The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Schumann · a song cycle for voice and piano, Op. 48, on sixteen poems in German by Heinrich Heine from the Lyrisches Intermezzo · sixteen songs in their published order, scored as one work · eight in major keys, seven in minor and the first suspended between them · about twenty-eight minutes in performance
Mode
Song cycle; sixteen lyric songs for one voice and piano, with no story told and no other voice, the piano a second protagonist
Mythos
The poet in love, remembering; the Virgin in Cologne with the beloved’s face, the wedding watched from outside, the land of old fairy tales, the coffin sunk in the sea
Phase
One love from May to its burial; a first song that does not close and a last song that the piano ends alone
Presentation
Concert music; sixteen songs for voice and piano setting Heine’s German, in published keys that drift flatward by fifths to E flat minor and are lifted back to B and E
Register
From the suspended arpeggios of the opening and three miniatures of happiness to hammered chords, a wedding dance, dry chords against a voice alone and a long postlude
Scale
One voice and one piano; one love remembered; about twenty-eight minutes
Governing Proposition
A poet remembers a love from its first May to its burial, in sixteen short songs that tell no story: happiness in three miniatures, a wedding he watches from outside, a dream in which he weeps, and a coffin carried by twelve giants into the sea. The wager of the work is that a feeling which has become its own song is no longer only felt but performed, remembered and finally buried by the man who made it, and that a piano which contradicts the voice and goes on after it has stopped can say what the singer cannot.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The cycle begins with the piano alone, in arpeggios that hang between F sharp minor and A major. The voice enters on the words of the title, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai”, in the wonderful month of May, and the song seems for a moment to be turning toward A. It does not arrive. After about a minute and a half it ends without a cadence in any key, on the dominant seventh of F sharp minor: a C sharp chord that asks for its resolution and is not given it. The longing the song states is not over, and so the song cannot close. The cycle begins as a fragment, without a beginning.
Which key the first song is in has been argued for as long as the cycle has been studied; Charles Rosen gave it pages of The Romantic Generation, and the question is not settled. The second song answers it sideways. “Aus meinen Tränen sprießen”, from my tears spring flowers, is in A major, the key the first song hinted at and never reached, and it lasts under a minute. The third, “Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne”, in D major, is the shortest in the cycle, about thirty-five seconds. The fourth, “Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’”, when I look into your eyes, is in G major; the fifth, “Ich will meine Seele tauchen”, I will dip my soul, in B minor.
These are three miniatures of early happiness, and they say one thing three ways. They are graceful, and they do not rise; they are short because happiness in memory is brief, and the cycle gives it a few minutes of the twenty-eight. They are also the place where the cycle is loosest, closer to a group of songs than to a form. But the keys are already moving. From A to D to G the tonic falls by fifths, the first of seven such falls in fifteen joins, and the drift runs flatward, from the sharp side toward a place far below, where the thirteenth song will lie.
Movement II
No. 6, in E minor, is the first song to rise to grandeur. In the holy Rhine stands the great cathedral of Cologne, and in the cathedral a painted image of the Virgin, whose features are the beloved’s. The piano writes in a dotted, archaic style that gives the image its stone. A river, a building and a painting are made into a vessel for one face, and the sacred enters the cycle only to be filled with the beloved. At about two and a quarter minutes it is the longest song so far.
No. 7, in C major, is “Ich grolle nicht”, I do not reproach. The man who says it says it over repeated chords hammered out in the piano, and the voice makes a long climb of denial while the chords say what the words will not. The voice says it does not reproach; the piano says it does. This is the first place where the instrument plainly knows more than the singer, and the cycle announces its method in a major key, at full voice. The height here is bitter, and it is reached by saying the opposite of what is felt.
With no. 7 the drift reaches C, the middle of the key plan, with no sharps and no flats. The two songs are hinges: the Rhine gives the beloved a sacred image, and the denial refuses to blame her. No. 7 is also the first face of the wedding that the next songs make plain, the face of denial; its other face, the spectacle, is two songs away. Schubert had made the song cycle a drama of one consciousness without a plot. A piano that contradicts the voice it accompanies goes beyond Schubert’s in kind, and it is the work’s own.
