Aus dem hebräischen Gesängen Op.25 No.15 - Score

The six-bar postlude is quietly eloquent, phrased in such a manner as to suggest that the singer, having decided that it is time for the tear to be banished, sets about making it disappear with some determination. There are four mini-cadences which fall into the home key of A major either in root position or first inversion , each one indicative of a slow movement of arm or hand, as if the tear were being wiped on a sleeve or the back of a hand.

This music falls in stages from the higher reaches of the keyboard to its centre, the final cadence dwelling for a full three beats on the dominant chord, as if every effort were being made to dry a face stained with tears before exposing it to the scrutiny of the tonic chord. Just as we reach the final resolution of A major, we hear a further A major chord, a staccato crotchet, which is like an after-shock and separate from what has gone before.

It seems that the solitary tear remains to haunt the singer after all, and that there is no handkerchief in the world that can dry it. The song is very simple and completely strophic. The two-bar introduction announces the melody with which the singer begins and the accompaniment hugs it throughout, a feature which, in this case, reinforces the shipshape control the singer exerts over his entire existence.

The interlude between the two verses also serves as the postlude. With its prancing left-hand chords and grim determination this is among the trickiest of Schumann postludes. This common thread links this music to the idea of dancing in the streets, as well as the idea of gossip spreading like wildfire.

If there is hilarity in this music it might well be the laughter of derision; if this were the case we would imagine that the second verse is sung in defiance of the public amusement generated by the first. From the west, where the sun sets, Beckons all that delights me in slumber and dream: In the west lives the man who rewards me with love, Who pressed me and my little child to his heart!

The accompaniment to the first verse of the song is as simple as that for a hymn tune, but Schumann endows this song with a dignity and emotional depth that are out of all proportion to the musical means. There is something stoically grand about this tableau, as if this picture of abandoned love were meant to be photographed by a great film director against a background of appropriately craggy and dramatic Scottish scenery. The words suggest that the lover and father may be as far away as Ireland, or even America.

The piano writing blossoms into waving fronds of quaver arpeggios which seem to suggest arms stretched out in hope of clasping succour from the returning prodigal. We immediately realise that her expectations are doomed, and for this reason this delicately fragrant music seems all the more poignant. I feel as if I should lay My hands upon your head, Praying that God preserve you So pure and fair and sweet. This may exaggerate its status in literary terms, but it has certainly inspired many composers — the poem is the perfect length to allow its verbal images to flower into musical lyricism, while the shy and epigrammatic nature of the verse discourages the pianistic overgrowth that might crush its slender stem.

There is a symmetry between this song of a German flower as the cycle nears its end — a return to home ground as it were — and the exotic Indian lotus flower earlier in the work which signified curiosity for the outside world, and impatience for the honeymoon. Both songs have been gratefully hummed through the ages by singers and non-singers alike because of their melodies. It surely does not matter if it seems that this glorious cantilena had been thought of first, and the words then made to fit it: On a throbbing bed of semiquavers, initially in a neutral A flat major, the bel canto melody with touches of fioritura — what else in a song with this title?

The music has the stately pace of prayer, but it is also tremulous with sublimated eroticism. We have seen elsewhere — in Widmung for example — that music poised between these two poles is something of a Schumannian speciality. These words, in this tessitura, and when beautifully sung, really do seem to evaporate into the ether and, in so doing, insinuate themselves into the secret places of the heart.

The subtle rise of the accompanying harmony at this point adds to the impression of music and emotion teetering on tremulous tiptoe. The piano writing, much of it an octave higher than before, has become fuller and more rapturous. The poet, too, is a specialist in the mixture of sex and religion, and the music waxes even more lyrical when warmed by this physical contact. It is also as if the composer were allowing a great Italian singer a cadenza at an important cadential point in an aria. Singer and accompanist sink gracefully to their final shared cadence. This moves, almost crab-like, up the stave, as if scarcely daring to look beauty in the face whilst blinded by its radiance.

As the piano eventually reaches the home key of A flat major after much subtle ado, we imagine that he might allow himself a tender embrace with his Clara, as if a dream were at last crowned with physical reality. I would also like to think that this song, with its indirect link to Schubert, was another of those covert tributes to his great predecessor that Schumann made in Myrten. The poem comes from the lips of a male poet and, in performances of Myrten which are shared as they must be between a male and a female singer, ascribing it to the tenor seems the obvious thing to do.

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This music has a lighter, shyer and more perfumed quality than Lied der Suleika No IX , and it seems happily associated with the female voice. Du bist wie eine Blume has the velvety depth of a magic carpet: The close-packed semiquaver accompaniment of Du bist wie eine Blume yields to piano writing that is suddenly airy and light. Left-hand quavers initiate gruppetti of delicate right-hand semiquavers phrased in threes. Semiquaver rests in both hands make the writing seem even more transparent.

