Born in Zwickau, Germany on June 8, 1810, Robert Schumann started his musical education on the piano. The son of a bookseller, he began to experiment with composition at an early age, and also cultivated a passion for poetry and literature. Although richly talented, he was never considered a prodigy, especially by the standards of the time. At sixteen, after the tragic deaths of his sister and father, he entered the University of Leipzig to study the law; but this didn't last long, and soon he had left the school to pursue music with all his energies.

At the age of twenty, Schumann was studying the piano with Friedrich Wieck in Leipzig; he also boarded with the Wieck family. Although a hand injury prevented him from pursuing a career as a keyboard virtuoso, he found a niche writing music criticism - and composing, an activity which was starting to focus his considerable talents. In the early 1830s, he published several piano pieces to critical acclaim. In 1834, he founded the New Journal for Music and served as its editor for the next nine years; the publication attacked what Schumann felt were the shallow and inconsequential musical practices of the day. On the positive side, he recognized the brilliance of Chopin and Brahms.

Meanwhile, Schumann continued to compose. In 1835 he fell in love with his former piano teacher's daughter, Clara Wieck - who was only sixteen at the time. Her father, although he initially liked Schumann, wanted more financial security for his daughter, and opposed the union hotly. But the couple persevered, and they were married in 1840. That year was Schumann's happiest as a composer. He wrote over 130 songs, including all of the songs on this program, and threw himself into his first symphonic projects. The next year, his first two symphonies were performed; after that, he delved into chamber music.

But the happiness and creative fire was not to last. In the early 1840s, Schumann began to suffer from mental illness; even while accepting a position at Mendelssohn's conservatory in Leipzig, his brain was beginning to deteriorate, most likely from the effects of syphilis. In 1850 the Schumanns moved to Düsseldorf, the home town of Heinrich Heine. After several increasingly unproductive and unhappy years, he attempted suicide, and was committed to an asylum in Bonn. There he died, aged 46, on July 29, 1856.

Schumann was a master of piano music, both in minor settings and in fully-developed sonatas and a Concerto. As a symphonist, he is regarded as a talented, but not masterful, creator of large orchestral forms; nor was he successful as a composer of operas. It is in his piano music and his songs - Dichterliebe in particular - that he accomplished his greatest work, and this music takes its rightful place among the greatest achievements of the early Romantic period.

Heinrich Heine (originally named Harry) was born on December 13, 1797 in Düsseldorf, Germany, of Jewish parents. Though his family preferred that he become a businessman, Heine eventually took a degree in law. In 1825, in order to make possible a civil service career (closed to Jews at that time), he resentfully converted to Protestantism. Despite this, he never practiced law or held a government job.

Heine’s reputation grew steadily with the publication of his poems in the early 1820’s. Most of these were collected in 1827 into the Buch der Lieder (Book of songs), which has always been his most widely read collection, and the most popular with composers, with nearly 5000 settings made of its 245 poems. It may have been inspired by his youthful and unrequited infatuation with one, or possibly two, of his rich uncle’s daughters. These poems are a concentrated combination of lyrical perfection, Romantic imagery, wry humor and bitter irony. Their seeming sentimental simplicity has been widely imitated, but seldom with any success. Heine had an unsurpassed ability to write lyrics which on the surface are almost trite, but are crafted as word-music of the highest order, where the sound and rhythm enhance the often contradictory underlying emotions. He often revised poems which had already been published, which has led to confusing conflicts between versions which composers have set and Heine’s final ones.

When he was 18 Schumann met Heine briefly in Munich and was charmed and amused by the poet’s sardonic wit, although he also noted Heine’s bitter and ironic smile. Heine moved to Paris in 1831, after publication of his Reisebilder (Travel pictures), a whimsical amalgam of fact, fiction, autobiography, social criticism, and literary polemic which was widely imitated. In Paris his political and social concerns found outlet in his prolific critical and satirical prose writings. He became acquainted with many of the most prominent figures of the age, including Karl Marx. Heine’s pro-revolutionary views were unacceptable to the German governments, and by 1835 his voluntary exile in France became an imposed one, and his works were banned throughout Germany. He continued to write poetry as well (New Poems; Germany, a Winter’s Tale; Atta Troll, a Midsummer Night’s Dream), much of it with often satirical elements of social and literary commentary.

