1840, the year of the song (120 songs) à He marries Clara Wieck, the daughter of his piano teacher and famous concert pianist. He found he could sell songs easier than anything else. He wanted to prove he could be a bread winner since Clara's father opposed to marriage.
Many of his lieder are expressions of his feelings for Clara.
Wrote topical lieder and external plot lieder.
He had always desired to find a synthesis of music and poetry.
He cultivated the song cycle more than any other composer. 3 elements needed for a song cycle's coherence à narrative continuity, large scale tonal planning and motivic recurrence.
In Schumann's view, the ideal lied must mediate between artlessness and art, simplicity and pretension. The lied must present the voice and piano as equal partners.
A great poem is necessary for a great song à he drew verses of the finest poets of the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries: Goethe, Eichendorff, Heine, Rückert, Andersen, Burns and Bryon, mostly lyric texts, narrative and dramatic texts.
Topics à love in all its nuances, patriotism, wandering, death, isolation and even madness. In some of the collections, folk- and drinking-songs appear side by side with lullabies, visions and depictions of festive scenes. He was particularly fascinated with the contrast between innocence and sensuality in many of Heine's lyrics, Schumann has been charged with insensitivity to the poet's characteristic irony. But although he undoubtedly smoothed over Heine's mordant wit on occasion, he demonstrated a keen sense for parody and for the destruction of illusion in his settings of Lieb' Liebchen ( Liederkreis op.24), Ich grolle nicht ( Dichterliebe op.48), and Die beiden Grenadiere (op.49 no.1), to cite just a few examples.
Schumann felt that the mission of a song composer was to preserve the poetry by capturing its spirit rather versus trying to translate it through music.
‘to produce a resonant echo of the poem and its smallest features by means of a refined musical content', he wrote, and hence becomes a poet.
Modified strophic or tripartite designs prevail his settings.
Tonal and motivic relationships are coordinated with textural factors à the motion from D to F in Reinick's Sechs Gedicte , reinforces a thematic shift in the poems from reality to dream world. Motivic recal and transformation are aligned with poetic content in the Eichendorff Liederkries II , In der Fremde, a small expressive figure first introduced in the accompaniment then represents yearning, removal in time and space, and then a jubilant union with nature. He also uses melodic recurrence to underline the power of memory à piano part in Frauenliebe und leben, and consolation in the piano part in Dichterliebe and Kerner Cycle.
He was familiar with An die ferne Gelibeter and Carl loewes' Esther. 1830's piano works à develped his concept of a cycle. Papillons, Carnival, Davidsbündlertanze. He felt musical coherence relied on harmonic connections and recurring motives. He wrote song cycles to make more money and used same techniques in song as he did in piano to achieve coherence. The following allowed him rapid shifts in mood with out losing coherence:
Thematic recall
Tonal structuring
Weak or incomplete closure between songs
Melodies derived from basic motives
Delayed resolutions.
His piano accompaniments carried greater weight than other lied composers
His concept of song cycle was unusual and accepted due to articles written by his colleagues supporting it.
His song cycle cohere by poetic theme, narrative thread, shared moments and imagery reinforced by musical elements of repetition and progression
Non tonic beginnings are frequent.
He reviewed songs from his neue Zeitschrift für Musik à expressed historical and aesthetic concerns. He felt Schubert was inspired by Beethoven but real breakthrough occurred after his death. Bach and Beethoven were guideposts inspiring contemporary music scene in Germany .
Majority of his texts are strophic with trimester and terrameter lines. Rhyme schemes a-b-a-b or aabb. The folk song was felt in the structures (their simplicity), to capture the Volkston à popular or rustic tone.
He was not faithful to the letter of his texts. He repeated lines/stanzas for highlighting or cadence reinforcement, repeated the first line at the end of a song, like a recapitulation, and omits stanzas (Die Stille op. 39 no. 4, or in In der Fremde from Liederkries).
Counterpoint plays a major role in texture à Fuxian species counterpoint with cantus firmus changing octave registers.
Schumann counterpoint
Full of arpeggios and implied voices appears even in the accompaniment.
Liederkreis à Im der Fremde, Schöne Fremde, Frühlingsnacht
Dictherliebe à Im Wunderschönen Monat mai, hör ich das Liedchen Klingen, Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen.
Schumann's Liederkreis op. 39, Eichendorrf
12 poems some of which existed as lyric insertions n several of the poets' novenls and novellas and have their origin in entirely disparate contexts.
No. 1-6 subjects are upbeat in nature à keys with sharps which increase in number.
No. 7-12 à darker hue topics with less exhuberant keys. The last song is F sharp major which his a return to the first song.
