Dichterliebe

Schumann composed well over half his total output of songs in a single year. During the so-called Liederjahr of 1840, he wrote at least 138 while waiting to marry his beloved Clara in the face of implacable opposition and a court case brought by her father, Schumann’s erstwhile piano teacher Friedrich Wieck. In July alone he composed the 12 songs of the Eichendorff Liederkreis (Song cycle), Op. 39, and 20 from Heinrich Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo—although when this group was published in 1844 as Dichterliebe, he had pruned it down to a sequence of 16. “It’s an old story,” sings the poet in the 11th song: the story of a boy in love with a girl who instead chooses another. Heine expresses the emotional vicissitudes of love longed for and lost via the imagery of nature—flowers, the Rhine—and through the language of dreams and fairy tales. Schumann’s acute response to Heine’s imagery results in a sequence of perfectly formed miniatures in which the piano not only supports but also offers commentaries upon the inner life of the poet-singer, not least in the poignant postludes to a number of the songs. In the final setting, the poet buries “the bad old songs” along with his love and sorrow. The outcome for Schumann himself would be happier, with his belated marriage to Clara in September, but Dichterliebe reflects the hopelessness he must have felt while his beloved was kept from him.