In 1839 Clara Wieck (soon to become Clara Schumann) was on a concert tour in Paris, and she met Heine at a dinner at the composer Meyerbeer’s home. She found him melancholy and unhappy, speaking bitterly of Germany, with nothing of the cheerful affability which Schumann had described to her. After 1844 Heine suffered financial reversals and painful physical deterioration from syphilis, the disease which also afflicted Schumann. He spent the last several years of his life in his "mattress-grave" in a Paris apartment, although, unlike Schumann, his poetic and observational powers never left him. Romanzero, his last volume of poems, is full of heartrending laments and bleak commentaries on the human condition, many of which are now considered among his finest lyrics. He died in Paris on February 17, 1856, five months before the death of Robert Schumann. (Much of the above biographical information was taken from Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, Springfield, MA, 1995)

Many people have criticized Schumann’s settings of Heine for missing the ironic content of the poet’s lyrics. But others, including the great lieder singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, have found the opposite. Fischer-Dieskau writes in his book Robert Schumann, Words and Music, "rarely do we encounter an artistic expression so similar to Heine’s, with its tortured, almost pathological qualities and its intensity. The Heine texts which Schumann selected seemed those which most fittingly represented the inner contradictions of his own nature. From intentional exaggeration to sentimentality, Schumann was able to reanimate Heine’s poetry through the genius of his music. Sometimes he used the poetry only as a vehicle; at other times his music gave substance to shallow verses. Nuance, a broken spirit, joy turning to melancholy, sadness turning into exuberance and sarcasm, tone painting of twilight, the images of death staring over the shoulders of young girls -- Schumann drew upon all these states of mind and images found in Heine’s poetry and from them developed his unique style of the Lied."

The Liederkreis, op.24 is Schumann’s first essay in the form of the song cycle. It takes as its text an entire sequence of nine poems called "Lieder" (Song-poems) f rom "Junge Leiden" (Youthful sorrows), the earliest part of Heine’s Buch der Lieder. Schumann started and completed this cycle in a few days in February 1840, and immediately wrote Clara that "while I was composing, my thoughts were only of you. Without such a bride, a person could not write such music." It can be read as if telling a typical story of love’s awakening and the lover’s eventual disappointment, with numerous Heine-ian outbursts of ironic hyperbole. There is not space here to enumerate the multitude of felicities in the individual songs. Instead, you are urged to read the texts while listening and discover some of them for yourself. A few of the songs incorporate substantial piano postludes, a feature which was to reappear with greater frequency and effect in Dichterliebe. Interestingly, one song which neither Schumann nor any of the other composers who set this song found humorous or ironic is precisely the one in which, unbeknownst to them, Heine wrote about a pair of patent leather shoes: "Anfangs wollt ich fast verzagen," number 8 in the cycle (another meaning of "trüg’," besides "bear" or "suffer," is "wear").

Immediately following the "Lieder" in Heine’s "Junge Leiden" are twenty "Romanzen" (Romances), which are mostly short ballads, telling atmospheric tales. Schumann set four of these during 1840, but not as an integral group. "Die feindlichen Brüder" is typical of Heine’s sarcastic take on folk legends, his famous version of the Loreley tale being another example. Schumann sets the bloodthirsty ballad in a deceptively simple and straightforward manner; there are subtle elements of musical satire on the nostalgia for medieval times.

Both the poetry and music of "Der arme Peter" treat the pseudo-folk theme of this three-part mini-cycle with a sensitively balanced combination of tenderness and cruelty. The first song introduces the characters, the happy newlyweds Hans and Greta and the lovelorn Peter, with a jaunty bagpipe tune; Peter’s bitterness and despair come to the fore in the second song, where Heine has the "hero" climb to the highest peaks to seek relief, but Schumann in a masterstroke of psychological insight sends those same lines descending to the depths of the voice. The third song finds Peter back in town, but in no better shape; the townspeople stare and whisper, and to the strains of a funeral dirge the poet explains that Peter really is better off dead.

"Belsatzar" , although it has a higher opus number, is, amazingly, Schumann’s first attempt at setting a dramatic ballad, as well as his first Heine setting. Heine’s poem tells an abridged version of the familiar tale of Belshazzar’s feast and the "handwriting on the wall, leaving out Daniel’s interpretation of the inscription and his denunciation of Belshazzar. Instead of trying to increase the dramatic tension by the conventional means of gradually adding atmospheric piano touches and increasing the tempo to the end, Schumann does the exact opposite, and succeeds brilliantly. He gradually strips away the fog of night and inebriation to uncover the sobering realization of what has actually been said and done, and the fear and trembling that ensues.

