawer for four years. As originally composed, the cycle contains 20 songs. When it is finally published in 1844, 20 have become 16. Schumann, it would seem, now senses that the rejected songs – Dein Angesicht, Lehn’ deine Wang, Es leuchtet meine Liebe and Mein Wagen rollet langsam – fit uncomfortably into this tightly knit cycle of memory, dream and desire where one song often dissolves into the next. Drake has occasionally performed Dichterliebe with the four discarded elements restored to their original positions. ‘They’re all great songs, but they need a very strong singer to bring them off within the cycle. In Dein Angesicht, set to a glorious melody, the poet dreams of his beloved’s death. In Mein Wagen rollet langsam he’s mocked by three grotesque, shadowy figures. I’m in no doubt that Dichterliebe is more successful without them.’ Schumann evidently agreed. Perhaps, as the great Schumann scholar Eric Sams has suggested, the ever-superstitious composer recoiled at including songs to such ominous words, especially in the year of his wedding.

While most songs of his Liederjahr are lyric miniatures, Schumann also produces a handful of ballads, most famously the Heine settings Belsatzar and Die beiden Grenadiere. Both ballads express the poet’s contempt for imperialism and (in Die beiden Grenadiere) sympathy for its victims. In 1816, the 18-year-old Heine had looked on as the bedraggled survivors of Napoleon’s army staggered through Düsseldorf.

For Gerhaher, Die beiden Grenadiere has an element of black comedy as well as heroic pathos. ‘I don’t think it works nearly as well performed apart from the other songs also published as part of Op 49, Die feindlichen Brüder and Die Nonne. The three songs could be said to form a mini-cycle. The first one, Die beiden Grenadiere, is a brief, crazy narration mocking the French grenadiers’ ridiculous patriotism – the dying soldier imagining himself rising from his grave when Napoleon arrives back from Elba to begin another campaign. At this point Schumann quotes the triumphant Marseillaise! That song tells of two mad soldiers returning from Russia. In Die feindlichen Brüder, two mad brothers fight each other over Countess Laura and die by each other’s sword, like Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polynices. It’s a joke, like a comic strip! And in the third song of Op 49, Die Nonne, we have a picture of a nun turning pale with envy as she watches a bride excited by dancing and lust. Schumann’s setting has a cinematic vividness, ending on an unresolved dominant seventh chord as the nun questions her fate. So after two pairs of crazy men, we get a pair of crazily contrasted women – one thinking of Christ, the other thinking of sex.’

In Belsatzar, one of the earliest songs of Schumann’s Liederjahr, Heine puts his own gloss on the familiar Old Testament story of Belshazzar’s drunken revelry, the writing on the wall and the overthrow of his corrupt regime. The poet’s implied parallels with the reactionary government of Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, would not have been lost on his readers. Schumann may even have been risking trouble with the authorities by setting Belsatzar.

Schumann’s sole opera, Genoveva (premiered 1850), is at best a mixed success, and has never held the stage, yet within the five-minute span of Belsatzar we have a gripping opera-in-miniature. The atmospheric, often densely textured piano writing, obsessively based on the opening motif, recalls the composer’s solo piano music of the 1830s. ‘Schumann shows himself to be a true dramatist in his timing of the story’s successive events,’ notes Drake. ‘But as the song ends with a whimper, in bare recitative, it’s hard to place in a recital. I would never programme it at the end of a group.’

Belsatzar has long been a particular favourite of Maltman’s: ‘The poem is quintessential Heine. He spends the poem creating this glittering corrupt Babylonian world, then destroys it in a single sentence. The challenge here is finding the right tempo. Many performances reach the final tempo too soon. The song should start as a very gradual accelerando, and only get up to speed when Heine describes the knights’ revels.’

A Woman’s Life and Love

In May – truly a ‘wunderschöner Monat’ (to quote the first song from Dichterliebe) – Schumann composes the Op 39 Liederkreis to poems by Eichendorff. Writing to his fiancée from Leipzig, he calls this cycle of mysterious half-lights and rapturous soaring ‘probably my most romantic work, with much of you in it, dearest Clara’. In June, Clara returns to Leipzig to join him in his legal battle. Within a few weeks it is clear that her father cannot win his court case. All that remain to him are delaying tactics. On July 7, Schumann scrawls in his diary ‘Hurrah! Victory!’ On 11th and 12th he drafts, in just two afternoons, another song-cycle: Frauenliebe und -leben.

