The Lied ohne Worte, song without lyrics, may seem like a paradoxical creation. Lied implies singing, singing conventionally implies text. The paradox is resolved when we realise that wordless instrumental music can still exhibit the characteristics of quasi-vocal melody, as well as poetic structure: phrases of regular length and rhythm, and (mostly through harmony) a suggestion that ‘something is being said’: a sense of direction, implication, negation, affirmation, climax etc.
For this reason, songs that have come into existence as regular songs-with-words can have a second life as songs-without-them. Sometimes such a transformation might count as a liberation of music from text. Not because of the prejudice that instrumental music is superior to vocal music and more ‘properly musical’ – but because sometimes the match between music and text is less than perfect; sometimes because the poetry is mediocre compared to the music.
These thoughts I have discussed in more detail in a podcast episode, Songs with and without words, and in an earlier post, Music minus words.
What follows are some further reflections (with recordings) on playing Lieder in a piano solo arrangement.
Secret Whispering and Silent Tears
Franz Liszt published a collection of arrangements of ten songs by Robert and Clara Schumann in 1874. Of the three songs by Clara, I have recorded two, Warum willst du and’re fragen and Geheimes Flüstern. For these two ‘arrangements’, Liszt had little more to do than delete the staff for the vocal part: it is almost entirely doubled by the piano. In this respect these songs, although subtle enough, follow a much earlier tradition of writing a song with accompaniment on only two staves; the melody was to be played by the right hand along with the voice (and the singer could be the player herself). Even in the original version, therefore, the piano part of these songs can be performed without a singer’s participation. In Geheimes Flüstern (Secret whispering) in particular, the homogeneity of the piano sound may create a greater effect of stillness than most vocal interpretations are able to achieve.
Within Robert Schumann’s Opus 35 (a rather loose and uneven series of twelve songs on texts by Justinus Kerner) the Nos. 8, 9 and 10 form a mini-cycle – a cycle that has no clear motivation in the poems. No. 8, Stille Liebe (Silent love) and No. 9, Frage (Question) are in the same key. Frage is a declamatory, almost recitative-like setting of the text; but oddly, as in the Clara songs, the vocal part is entirely doubled by the piano. It is a kind of short intermezzo, open-ended and leading directly into the grandiose No. 10, Stille Tränen (Silent tears).
‘Soft’ and ‘silent’ are frequent words in these songs, but Stille Tränen builds up to a fortissimo climax. The long phrases of this song (tempo: Sehr langsam) and tessitura pose a problem for the Lieder singer, who suddenly has to muster operatic technique. “Wagnerian” is a term that tends to come up. One scholar characterises the song as “melodramatic” and “emphatically theatrical and just a trifle bathetic”.1 Such an impression may arise particularly if the singer is overwhelmed; satisfactory performances are very rare. However, the text should bear some of the blame.
A paraphrase might go like this: What you see is a cloudless morning, but you slept through the rain during the night. Likewise, you do not notice that the sunny countenance put on by ‘some people’ may follow a night full of tears.
The self-pity demonstrated by ‘some people’ (mancher, no doubt a substitute for the first person) might reinforce the impression of melodramatic theatricality. The way the speaker expresses him- or herself in the song, he/she is by no means silent about those tears. Probably we should think of the text as an interior monologue, addressed but not spoken to ‘you’. Anyhow, we may choose to disregard the text and concentrate on the musical expression. My feeling is that Schumann has found his inspiration, as often happens, primarily in the first lines and developed the music from there. These opening lines are in the context of the poem not particularly significant:
Du bist vom Schlaf erstanden / Und wandelst durch die Au
You have risen from sleep and are now strolling through the field
But the image conjured up here – that of ‘rising’ from sleep (erstanden sounds somewhat lofty) and wandering into the open space – relates more than anything else in the poem to the surging melody and the continuous forward momentum. Schumann builds up his slow climax in such a compelling way, that it sounds to me as something that has always been there – as if it were merely the logical development of what is implicitly contained in the raw materials of harmony and melody.
Most of the piano texture consists of simple repeated chords (which run the risk of becoming monotonous hammering), but on the final page the piano gains its own voice. So much of these three songs, in fact, relies on the piano part that it seemed to me worthwhile to liberate them from their lyrics and transform them into piano music. (There are, to my knowledge, no earlier piano solo arrangements.)
Frühlingsnacht
To my feeling, in all these cases the piano solo version offers something extra to the original, without substantial alteration of the score. Things are a little different with Frühlingsnacht, one of Robert Schumann’s most popular songs and also a long time favourite among Liszt’s arrangements.
The original song concludes the Liederkreis op. 39 (on poems by Eichendorff). Liszt published his arrangement separately, but the original song is too short to stand alone; Liszt therefore repeats the whole piece with virtuoso embellishments – the trills seem to represent the nightingales in the text:
Und die Nachtigallen schlagen’s: / Sie ist Deine, sie ist Dein!
And the nightingales sing it: She is yours!
Part of this varied reprise (the arpeggios of bars 54 and 56) is, in my opinion, a weaker alternative that interrupts the flow, and I prefer to play these bars as they were the first time.
As effective as this arrangement is in conveying the ecstatic expectation of the original, its strongly foregrounded pianism detracts from the intimacy of feeling. I would not consider this a case of ‘music waiting to be liberated from its text’.
(Other recent additions to my recordings page are Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Sonata in G Minor Wq65/17 and Schubert’s B-flat Major Impromptu D 935/3).
- Jon W. Finson. Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs. Harvard University Press 2007, 78. ↩︎
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