Movement III
No. 8, “Und wüßten’s die Blumen, die kleinen”, and if the little flowers knew, is in A minor. The flowers, the nightingales, the Rhine and the summer garden are the natural order of the cycle, and they are always signs, never a place. No. 9, “Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen”, there is fluting and fiddling, is in D minor, and it is the wedding. The beloved is the bride. The piano carries the dance in a whirling figure from beginning to end, and the voice does not take part in it: it speaks over the dance and can only describe what it sees.
This is the second face of the wedding, spectacle after denial, and the lover is outside it. The piano is the world going on without him, and the voice is reduced to report. It is as near as the cycle comes to the social, and it comes at the edge, through a window. No. 10, “Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen”, when I hear the little song, is in G minor and lasts about two minutes. It is two flats below the middle, and the drift has gone on falling by fifths: A minor, D minor, G minor.
Then a leap breaks the drift. No. 11, in E flat major, is the one comic song: a love triangle told as “eine alte Geschichte”, an old story. It lasts about a minute. It is a heartbreak told as a joke, and the comedy is the cycle’s method turned inside out: the voice is light, and what the lightness hides is the poet’s own case, told about someone else. The law that governs the cycle holds here as it holds in the burial at the end: the voice states a feeling, and the music shows what the feeling hides.
Movement IV
No. 12, “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen”, on a shining summer morning, is in B flat major: the poet in a summer garden among flowers, about two and a half minutes, closing with a long piano postlude after the voice is done. Nothing marks the postlude as a seed. The cycle will return to it at the very end, and only then will the listener know that the walk in the garden was something to be remembered.
No. 13, “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet”, I wept in my dream, is in E flat minor, six flats, the lowest point of the key plan and the heart of the work. The voice sings alone. Between its phrases the piano gives two dry chords and falls silent, and the pattern holds, voice and then chords, until the last stanza, where the two are joined at last. The voice weeps alone and the piano answers with silence. Those chords and the silences around them are the loudest silence in the Lied, the sublime of dread made out of almost nothing. It is where the dream turns into knowledge.
Then a lift as sudden as any in the cycle. No. 14, “Allnächtlich im Traume”, nightly in dreams, is in B major, five sharps after six flats, and repeats the dream of no. 13 in a lighter key. No. 15, “Aus alten Märchen winkt es”, from old fairy tales it beckons, is in E major and runs about two and a half minutes: the land of old fairy tales, told at length and with delight, and evoked as Heine evokes his images, in order to puncture them. The last four songs take about two fifths of the cycle’s time.
Movement V
No. 16, “Die alten, bösen Lieder”, the old, wicked songs, is in C sharp minor and is the longest song, about four and a half minutes, about a sixth of the whole. The poet buries his old songs and his love together in a coffin, larger than any grave, carried by “zwölf Riesen”, twelve giants, into the sea. It is something like a rite, and Heine builds it as hyperbole, to be laughed at as well as wept at. The coffin is a joke as large as the grief, and the song sets both.
Then the singer stops, and the piano goes on alone. The long postlude turns to D flat major and returns to the postlude of no. 12, the summer garden. The end of the cycle is a memory of a memory, and it is given to the instrument because the words are now buried. The C sharp that the first song left hanging becomes the D flat of the last bars: the same pitch written another way, a frame heard more on paper than in the hall, and still a frame. Whether this postlude is consolation or forgetting is one of the questions the cycle has never closed.