On these rippling eddies of sound are superimposed fragments of piano melody, echoes of the vocal line like so many tender sighs.

Schumann: Aus den hebräischen Gesängen, Op. 25 No. 15 (page 1 of 1) | Presto Sheet Music

These scented greetings are part of a courtly love tradition and they betoken a gentleness where intimacy with a lover engenders more respect, rather than less. This writing suggests contained passion — a conversation between two shy lovers represented here by voice and piano where each is hesitant to press their case for fear of being inconsiderate to the wishes of the other.

But help is at hand: These contrasting thoughts entwine in voice and piano, and the optimistic and pessimist strands of the song are reconciled at the lingering cadence. The postlude recycles the spring-sunshine motif heard in the piano four bars earlier, this time an octave lower: The final piano flourish — a teasing little right-hand triplet in E flat major which rises as the left-hand arpeggio falls — is like rose-petals, and their scent, scattered in the breeze.

In summing up their achievement the creators here twinned in word and musical deed modestly acknowledge the shortcomings of their bridal gift. Schumann was not given to religious perorations, but there was something about his love for Clara which seemed to him sacred and awe-inspiring. He had no qualms about incorporating Ave Maria into the postlude of Widmung, and here, in the same key of A flat major, he unashamedly imagines the completion of the circle where the prayer which concludes the first song in the cycle has been answered with transfigured bliss.

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Robert and Clara were soon to become celebrated figures in German music, and the story of their struggles and triumph against parental adversity the stuff of which legends are made. The only other song in the cycle remotely like it is Lied der Braut No 2. Here there is a similar sense of time standing still as Schumann solemnly plights his troth: Here we find ourselves in the solemn key of B flat minor.

At this point all ceremony suddenly recedes; the lover and his bride seem caught in a shaft of musical sunlight which picks them out from all the others in the congregation, and from all other lovers. No film director could have engineered a more perfect final close-up of the two stars of Myrten. Before fading from the screen and into immortality, two faces scan each other with that mixture of ardour and almost reverential tenderness that has been the keynote of the entire cycle.

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin. Don't show me this message again. Myrthen, Op 25 composer. January to early April ; presented to Clara on their wedding day in September Gerald Finley baritone , Julius Drake piano. Why another Dichterliebe recording? Because Gerald Finley has simply one of the greatest voices of his generation, and is an artist at the peak of his powers. He brings to this noble cycle the supreme musical understanding that characterizes all his The Myrthen Ensemble , Joseph Middleton piano.

Christopher Maltman baritone , Graham Johnson piano. As with the Hyperion Schubert Song edition one struggles for new ways of expressi Ian Bostridge tenor , Graham Johnson piano. Du bist die Ruh, du bist der Frieden, Du bist vom Himmel mir beschieden. You my soul, you my heart, You my rapture, O you my pain, You my world in which I live, My heaven you, to which I aspire, O you my grave, into which My grief forever I've consigned!

You are repose, you are peace, You are bestowed on me from heaven.

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Your love for me gives me my worth, Your eyes transfigure me in mine, You raise me lovingly above myself, My guardian angel, my better self! This is one of the most famous songs in the world, and with some justification. That Franz Liszt also made a celebrated solo piano transcription of it is testament to the memorable power of a melody that is unfailingly exhilarating. It is that rare thing, a piece that combines passion and tenderness, force and sweetness, a thrusting determination with an ability to yield. And all in a relatively short song in which, as a pianist, one has the impression of sometimes following the singer humbly, and sometimes leading him or her on, whipping up the vocal line to greater fervour.

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For the pianist this means the ability to listen, but it also gives him the right to expect that on occasion he will be trusted to take the lead. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Let me hold sway in the saddle! Stay in your huts and your tents! And I'll ride happily far away, With only the stars above me. It is fitting that Goethe should make an appearance in a work which re-defined and re-shaped the idea of the song-cycle.

A serious lieder composer in could not avoid this great poet, but Schumann is clearly diffident about engaging with Weimar. Perhaps he felt that Mendelssohn would disapprove. For that reason he avoids any of the famous Goethe lyrics and chooses one that had been ignored by everyone else Anton Rubinstein was to set it in a Russian translation in One can see why Schumann chose it as a means of introducing himself in fancy dress: This is the signature tune of a liberal thinker who is in thrall to no man, free to travel under the stars, contemplating the glories of the heavens as he does so.

