“Schubert died. Cried all night,” wrote the eighteen-year-old Robert Schumann in his diary in 1828. Yet living in Zwickau, Germany, far from Schubert’s Vienna, Schumann did not know many of the older composer’s best-known works, his lieder. He loved Schubert’s piano music, and indeed, for the first ten years of his own career as a composer, Schumann wrote only piano music.

Then in 1840, the year of his marriage, he suddenly started pouring out lieder. Given this history, it is not surprising that in Schumann’s songs the piano is given a more complex role than in Schubert’s. This is particularly true of his most famous song cycle, Dichterliebe, the first and last songs of which (nos. 1 and 16) we will examine here. Dichterliebe has no real story; its series of love poems traces a psychological progression from cautious optimism to disillusionment and despair. They are the work of another great German poet, Heinrich Heine, a man who reacted with bitter irony against Romanticism, while acknowledging his own hopeless commitment to its ideals.

“Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” (In the wonderfully lovely month of May) The song begins with a piano introduction, halting and ruminative — which seems at first to be a curious response to the “wonderfully lovely” month of May. The piano part winds its way in and out of the vocal line, ebbing and flowing rhythmically and sometimes dwelling on quiet but piercing dissonant harmonies.

What Schumann noticed was the hint of unrequited longing in Heine’s very last line, and he ended the song with the piano part hanging in midair, without a true cadence, as though in a state of reaching or yearning: a truly Romantic effect. Technically, the last sound is a dissonance that requires resolution into a consonance (see page 28) but does not get it (until the next song).

In this song, both stanzas of the poem are set to identical music. As mentioned earlier, such a song is called strophic; strophic setting is of course familiar from folk songs, hymns, popular songs, and many other kinds of music. For Schumann, this kind of setting had the advantage of underlining the similarity in the text of the song’s two stanzas, both in meaning and in actual words. Certainly his music deepens the tentative, sensitive, hope-against-hope quality of Heine’s understated confession of love.

The qualities of intimacy and spontaneity that are so important to Romantic miniatures can be inhibited by studio recording. Our recording of Schumann’s song was made at a concert (you will hear applause as the artists enter).

“Die alten, bösen Lieder” (The hateful songs of times past) After many heart-wrenching episodes, the final song in the Dichterliebe cycle begins strongly. The insistent rhythm in the piano part sounds a little hectic and forced, like the black humor of Heine’s poem. Although basically this is a through-composed song, the opposite of strophic form, there are some musical parallels between many of the stanzas, and the music of stanza 1 comes back in stanza 5.

But there is a sudden reversal of mood in stanza 6, as the poet offers to tell us what this morbid list of funeral arrangements is all about. In the music, first the accompaniment disintegrates and then the rhythm. All the poet’s self-dramatization vanishes when he speaks of his grief in recitative-like rhythms; the end of the song would be a whimper if Schumann at the piano were not quietly and firmly in control.

Instead, in a lovely meditative piano solo, music takes over from words. Not only does the composer interpret the poet’s words with great art, both in the hectic early stanzas and the self-pitying final one, but he adds something entirely his own in this final solo. The sixteen vignettes by Heine and Schumann in Dichterliebe add up to a memorable anthology of the endless pains and pleasures of love celebrated by the Romantics.