Schumann set the poems in 1840, his first year of song, after making his name with the piano, from Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo in the Buch der Lieder of 1827. He removed four songs before publication, and the sixteen appeared in 1844 in the order in which they are sung. They have been in print, in the recital and in the conservatory ever since, and on record for about a century, by every kind of voice. Whether Schumann’s music softens Heine’s irony, or composes a second irony of its own, has been argued as long as the songs have been studied. What the cycle brought into the open holds either way: that a love remembered is a set of fragments, that the man who sings it knows he is singing, and that the song ends only when he stops and the piano goes on.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance at the frame and the hinges. Remove no. 1 and the cycle loses the open question it exists to answer; remove no. 16 and the postlude has nothing to bury. No. 13 cannot go: it is where the dream turns into knowledge. Nos. 7 and 9 are the two faces of the wedding, denial and spectacle. But the test finds give, and the strongest evidence is Schumann’s own hand: he removed four songs before publication and the cycle closed over the gap. A cycle that can lose a fifth of itself to its maker has parts chosen rather than compelled. Nos. 3, 4 and 5 say one happiness three ways; no. 14 repeats the dream of no. 13 in a lighter key.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a feeling that has become its own song is no longer only felt; it is performed, remembered and finally buried by the person who made it. The poet knows he is a poet in love, and the cycle shows what that knowledge costs. The evidence is in the music as well as in Heine’s words. In no. 7 the voice says it does not reproach and the piano’s hammered chords say it does. In no. 9 the dance goes on and the voice can only describe it. In no. 13 the voice weeps alone and the piano answers with silence. In no. 16 the singer stops and the piano speaks last. Held a tenth above the gate: the proposition is assembled from short lyric moments, several of them mood, and whether the music blunts Heine’s irony is argued.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height is real and frequent for a work of twenty-eight minutes, and in a chosen register. The sublime of dread: no. 13, where the voice is left alone and two dry chords are the loudest silence in the Lied. Grandeur: no. 6, the cathedral rising in the Rhine, in an archaic dotted style that gives the image its stone. Bitter height: no. 7, the long climb of the denial. Beauty: the suspended opening of no. 1, and the postlude of no. 16, which is the work’s summit and arrives after the voice has finished. Held below Winterreise (9.3) on frequency and on scale of forces: nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 11 and 14 are graceful or witty miniatures that do not rise, more than a third of the songs.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The particulars are vivid and some reach toward the figural: the Virgin in Cologne with the beloved’s face, the wedding the lover watches from outside, the land of old fairy tales in no. 15, the coffin sunk in the sea. The last song builds something like a rite, the poet burying his songs and his love together in a grave larger than any grave. What holds the axis is that the archetypes are evoked, and Heine evokes them in order to puncture them: the coffin carried by twelve giants is a joke as large as the grief. A rite performed in irony is myth evoked. The cycle builds a sequence of images of one love remembered, not a myth carried through its structure, as Winterreise carries its stranger on an inverted quest.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is the Lied of Schubert, his two Müller cycles above all, and Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte. The departures: a cycle that begins without beginning, on an unresolved seventh, and so begins as a fragment; a piano that knows more than the voice and contradicts it, in nos. 7, 9 and 13; a postlude that recalls an earlier song and carries the cycle’s conclusion without words; a cycle with no story told, made of Heine’s ironic lyric where Schubert set Müller’s plainer verse. The stake was moderate. Schumann had made his name with the piano, and what he carried into the Lied, the fragment and the postlude, was in large part the method of his piano cycles. Schubert had already made the song cycle a drama of one consciousness without a plot. The swerve is real and partly along roads already built.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that a remembered love is a set of fragments, not a story, and that it ends only when the singer stops and something else goes on. The first song cannot close, because the longing it states is not over; the next begins in the key the first hinted at and never reached. The short songs of early happiness are short because happiness in memory is brief. The last song’s postlude returns to the postlude of no. 12, so the end is a memory of a memory, given to the instrument because the words are now buried. Recast as a through-composed scena, the work would lose the gaps; as spoken poems, the piano’s contradiction of the voice, which is half its knowledge. Held below the top where nos. 3 to 5 are closer to a group than a form.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and a long record of it. In performance: Fischer-Dieskau across several decades, Wunderlich, Souzay, Pears with Britten, Goerne, Bostridge and Gerhaher, and every voice type, transposed. In study: Rufus Hallmark’s The Genesis of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Eric Sams’s The Songs of Robert Schumann, Charles Rosen’s The Romantic Generation (1995), with its pages on the opening song, and Beate Perrey’s study of the cycle and early Romantic poetics. The questions stay open: which key the first song is in; whether Schumann’s music softens Heine’s irony or composes a second irony of its own; whether the final postlude is consolation or forgetting. Held below Winterreise (9.5): the literature is smaller, and much of it concentrates on the first song.