Schumann could well have said of Frauenliebe und -leben (‘a woman’s love and life’), as he had of the Eichendorff Liederkreis, that there was much of Clara in it. Indeed, by omitting the final poem of Adelbert von Chamisso’s cycle, ‘Traum der eignen Tage’ (‘dream of my own days’), in which the woman finds fulfilment through her daughter and grandchild, the composer focuses entirely on the relationship between man and wife. The cycle can induce an uneasy feeling today: not because of Schumann’s profoundly felt music, but owing to the poems’ (at least, to us) absurdly chauvinistic portrayal of female submissiveness. Yet they would hardly have seemed chauvinistic in an age when even a woman as gifted as Clara was brought up in conventional attitudes of obedience. Some female singers have even refused to sing this cycle. Not, though, Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling. ‘When approaching Frauenliebe I think about how Clara managed to perform enough to feed her large family, as Robert struggled with his mental health. Quite a modern woman. There is so much in the cycle that is absolutely timeless: falling in love, choosing one another. Her wedding ring meant as much to her as my ring means to me! We still have weddings and traditions. We are still having children. We still sing for them. We can still lose our loved ones.’

For Dame Sarah Connolly, perhaps the cycle’s most eloquent modern British interpreter, ‘Frauenliebe is a period piece, in and of its time. If one is offended by the role of the subservient, frail, adoring woman then one may as well apply that to Madama Butterfly, Mimì, Gilda, Nedda! And if these songs were good enough for Clara, the first female international concert pianist to travel unescorted, then who am I to gainsay her! I can imagine the conversation in a Doctor Who episode where I’m transported back to Inselstrasse in Leipzig and regretfully inform them that their sentiments are passé and offensive. I envisage confusion followed by howls of laughter.

‘I feel it is my duty to keep this cycle alive even as an older singer, perhaps expressing the first few songs as memories rather than real time. Who doesn’t remember the first flush of infatuation? Who does not recall embarrassing tales of self-abasing behaviour – staying up all night fantasising, saying all the wrong things, feeling this man is “the one”? Have we changed that much? No. Our codes of acceptable behaviour have rightly curbed male hostility towards women; but in turn, should that make us feel we ought to banish the girlish dreams that we secretly have but are too ashamed to admit to? There is one part that I do find tricky, though, near the end of the wedding song, “Helft mir, ihr Schwestern”: “Lass mich in Andacht, / Lass mich in Demut, / Lass mich verneigen dem Herren mein” (“let me bow down before my Lord in reverence and humility”). We’ve rightly banished these expressions from modern wedding vows – but this music is from 1840, and I am a singing actor!’

Typical of Frauenliebe und -leben is the way songs tend to fade into gentle reverie, with musing piano postludes that seem to penetrate the secret recesses of the woman’s heart. After the final song of bereavement we come full circle as the piano, a wordless poet, recalls the accompaniment of the opening song – shades here of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte cycle. For Drake, the strangest postlude comes at the end of the bouncy penultimate song. ‘After the nursery fun, where we can imagine the baby being tossed in the air, the tempo slows and the music becomes intensely chromatic. I find this very puzzling. Is this postlude meant to be calming, or is it a portent of the tragedy that immediately follows?’

Frauenliebe und -leben marks the end of the overtly ‘Clara phase’ of Schumann’s Liederjahr. Most of the songs he composes between that and the end of the year are more objective in tone: character sketches or mini-dramas rather than love lyrics. They include four settings of Hans Christian Andersen, copies of which he sends to the poet (‘Perhaps the settings will seem strange to you. So at first did your poems to me’). Three of these, Muttertraum (in which cawing ravens portend that the sleeping child will end his life on the gallows), Der Soldat and Der Spielmann, are candidates for the eeriest he ever writes. Der Soldat, with its shocking final twist, prefigures Mahler’s grim portraits of doomed soldiers and drummer boys. In Der Spielmann (‘the musician’), Schumann gives vent to two of his abiding fears: of losing Clara (he had nightmares that her father would force her to marry another man), and that his life would end in mental breakdown. Says Drake: ‘Here’s a story of a chronically highly strung, mentally unstable musician. Schumann must have recognised himself here, and seen in the poem an ominous warning of what he might become.’

Marriage and its aftermath

After the turbulence of the last few years, the early months of the Schumanns’ marriage are blissfully calm. ‘A quiet week went by, with composing and much embracing and kissing,’ notes the composer. There are more songs. In November and December 1840 he produces a sequence (Liederreihe) of 12 to poems by Justinus Kerner, who led something of a double life as a poet and a famously unconventional doctor who practised treatments such as herbalism, spiritualism and somnambulism. These Op 35 songs are permeated by echt-Romantic themes of wandering, loneliness and loss, plus a recurrent strain of mysticism. While it can be hard to find a linking thread in these apparently disparate songs, for Gerhaher they form a narrative cycle, with a distant echo of Winterreise. ‘We have a young man excitedly in love in the first song, Lust der Sturmnacht (“joy of a stormy night”). Then in the second, Stirb, Lieb’ und Freud’! (“die, love and joy”), he loses his girl to the church. In the following songs the young man fails to find consolation in nature or his friends, or even in sleep (No 10, Stille Tränen). Death is the inevitable outcome, in the last two songs.

