Dichterliebe
Jessica Duchen shares an emotional journey with a young Schumann in her search for the best recordings of his Heine-inspired song cycle
The work
Robert Schumann met the poet Heinrich Heine when he was 17, visiting Munich in the spring of 1828. Heine, 12 years Schumann’s senior and fast building a peerless reputation, made a profound impression on the young musician and law student – he recalled that Heine ‘laughs about the trivialities of life and is scornful about the pettiness of little people’. Later, Schumann set as many as 40 of Heine’s poems to music.
Many of these date from 1840, a year that Schumann devoted to creating such an outpouring of songs that it is often termed his ‘Liederjahr’ (see left). This was, in personal terms, a difficult time. He and the 20-year-old Clara Wieck, fighting Clara’s father for the right to marry, were perpetually caught up in libel, legal action, scandal and general desperation. The young couple sought refuge in their confidence in one another and in their respective music-making.
‘Dreaming and making music is almost killing me at the moment,’ Schumann wrote to Clara in February. ‘What bliss it is to write for the voice. I have gone without it for a long time.’ In May, he turned his attention to a selection of poems from Heine’s Lyric Intermezzo, which the poet had reworked in his 1827 Book of Songs
– and started, appropriately, with ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’ (‘In the wonderfully beautiful month of May’).
The result, ultimately called Dichterliebe (‘Poet’s Love’), is one of Schumann’s finest song cycles. He finished it in a week. The 16 songs, trimmed from an initial 20, are brief, concentrated, sometimes almost aphoristic, f lying by in a roller-coaster narrative.
The story is simple, its emotions anything but. A young man falls in love.
It’s clear by the fourth song that she doesn’t love him. He’s obsessed. She’s in love with someone else. She rejects him; he recognises the darkness in her heart. She marries another man – not the one she loves. Our protagonist plunges into depression, nightmares and escapism. He recovers, metaphorically sinking his vast, useless love deep into the sea.
The cycle sets endless challenges for performers. And choosing a ‘definitive’ version is almost impossible, because everyone will have different preferences to determine the parameters.
One good starting point is the fact that Dichterliebe has accumulated many ‘false traditions’: for instance, rushing through the third song, ‘Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne’ at such speed that the singer can hardly draw breath. But there is no good reason for that: Schumann instructs simply ‘Munter’ (‘blithely’).
The evocation of Cologne cathedral (‘Am Rhein…’) can emerge as slow and pompous as a funeral procession – but again this is needless, as Schumann asks for ‘Ziemlich langsam’ (somewhat slow).
Dichterliebe’s 16 songs are brief, concentrated, flying by in a roller-coaster narrative
Then there’s the small matter that Dichterliebe is written ‘for high voice’ and dedicated to a soprano: namely Wilhelmine Schröder-devrient, the original Senta in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Only a few women sing the cycle today – given Schumann’s dedication, I regret not having found among them a recording that could reach my top four, due to vocal mannerisms or other interpretative quirks. A tenor should be the happy medium, but the majority of recordings are by baritones; the quantity of fine interpretations with top-quality singing and playing is therefore skewed towards them.
The quality of partnership between singer and pianist is absolutely paramount – often I’ve longed to cut up the duos and paste in an alternative individual. For instance, the splendid tenor Christoph Prégardien is scuppered by his fortepianist’s instrument, which sounds as if it’s languished in a school gym for a hundred years. Conversely András Schiff’s heavenly piano playing is not wholly matched by his tenor Peter Schreier, who was past his best by the time they recorded this.
Do you like your Lieder straight-up and direct, or almost operatic in its character? As for Heine’s double-edged perceptiveness, sharpened with irony, how much of that does Schumann really take on board and how much of it needs to be reflected?
Is this poet a hero, a man on the edge of madness, or (as some make him sound) a pathetic fool? If the singer makes you realise why the girl chucked him, it’s a non-starter. Some performers – mostly contemporary ones – over-egg the pudding with sentimentality, maybe the result of unnecessary over-projection. There’s a special sensibility in Schumann, subtle and direct and complex at the same time; it’s surprisingly elusive and never saccharine. When you find it, treasure it.