Note from webmaster: This piece was performed in the same program with Schütz's Musicalische Exequien and Schönberg's Friede Auf Erden. Hence, the first two paragraphs reference these other two pieces and provide a context for the entire program.

his concert has to do with connections. We are exploring the special linkages that great composers establish with listeners, that tell us things that are otherwise inexpressible. All of the works in this program deal with pain of one sort or another, but also with hope and the possibility of remediation. It seems to me that music uniquely has the power to show how pain, and the cure for pain, are matched components in the continuum of human experience.

Schütz grieves over the pain of departure of a patron/friend in the context of a continent torn by thirty years of devastating war. Schönberg's startling clairvoyance, on the doorstep of the last century, lamenting mankind's historic failure to prevail in the war against war itself turned out to be ominously predictive of the horrible events to come. And Schumann brings pain down to an intensely intimate level in music that captures the very essence of young lovers experiencing the kind of pain that young lovers experience.

"The best way to cultivate one's feeling for melody is still to compose frequently for voice and a cappella chorus. Basically, one must invent and create inwardly as much as possible." So wrote Robert Schumann (1810-1856) in January 1846, the very month in which the choral songs of opus 59 were composed. These were his first serious attempts in the a cappella genre, although some large scale works for chorus and orchestra (Das Paradies und die Peri and Scenes from Goethe's Faust) and a few accompanied choral songs (Zigeunerleben, for chorus and piano, and a set of four-part songs for male chorus, for instance) date from the early 1840s. The opus 59 set is interesting on different levels and for different reasons. The transparency of the writing and the subtlety of the harmonic gestures suggest a certain naïveté which is consistent with the implied youthfulness of some of the speakers. The four poems by four different poets afforded Schumann an opportunity to explore individual characterizations in a medium (the chorus) that was not generally used in this way. The German choral literature of the nineteenth century is large and varied, but the themes tend to be limited to bucolic or other images from nature - trees and forests are big(!), so are birds, streams, night-sounds, and the changing seasons. Choruses are rarely allowed to fall in love, as happens in three of the opus 59 songs.

Nord oder Süd, the first of the set, was the last composed and the one whose poem is closest to the norm of German Chorlieder of the time. It is a philosophical examination of the contrasts and stages of life, generally optimistic in tone: North /south, country/town, servant/lord, young/old, and finally slumber/death. There is exuberance in each of the first four strophes. But Schumann slows down the movement and intensifies the mood at the beginning of the final stanza, to make sure we realize that here lies the message and meaning of the whole text: make the most of life, it will pass away all too quickly. The second song, Am Bodense, also changes direction mid-course. Using the metaphor of a ship under full sail heading home to his lover in the fatherland, the speaker's plea for a speedy voyage is supported by music of billowing freshness. Suddenly the wind dies and, in the final verses, we learn that the loved one will not be there to greet him, having herself departed for a better fatherland. Jägerlied is another love song, a gentle meditation on the pain of distance separating a couple. Gute Nacht is a quiet evening song sung to someone dear; neither gender nor relationship is made explicit.

The Boston Cecilia performed this piece at Emmanuel Church in Boston on October 16, 2004.

© 2004 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.