No. 6 Schöne Fremde. #12 Frühlingsnacht are climactic statements providing closure to their respective sections.
He imbued the lieder with cyclism by ordering texturally and connecting them musically. The discontinuties are in the rapid mood shifts. Like a stage director who through his production renders an interpretation of another artists work.
Piano is an equal partner, it doubles the voice
Postludes
Avoids programmatic elements (Schumann did not like the new German School / Liszt, programmatic elements).
The poetry describes a series of affective states, He arranges 9 poems into a meaningful pattern. United by a clear scheme of tonalities
Unhappy love à despair à separation à recovery. Uses related keys B-E-A-D.
Narrow range / recitative like in some cases
More interesting harmony rather than melody.
Inspired by Clara and he claimed was his most romantic.
In der Fremde, he omits a stanza à horn call motive, ascending / descending 4ths, melody sung by beloved returns in the piano, last statement initiates the postlude.
In Zwielicht, he uses a transposition of Bach's fugal writing.
Myrthen
26 songs composed to texts by diverse authors à Rückert, Goethe, Heine, Burns, byron, and Thomas Moore.
Shows very little in the way of poetic or musical unity. Progressions are closely related keys..
Presented to Clara as a wedding present.
Frauenliebe und leben
Provides a chronological narrative
Narrative coherence that Schumann emphasized with key relations
Recalls An die ferne Geliebte by using a thematic correspondence between the beginning and the end.
Secret adoration à engagement and wedding à pregnancy and childbirth à husbands death.
Symmetrically arranged arch form. The most straight forward in terms of forging individual settings into a larger unit.
Closely related keys 1-5 B flat major, 6-8 G major, D major, D minor. Distant related key between no. 5 and 6 representing a boundary between the old and new life.
Kerner cycle op. 35
Dichterliebe (The poet's love)
20 songs four which were omitted when it was first published 1844
Poems selected from Heine's Buch der Lieder 1827, in the Lyrisches intermezzo section.
Shows Heine's famous “romantic irony” at its most extreme à addresses the theme of unrequited love starting from innocence and lyricism to cynicism. Plantinga, “The conventions of Romantic poetry are held up to ridiculed in verse that itself seems to operate by those conventions.”
Love's bliss à suppressed anger of discovering infidelity à vents disappointment à consolaton (left tonally open ended).
Im wunderschönen Monat Mai à the first poem, a confession of love expressed with all the conventional metaphors (budding flowers, birdsong in springtime). Polyphony of arpeggiated suspensions and resolutions in which vocal and instrumental parts are inversionally related.
Die altoen, bösen Lieder à The old wicked songs, the protagonist proposes to drown his love, his dreams, his suffering, and his poems in the sea.
Ich hab im Traum geweinet à During the poem's first two stanzas, voice and piano are completely separated where one is silent as the other sounds. During the recit like vocal parts, the piano punctuates with chords giving a funeral quality. The third stanza the voice and piano join. The vocal part is montone with dissonant chords which don't resolve until the voice is finished. The Piano interjects during independent passages for voice alone.
Das is ein Flöten und Geigen à A roll reversal of textures. The piano has the obbligato vocal part. This also occurs in Waldesgespr ? äche from Liederkreis
Textural basis drawn from Heine's Lyrisches Intermezzo, a widely ranging poetic collection.
Brahms was a prolific composer of song. Over a period of 43 years (1853–96) he published 190 solo lieder, 5 songs for one or two voices, 2 songs with obbligato viola, 20 duets and 60 vocal quartets for solo voices, all with piano accompaniment
On occasion Brahms's choice of poem was the result of external circumstance or event.
Fluent, expressive and essentially diatonic melodies are supported by strong basses that rival the vocal part in vitality and often engage it in contrapuntal interplay. The interior voices, indicated in the sketches mostly by figured bass symbols and left to be worked out in detail at a later stage, enrich the miniature with further counterpoint and chromatic inflection. Such a texture, as well as Brahms's predilection for simple as well as varied strophic forms and for melodic formulations that are found in folktunes, reveals the deep roots of his lyrical art in the folksong ideal embraced by poets and composers since the Enlightenment. At times it is difficult to distinguish his artless folklike songs from his artful arrangements of folk melodies
Brahms's songs up to the 1860s can be classified into three periods
highly expressive vocal writing, bold though not always purposeful chromaticism and sometimes melodramatic accompaniments
During the second period (1858–9), which yielded most of the songs in opp.14 and 19 and the duets op.20, Brahms focused on folk and folk-inspired poems from Herder, Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio, Karl Simrock and J.L. Uhland.