A snag is that this is one of the very few songs in Myrten where there is no love interest; but it is surely meant as a counterpoise to the following Der Nussbaum — the heroic man rides a horse under the desert skies while the girl, safely at home under the nut tree, dreams of her distant lover and the time when he will return to marry her. At least the mood of Freisinn shows that the composer is determined to do just that. Another problem is that the music is not quite eastern enough to be different from other run of the mill horse-riding music.

On the whole the Highland widow No 10 is a more original horsewoman than this Bedouin. The most effective music is that for the second strophe where Schumann manages to conjure a mood of Koranic solemnity as jerky dotted rhythms are abandoned in favour of a rapt star-struck melody supported by a solemn chorale of crotchets.

The music makes an attractive enough transition into the next great song, but it sounds rather too much like an item from Kinderszenen a relation of Wichtige Begebenheit perhaps with a text that has been added as an afterthought. A nut tree blossoms outside the house, Fragrantly, Airily, It spreads its leafy boughs. Many lovely blossoms it bears, Gentle Winds Come to caress them tenderly. As far as Myrten is concerned Julius Mosen is the odd man out.

All the other poets in the cycle make more than one appearance, but Mosen is included because he happens to have written a poem which was indispensable to the scenario. Schumann was not enthused by Der Nussbaum as a piece of literature, but the girl dreaming of her forthcoming marriage was too appropriate to ignore, as was the idea of Clara framed by a typically German outdoor picture which emphasised her qualities of purity and simple goodness. To match this, Schumann composed nothing more or less than a new folksong which enriched not only the lieder repertoire but the treasury of music which is counted as belonging to the people as a whole just as Schubert had done when he composed Der Lindenbaum.

There must be something about the idea of a German tree on German soil which goes to the root of the national musical consciousness. Robert Burns Deutsch: My heart is sad, I cannot reveal it, My heart is sad for somebody; I could lie awake during the longest night And always dream of somebody. Of somebody; Oh heavens! I could roam through the whole world, For the love of somebody. My heart is sair, I dare na tell, My heart is sair for Somebody! Burns had not even been born when this catastrophe took place, but despite the fact that he had little sympathy for the Catholic Church or any church for that matter , as a Scotsman he regarded the Jacobite rebellion with something approaching patriotic pride.

If I sit alone, Where could I be better off? I drink my wine All by myself; Nobody hampers me And I can think my own thoughts. With this song Schumann, who was fond of a drink, continues to flesh out his self-portrait with a touching frankness. The question is rhetorical but it requires a riposte. The tenor of the whole cycle is the implicit answer to this question: In fact, even after his marriage, the composer often needed to sit and think on his own with a glass of beer or wine.

Whoever serves me wine, must do so gently, Or the will cloud in the glass. This is one of the most extraordinary poems in the Myrten cycle. The second is in complete contrast: The lotus flower fears The splendour of the sun, And with bowed head Dreamingly waits for night. The poem is to be found in the midst of the Lyrisches Intermezzo, the book from which Dichterliebe is taken. But its exotic background the lotus is a flower connected, in its waterlily form, with Egypt and India makes it unsuitable for Dichterliebe, and ideal for Myrthen, which was conceived as an anthology of love songs from around the world.

The lotus-flower fears The sun's splendour, And with bowed head, Dreaming, awaits the night. The connection with Mendelssohn has already been mentioned in the introduction to Myrten. In any case the eastern theme of that lyric even if he had dared to envisage a rivalry with Mendelssohn in making his own setting did not fit the Dichterliebe scenario.

He set it in February and returned to compose Dichterliebe in May of the same year. Gottes ist der Okzident! God is the East! God is the West! Northern and southern lands Repose in the peace of his hands. Goethe points out that east and west are united by a single deity and that, by implication, the oriental-style verse of his collection has a global relevance.

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Schumann is less concerned with the humanistic side of the lyric than the opportunity it gives him for Thousand and One Nights colouring. He ignores the fourth verse, as well as the longer strophe which concludes the poem. If he had any later reservations about this setting it concerned the scale of the music which he must have thought was too modest for the sweeping grandeur of the verbal sentiments.

In Loewe had composed an exemplary choral setting Op 22, published which linked all these talismans together; the five verses are treated as different sections which contribute to a greater whole. For Myrten Schumann writes a powerful, if compressed, miniature: Liebevoll du scheinst zu sagen: Dass ich ihm zur Seite bin. Marianne von Willemer With what heartfelt contentment, O song, do I sense your meaning! Lovingly you seem to say: The appearance of Suleika in Myrten is as much of a tribute to Schubert as the quotation of his Ave Maria in the dedicatory song. It remains very much an open question as to whether the passionate love affair implied by these poems was a mirror of reality or merely a picture of what might have been under different circumstances.

