Liederkreis

Behind the rather prosaic shared title Liederkreis (literally ‘song-cycle’) lie two of Schumann’s finest lyric creations. Liederkreis Op. 24 and Op. 39 were both products of his miraculously productive “Year of Song”, 1840, during which he composed around 140 songs—including four cycles—while waiting to marry his beloved Clara against her father’s implacable wishes. In July alone, he composed 20 songs for the cycle Dichterliebe (though omitting four of those songs in the published set) as well as the 12 of his second Liederkreis. The poetry he chose here was by Joseph von Eichendorff, one of the leading figures of German literary Romanticism. In his response to the pervasive sense of nostalgia and transience in Eichendorff’s verses, Schumann’s settings introduced a new strain of nocturnal reverie to the Romantic song repertoire. The best-known song, “Mondnacht” (“Moonlit night”), is typical of this style, with its ecstatic melody borne aloft on a numinous accompaniment. The forest, the archetypal symbol of German Romanticism, lends a note of mystery to the claustrophobic, chromatic “Zwielicht” (“Twilight”) and the bewitched woodland journey of “Waldesgespräch” (“Forest dialogue”), and provides a mystical landscape in the opening song, “In der Fremde” (“In a foreign land”). Schumann’s love for Clara is ever-present, too, in the ardent confession of “Intermezzo” and the rapture of the closing “Frühlingsnacht” (“Spring night”). Like Schubert before him and Wolf after, Schumann was often able to transcend mediocre poetry with music of uncanny sensitivity. In the Eichendorff Liederkreis, on the other hand, superior poetry inspired him to create settings at a level of inspiration that is rarely paralleled.