This lied is another perfect Romantic miniature, in spite of the cliché-filled poem, with its moonlight, its dreams of love, and its downhearted lover. Both melody and piano accompaniment are very plain, but the slightly unusual chords chosen by Schumann create a unique pensive mood. The form, too, is simple: modified strophic form, A A A′. Some modification, however slight, had to occur in stanza 3, where the poem’s speaker, catching sight of the lit-up windows in the house, registers his excitement by crowding his poetic lines with extra words and extra syllables — which require extra notes.

There is an obvious, banal way of setting such crowded lines: See page 243, in the Listen box. But instead Schumann very skillfully pulls the words out of phase with the musical phrases, achieving beautiful rhythmic matches for some of the extra words: slower for drunten (down), livelier for funkeln (light — literally, sparkle), and very slow for still (silently):

And three things help make the climactic word Liebchens (loved one) radiant: the new long high note, the new harmony, and the expansive phrase (five bars in place of four). Schumann’s piano postlude adds a wistful minor-mode aftertaste. As with many great lieder, the music here far transcends the words.