"Die beiden Grenadiere" (The two grenadiers) recalls a episode from Heine’s youth, when he supposedly saw the return of French prisoners of war from Russia. Heine greatly admired Napoleon, and though he campaigned throughout his life for political liberalization, he always preferred "benign" monarchs to a democratic "tyranny of the multitudes." In Schumann’s hand the short, poignant vignette becomes timeless, exposing the patriotic fervor of the dying soldier with alternating lyrical and marchlike phrases. The high point comes when the "Marseillaise" rings out triumphantly, but Schumann does not let the song end there; the postlude reminds us that the soldier does die, and that, though he escaped captivity once, Napoleon’s cause was finally a lost one. Wagner also composed a setting of this poem at about the same time, which also included a quotation of the "Marseillaise." Although Wagner’s version was far more highly acclaimed and successful in its time, and won the composer a pension from the French government, Schumann’s is the setting that has come to be most admired and performed.

The cycle Dichterliebe, (A poet’s love) widely considered the acme of the song cycle form, is composed of sixteen poems taken from the section entitled "Lyrisches Intermezzo" (Lyrical Intermezzo). Schumann rearranged his selections to tell a similar story to his first Heine cycle, with even more moving results. It may recount something of the story of the few months when Robert and Clara drifted apart and were then reconciled. The manuscript sent to the printer had twenty songs, but Schumann excised four and made extensive revisions in several others. Recently Thomas Hampson recorded that ur-Dichterliebe, producing a fascinating document of Schumann’s original intentions. In its final form, however, Dichterliebe is an unsurpassed unified masterpiece. Many of its individual songs are so slight or ambiguous in their resolutions that they cannot stand on their own, and many others have piano postludes so long that they can almost be thought of as songs in themselves. There are many obvious and not-so-obvious musical relationships between many of the songs, as when, for example, the postlude of song 12 reappears transfigured in the final postlude. And yet for all this unity, the range of expression is enormous, from the dreamy optimism of the opening to the bitter shattered hopes of the final song, through every imaginable shade of hopeless yearning, wistful melancholy, rage and despair.

All of the songs on this program are taken from the first two sections of Heine’s early Buch der Lieder. In fact, Schumann set only one Heine poem which was not part of that volume. It is as if Schumann was composing his way systematically through Heine’s oeuvre. Sadly for us, this exploration did not continue, for when Heine publicly insulted his close friend Mendelssohn, Schumann refused to have anything more to do with the poet and his lyrics.

A note from the pianist

Any lieder pianist takes special pleasure in a set of Schumann songs on a recital; the pianist contemplate an entire program of Schumann settings finds himself in a special form of musical paradise. No one has ever written better piano parts than Robert Schumann. The bulk of his song-writing came on the heels of his "solo piano period" (for Schumann tended to write successively in one genre after another) that saw the composition of the Fantasy, op. 17, the Scenes from Childhood, Kreisleriana, and Carnival Jests of Vienna, among other masterpieces. Similar threads of lyricism, virtuosity, harmonic audacity, and passionate declamation run through the song accompaniments. The piano parts, moreover, not only support the singer in his or her evocation of the poet's meaning, but often provide an elaboration or even an alternative "take" on that meaning. Is it too much to infer that the five-measure coda to "Die beiden Grenadiere" adds historical perspective and a touch of irony to the Grenadier's patriotic effusions?

In Dichterliebe Schumann provides his most unforgettable piano parts: impetuous introductions, creative, ever-changing accompaniments, and, above all, wondrous epilogues. A recitation of their riches would take pages. Two examples will suffice. In the eighth song, "Und wusten's die Blumen," the poet uses delicate images to paint a picture of despair and Schumann underlays this with a diaphanous accompaniment; at the words "she has torn apart my heart," however, the piano suddenly erupts in a desperate, jagged coda. And then there is the astonishing epilogue to the whole cycle, in which the pianist sums up--as if in a dream, without apparent barlines or obvious destination--the sorrow, anger, elation, and ultimate resignation of A Poet's Love.