His famous Guten Abend, gute Nacht à text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn 1868
Strophic form predominates, and the excesses of the earlier songs are dispelled by simpler melodies and accompaniments. The influence of Brahms's study of early music is at times evident in his harmonic language and use of counterpoint. The first of the folksong arrangements – 28 Deutsche Volkslieder (woo32 post.) given to Clara Schumann and 14 Volks-Kinderlieder (woo31) dedicated to the Schumann children – were prepared at this time.
A clear stylistic shift is apparent in the early 1860s, during Brahms's ‘first maturity'.
A clear stylistic shift is apparent in the early 1860s, during Brahms's ‘first maturity'. The ambitiously scaled songs of the nine Lieder und Gesänge op.32 on poems by August von Platen and Daumer and the 15 Romances op.33 from Tieck's Magelone reveal operatic aspirations in their proportions, interior shifts of tempo and style, illustrative writing, strong harmonies, forays into quasi-recitative and ‘orchestral' piano parts. Such songs as Wie bist du, meine Königin op.32 no.9 and Von ewiger Liebe op.43 no.1, however, strike a more balanced pose and point the way to the future. Although Brahms indulged in the grand scale again in the early 1870s with the tempestuously passionate and intensely sensual eight Lieder und Gesänge op.57 on poems by Daumer, most of his later songs fall within the parameters of the ‘volkstümliches Kunstlied' established by Schubert
15 romances from Ludwig Tieck's Wundersame Liebesgeschichte der schönen Magelone und des Grafen Peter von Provence ( Wondrous love story of Fair Magelone and Count Peter of Provence ). 1861-68
His most extensive musical setting of texts by any major writer
Poetry is a novel like prose narrative, based on a medieval romance with seventeen interspersed poems that express the events of the story. The poems are spoken by various characters in differing circumstances and there is no continuity of meaning among the verses themselves; only in a loose sense can they be labeled a cycle.
Brahms sets the poems in a modified ballad style but with no recitative like declamation common to the ballade à more like a loosely constructed aria in which words are sometimes repeated. This is unusual for Brahms who usually uses more of a strophic, modified strophic or simple episodic forms à folksong like.
The songs are mostly through composed, freely changing texture and figuration in response to changes of mood and meaning in the poetry.
Dramatic, sometimes pictorial accompaniment with wide ranging figurations similar the Brahms' solo keyboard music.
Ruhe, Süssliebchen à lullaby. Sonorous textures, extended pedal points.
Brahms Alt-Rhapsodie op. 53 1869
Aber abseits wer ists's? / but who is that, on one side? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Adagio à Poco Andante à Adagio
Solo mezzo soprano with choir.
Brahms pours himself into this composition due to his transferring his love to Clara Schumann's daughter, Julie.
Like in the third symphony, Brahms evokes totally different emotional states, from striving to reconciliation.
The poem is about a bitter outcast begging the “father of love” for peace and consolation.
Four Serious Songs, op. 121 1896
Compiled texts from the old and new testaments in Luther's translation (like in his German Requiem).
Subject matter is death (which he often thought about).
First two songs à Denn es gehet dem Menschen; Ich wandte mich ) à texts evoke pessimissim.
Third song à from Ecclesiasticus , O Tod, à “O death, how bitter thou art “and later “O Death, how welcome thou art to the needy.” He transforms one into the other. The falling thirds of the opening (same as the beginning of the Fourth Symphony), are inverted and in the major mode while the accompanimental pattern (descending tenths in the outer parts imitated sequentially in diminution, in the alto and tenor registers).
Fourth song à praises love as the conqueror of death, in the words of the first Corinthians; “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, then I am as sounding brass.”
Cantata like declamation combined with lyrical expression of the Lied.
Possible Reasons for Orchestral Lieder:
As the century came to a close, composers hoped to reach a larger public than the more intimate recitals.
Composers sought to achieve greater intensity and subtlety of color and expression.
Practical reasons à such for Strauss, orchestral lieder was meant to serve his wife, and later Elisabeth Schumann repertoire to sing in concert other than an aria or scena.
1870-1880, there is a parallel where Lieder Abend blossomed and piano lieder declined from being included in orchestral concerts.
1856 Berlioz, orchestrated Schubert's lieder as well as his own, Les Nuit d'ete.
1860 Liszt orchestrated Schubert lieder and his own lieder.
The first genuine orchestral lieder:
Weingartner à Der Wallfahrt nach Kevlar, 1887
Pfitzer à Herr Oluf, 1891
Delius à Saskuntala 1889
When lied went to the concert hall, the internal dynamics of the art form seemed disconnected.
Replacing the orchestra for piano and performing in larger concert halls brought new challenges in achieving unencumbered lyricism and equality between voice andorchestra.