‘As always in Schumann, I find that it’s important not to take each word of the poems too literally. Schumann’s music tends to make Kerner’s verses more complicated. He didn’t want to translate the text’s literal meaning into music, as Schubert typically did in his songs.’

From the Kerner songs, Maltman singles out the ritualistic, mystical Auf das Trinkglas eines verstorbenen Freundes (‘to the wine glass of a dead friend’). ‘Here’s a song that requires a total lack of dramatisation. It’s so delicate and deeply felt, and needs to be treated with kid gloves, sung without any obvious emotion. You have to allow the song to work for you. It’s the same with the final two Kerner songs, sung to the same music and fading into nothingness, as the poet takes the sickness of the world upon himself – this ending is a perfect fit for Schumann, who was so dangerously sensitive.’

At the end of this miraculous Liederjahr the focus shifts back towards Clara. Even before their marriage, Schumann urged her to share his song euphoria. Clara’s initial response was astonishingly self-deprecating: ‘I cannot compose. It makes me quite unhappy at times, but it really is not possible, I have no talent for it. Do not think this is laziness. And as for a song, that I can’t do at all. To write a song, to understand a text completely, requires genius.’

Undeterred, Schumann continues to encourage her. At the turn of 1841, after composing what he dubs nine ‘light’ and ‘simple’ songs to poems from Rückert’s Liebesfrühling (‘love’s spring’), he writes in their joint marriage diary: ‘Now Clara should also compose some songs from the Liebesfrühling. Oh, do it, Klärchen!’ After a delay, due partly to pregnancy, partly to her reluctance to pit herself against her husband, Clara finally produces four Rückert songs in June. He includes three of them in a joint collection, Zwölf Gedichte aus Liebesfrühling, which he presents to Clara in September, on her 22nd birthday. To the couple’s delight, some critics can’t tell which songs are his and which are hers! For Tilling, ‘This is the real Robert and Clara cycle. Yes, the songs – both his and hers – are simpler than those in the other cycles; but they’re so beautiful and heartfelt, perfectly matching Rückert’s love poems to his wife.’

By now, though, Schumann has embraced wider horizons. As 1840 has been the year of song, so 1841 will be his orchestral year, in which he writes two symphonies, the Overture, Scherzo and Finale (in effect, a three-movement symphony) and the first movement of what, in 1845, will become his Piano Concerto. Many people today regard the song-cycles of 1840 as his greatest, most original achievement. Not, it seems, Clara. In March 1841, Schumann scores the greatest public success of his career to date when Mendelssohn conducts the premiere of his Spring Symphony in Leipzig. Clara notes in her diary, ‘The old adage that marriage kills the creative spirit is in this instance happily untrue!’ There will be virtually no more songs until 1847. Within months of his marriage he has triumphantly fulfilled Clara’s hopes for him. ‘My highest wish is that he should compose for orchestra – that is his field!’

The year of song on record

‘Frage’

Christian Gerhaher bar Gerold Huber pf (Sony Classical)

The first of Gerhaher’s Schumann series, this Gramophone Award winner features the Gedichte von Justinus Kerner.

Read the Gramophone review

Myrthen, Op 25

Camilla Tilling sop Christian Gerhaher bar Gerold Huber pf (Sony Classical)

For his second Schumann album, Gerhaher is joined by Camilla Tilling in the Myrthen cycle.

Read the Gramophone review

‘The Songs of Robert Schumann’, Vol 5

Christopher Maltman bar Graham Johnson pf (Hyperion)

Christopher Maltman’s contribution to Hyperion’s survey of Schumann’s songs includes Dichterliebe.

Read the Gramophone review

‘Schumann – Songs of Love and Loss’

Sarah Connolly mez Eugene Asti pf (Chandos)

Sarah Connolly is one of the most eloquent interpreters of the cycle Frauenliebe und -leben.

Read the Gramophone review

‘Dichterliebe and Other Heine Settings’

Gerald Finley bar Julius Drake pf (Hyperion)

Julius Drake is the accompanist for another outstanding Dichterliebe – a Gramophone Award-winner in 2009.

Read the Gramophone review