Composer: Schumann, Robert
Dates: 1810-1856
Song title: Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen
Opus, no., etc.: op.24, Nr.3
Music collection title: Liederkreis nach Gedichten von Heinrich Heine für eine Singstimme mit Klavier
Imprint(s): Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1840
Analysis: The dreamy prelude is distinguished by a soaring, chromatic motif which, due to its slow syncopation, seems to hover in mid-air.The voice hovers around the middle range, only momentarily breaking free to express the poet's inner pain at the end of the first two stanzas.The transition to the third stanza, where the birds answer him, remains a bold stroke even after more than a century and a half. In the transition between the first and second stanzas one hears a dominant seventh chord followed by a solo g-sharp (by implication an added ninth) preparing the return of the tonic. After the second stanza the same dominant seventh reappears, but is sustained under the now-flatted ninth (g-natural). This serves as a pivot to the distant key of G major, which is where the entire, even more hypnotic third stanza is set. Here the melody hovers obsessively around b, while all phrases resolve only to an inconclusive six-four chord. The bird-song is subtly characterized, not by piano figurations or vocal coloratura, but by higher register doubled thirds in the piano, a device Schumann was to often use for bird references. After a quick shift back to the relative "reality" of B major, the final stanza reprises most of the first and second stanza music until the last line. Here the poet, instead of decrying his pain, rejects the birds' message and turns inward, embracing his loneliness ("I trust non-one"). Therefore the high g-sharp is eschewed for a low-lying phrase, rising one final time to the song's central b before a lingering chromatic sigh. The words and music of this phrase are repeated, lower again by a third, to end on the lowest note in the song (d-sharp) as the postlude begins, repeating the prelude almost verbatim.
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Copyright © 2000, Peter W. Shea