Bearing in mind that Offenbach near Frankfurt where Marianne and her husband lived was a long way from Weimar, and that the two met seldom in the flesh, the latter seems more likely to have been the case. Oh I am come to the Lowlands, Alas! They have taken all I had, So that now I have nothing to eat.

Without a penny in my purse, To buy a meal for me. This is no folksong gathered from the Scottish countryside; Burns was the author of the poem. He would have had all the details of the Culloden massacre etched on his heart: This resulted in the destruction of the castles of Lovat, Glengary and Lochiel.

The cottages of tenant farmers were demolished or burned to the ground; their cattle were driven away, and the families of the rebels were either put to the sword, died in the fires, or were forced to wander homeless and starving on the scorched heath. Let me lay my head on his heart, Mother, mother! Never shall it end, Change? The second line of the third verse may need some explanation: It is also a line which has foxed the translator: Wer ihm kleinen Dieb gebar, Weiss der edle Clan aufs Haar.

Sleep, sweet little Donald, The very image of great Ronald! Our noble chief knows all too well Who conceived with him the little thief. George Gordon, Lord Byron George Gordon, Lord Byron Deutsch: My soul is dark! My heart is heavy! Take the lute From the wall, it alone can I still bear to hear, Draw from it with your skilled hands Sounds that will beguile my heart.

If hope can still nourish my heart, These sounds will charm it forth, And if tears lurk in my dry eyes, They will flow, and burn me no more! My soul is dark — Oh! If in this heart a hope be dear, That sound shall charm it forth again: The original title of this poem is My Soul is Dark. It describes the imaginary words of King Saul who longs to be healed of his melancholy; he calls for the music of the youthful David, future king of Israel and supposed psalmist.

To this end the composer English Jewish Isaac Nathan approached Byron and asked him to provide the words for very old tunes that he claimed to have in his possession — the original melodies sung in the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, no less, before its destruction by the Romans. Byron duly provided Nathan with a succession of small literary masterpieces based on the Old Testament which soon became celebrated. These outlived the music which was original in one sense, unoriginal in another put together by Nathan in the hope of making a musical sensation.

This interesting character is now venerated as a founding father of music in Australia, whither he fled to escape his English creditors. Catherine Maria Fanshawe Catherine Maria Fanshawe Deutsch: It loves the thick of the battle, it flees peace, It is granted to neither men nor women, But to every animal, only you must dissect it. It is not to be found in poetry, Science has it, science above all, And theology and philosophy.

It always presides amongst heroes, Yet the weak never lack it in their souls, It can be found in any house, For were it missing, all would be over. Small in Greece, on the banks of the Tiber It grew bigger, but biggest of all in Germany. It begins every hope, every wish it must bound, With the husbandman toils and with monarchs is crowned, Without it the soldier and seaman may roam But woe to the wretch who expels it from home.

Yet in shade let it rest like a delicate flower, Ah breathe on it softly — it dies in an hour. This cheery little riddle is just what we need after the emotional depths plumbed by the previous song. In this music Schumann confesses his lifelong passion for codes and ciphers, and he seems to be teasing a smile out of Clara; after all, this is a sample of how lively and communicative, how full of fun, their own lives would be after their marriage.

Thomas Moore Deutsch: Row gently here, my gondolier, ply the water gently, So that only she, to whom we glide, shall hear us coming! Oh, if only heaven could speak and reveal all that it sees, It would tell much about what the stars discern at night! In taking us to Venice, Schumann seems to make an abrupt change of locale. Carousing with his men friends was something that Schumann was prepared to relinquish in favour of a settled married life, and setting this poem may have been a means of saying farewell to bachelordom.

Accordingly he has written a song which is almost more Neapolitan than Venetian in its energy and gaiety. It is certainly more tarantella than barcarolle. The theme is elopement of course, and this would have appealed mightily to Schumann who considered running off with Clara when he was at his most desperate to be with her. In this song Schumann seems to be saying that he is proud of his Clara who is a redoubtable fighter. Like many men he seems particularly bemused and delighted by belligerence when it assumes female form. Clara was indeed strong her later life was a testament to her indomitable qualities , and a great deal stronger than Schumann as it turned out.

The result is one of the most forthright songs in the cycle, with one of the most dramatic postludes. How can I be cheerful and merry And whirl briskly about in my sorrow? The handsome boy who loves me Is far across the mountains. This is one of the most simple songs in the cycle, but in a skilled performance it can be surprisingly touching. Schumann has relied entirely on the power of a simple folksong-type melody to convey the pathos of the situation.

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