Composer: Schumann, Robert
Dates: 1810-1856
Song title: Lieb Liebchen, leg's Händchen
Opus, no., etc.: op.24, Nr.4
Music collection title: Liederkreis nach Gedichten von Heinrich Heine für eine Singstimme mit Klavier
Imprint(s): Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1840
Analysis: The voice enters alone, first quietly murmuring to the beloved to lay her hand on his heart, then rising skips of a fourth betray his agitation. All of this is accompanied only by the offbeat eighth-note chords in the piano's right hand, lending an air of urgency while portraying the beating heart. Indeed, assuming a man is singing, it is the voice which supplies the bass line until the final phrase of the first stanza. The harmony of the first two lines is skeletally diatonic, but at the third phrase ("Da hauset ...") we take a short, six-measure glimpse into the poet's delusion of the carpenter in his heart via an extraordinary round trip to the nominally far distant key of E-flat minor. This is economically accomplished with a few chromatic alterations and enharmonic respellings (E-flat minor is actually the respelled modal minor of the leading-tone chord in E minor). The quarter-note triplet on "Zimmermann" momentarily adds a touch of terrified arrhythmia to the voice's insistent pattern of a quarter-note followed by two eighths. The piano heartbeats suddenly stop at the realization of what is being built ("Der zimmert mir..."), and the singer can hardly express his horror, so that he pauses for a whole measure while the piano finishes the final phrase with two staccato strokes, before he can force himself to say the final word: "Totensarg" (coffin). A three-measure interlude sustains the agitation by resuming the syncopated offbeat chords. The second stanza repeats the music of the first with only minor alterations, but it seems nearly as appropriate to these words as it did to those of the first stanza. This time the first line is underlaid by a series of quiet, legato quarter-notes in the left hand, falling two octaves into the depths. Triplet quarter notes appear again, this time at the exhortation "sputet euch." The voice part ends the final phrase in the same delayed manner as the first stanza, but without any overlap into a postlude. "Schlafen kann" is a horrified, staccato whisper in the dark, a realization that the rest and sleep the singer pleads for is that of death, which one confronts entirely alone.
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Copyright © 2000, Peter W. Shea