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the cycle made the piano a second protagonist in song, able to contradict the singer and to finish what the singer cannot, and it made the Romantic fragment, the open beginning and the wordless close, a form for the Lied. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the Lied, real and lasting. Brahms, Wolf and Mahler wrote in a song world where the piano carries meaning of its own and the postlude can speak last. The reach is shared: with Schumann’s other cycles of 1840, the Eichendorff Liederkreis and Frauenliebe und -leben, and with Winterreise, which came first and stands larger. The field, the German Lied, is narrower than the symphony’s or the opera’s, and the figure clears the gate by a tenth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the score and Heine’s poems survive whole; the four songs removed before publication are not part of the work and are no loss to it. Presence: continuous since publication in 1844, in print, in the recital, in the conservatory and on record for about a century; with Winterreise it is one of the two most performed song cycles. Fabric: nothing is lost; the piano has changed since 1840 and the work has needed no retouching; the German is a barrier the tradition has carried most of its listeners across. The span is about a hundred and eighty years. Its presence is very wide within its field, and the field is the recital hall; the figure is held a tenth below the widest presence.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. The piano writing is an image and a structure in each song: the suspended arpeggios of no. 1, the archaic dotted bass of no. 6, the repeated chords of no. 7, the whirling dance of no. 9, the dry chords and silences of no. 13. The declamation sets Heine’s stress closely. The postludes are composed as conclusions, not codas. Heine’s verse is part of the work and is the better poetry of the two great cycles: compressed, musical, and armed with irony in its last lines. The costs: where the music sets an ironic turn sincerely, a meaning the words had is lost, and the voice writing of the miniatures is plain. Held below Winterreise (9.5) and the Goldberg Variations (9.7) on the range of means a twenty-eight-minute cycle commands.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comic triangle of no. 11 and the burial of no. 16. One law governs them: the voice states a feeling and the piano reveals what the feeling hides, or what it leaves behind. No. 11 tells a heartbreak as a cheerful old story in E flat; no. 16 buries the songs and the piano keeps singing. The key plan supports it: a flatward drift by fifths, seven of fifteen joins, to the E flat minor of no. 13, and a frame in which the C sharp left hanging in no. 1 becomes the D flat of the last bars. The tension: the drift is broken by leaps, G minor to E flat and E flat minor to B, and the frame is enharmonic, heard more on paper than in the hall. The range governed is one love remembered, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders the work holds are held by its one law: consciousness, as self-aware feeling; erotic love; the natural order, as flowers, nightingales, the Rhine and the summer garden, all of them signs; the sacred, in Cologne cathedral and the Virgin’s image, made a vessel for the beloved; the social, at its edge, in the wedding and the comic triangle; art itself, in the songs that are buried. What holds the axis here is absence, and most of the list is absent: labour, the state, history and the family do not appear, and mortality enters only as metaphor. A half hour for one voice holds one love and the mind that remembers it. Below Winterreise (7.7), whose winter world is the whole surface and whose outsider is social, and below the Goldberg Variations (7.4).
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, The Living Form and The Imperishable at 9.1. A piano whose writing is an image and a structure in every song, set to Heine’s compressed and ironic verse; a form that knows a remembered love as fragments and gives its end to the instrument; and a cycle in print and in the recital since 1844, one of the two most performed in the Lied.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: one voice holds consciousness, love, the natural order as signs, the sacred as a vessel, the social at its edge and art itself, but labour, the state, history and the family do not appear, and mortality enters only as metaphor. Above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, myth evoked and punctured by Heine’s irony rather than built, and The Swerve at 8.5, a turn partly along roads Schubert and Schumann himself had built.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear it by a tenth, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.1, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.6, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, so the unmet gate does not decide the tier.
Basis · the score of Dichterliebe, Op. 48, in its standard performing version: the sixteen songs as published in 1844, in their published order and published keys, for one voice and piano, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand. The sixteen songs are scored as one work, as a set scored as one; no song is scored separately, and no performance is the object. The four songs Schumann removed before publication are not part of the work and are not scored. Transpositions for lower voices, the common practice, are the same work in other keys; the published keys are the text. Heine’s sixteen poems are part of the work and are read in German, as Schumann set them. German is quoted only where the words are sure: the song titles and two short phrases of four words or fewer; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. The key plan, the major and minor count and the steps between tonics were counted by script; the running times are approximate, a typical modern tempo, not a measurement. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact dates of composition in 1840, the publisher and the dedication of the first edition, where the four removed songs were later published, the origin of the title, Schumann’s changes to Heine’s wording, the earliest recordings, the dates of two of the studies named, and the first song’s place in the teaching of harmony. Whether the music softens Heine’s irony is stated as argued, not as fact. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.