Rätsel Op.25 No.16 - Score

Myrtles, Op.25 • No.16 Rätsel (Énigme)

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About 'Etude Op.25 No.9 in G-flat major : Butterfly'

Spanisches Liederspiel op 74 Schumann Robert. Piano music of Schumann Robert. Piano works Schumann Robert. Masterpieces of piano music Schumann Robert. That could befit Youtube. To descend from such heights is never easy, and to do so quickly is harder still. Perhaps it is a flaw of the song that it comes to such a sudden end only four bar later as the vocal line falls to a lower tessitura; not even a pair of ritardando markings manage to create the necessary poise. It is notable that on this occasion Schumann avoids a recapitulation of that beautiful opening melody.

The thrill is that something so shy and retiring as the lotus flower should become so openly passionate when unveiled. The shy anxiety of the opening betokens sexual inexperience.

Chopin's Op.25 No.5 (Wrong Note) Etude Audio + Sheet Music

Not able to give herself to the crude embraces of sun she reserves her passion for a secret lover who is a master of the more subtle caress. He entices her to his embrace. The words and the music of the third verse are nothing more than a depiction of deflowering. This is the climactic moment of the music which also marks the return to the home key; she has come full circle.

So much of this cycle is a projection of the happiness that would be shared by the newly married couple, and it is hardly surprising that the composer was impatient for his honeymoon. This is his promise to be a good lover and provide Clara with a whole new realm of pleasure. Sei von seinen hundert Namen Dieser hochgelobet!

Mich verwirren will das Irren; Doch du weisst mich zu entwirren, Wenn ich handle, wenn ich dichte, Gib du meinem Weg die Richte! He, who alone is just, Wills what is right for each. Of his hundred names, Let this one be highly praised! Wandering may lead me astray; But you can disentangle me. When I act, when I write, May you guide me on my way! Without any attempt genuinely to mirror eastern music or Islamic custom Schumann seems to have imagined a call to prayer from a fairytale minaret.

The fact that the undulations of this vocal line stand apart from the piano here provider of a purely supportive harmony adds to this impression. Goethe heard such incantations for himself when a Turkish regiment was stationed in Weimar during the Napoleonic Wars. The piano punctuates these invocations to east and west with hefty quaver chords which cleave the air like brandished scimitars, as if ready to lop off the heads of infidels. The whole tone of this music is judgmental. The second verse is set to music which somehow suggests religious instruction from a learned and venerable mullah putting the fear of God into his awestruck congregation.

The twin invocations to the single deity of both east and west are repeated as a bridge into the third strophe. This is entirely different and seems to have been written for another, higher voice altogether. The first page of the song is low for any tenor, and suddenly the singer finds himself in a more fitting tessitura. When a baritone performs the song the opposite happens: The first strophes have been about rules and obedience, and the tight rhythmic structure of the music reflects the straight and narrow.

Those who fall into sin and error have no such discipline in their lives, and accordingly the music, branching out into aimless quavers, is made to wander across the bar line in a succession of two-bar phrases which float and weave with an almost drunken freedom. Unlike the opening of the song this section is actually addressed directly to the deity. The vocal line is so high that Schumann published an ossia for lower voices; the original, which suggests the desperate fanaticism of a soul within reach of salvation, is more effective.

The first verse is now exactly repeated as Schumann once again employs his familiar ABA structure. For my heart, dear friend, is the mirror, Wherein you have seen yourself; And this the breast where your seal is imprinted Kiss upon kiss. Marianne with a touch of Goethean editing wrote the two remarkable Suleika poems, addressed to the east and west winds, which were set by Schubert. He then looks into his lieder — his songs — and, lo and behold, she is there. And she can only go on getting more and more beautiful in the framework of his poetic invention.

She is always there because of his writing and creativity. Why Robert felt that this was relevant to Clara is easy to guess.

Robert even wrote out the poem in Leipzig and sent it to Clara then in Austria on 20 April In the same letter he wrote to her: It is clear then that when Clara saw the song set to music in Myrten she would have recognised the poem as belonging to their shared past. It is as if it were dedicated to all lovers, past and future, who have had to nurture their affections in long-distance relationships.

Closeness is not about physical proximity the poem seems to say, but the music itself shows singer and pianist in an astonishingly close bond. Every single note of the vocal line is doubled — one might also say shadowed — by the accompaniment; this is surely something of a record in a medium where it is conventional wisdom that such doubling reduces the efficacy of the vocal line.

If the pianist were to play the accompaniment as it stands and on its own the listener would not be deprived of a single fragment of melody — the whole tune occurs unfailingly in the little finger of the right hand. It is this unanimity which makes the song extremely difficult to perform. The piece requires an extremely flexible rubato, a plasticity of expression; despite this surging and variable pulse singer and pianist need to sound absolutely at one, even in passages with ornamental turns. Voice and piano are superimposed on each other, mirroring the synchronicity of movement between a form and its ghostly double.

That these move in the opposite direction from each other in spatial terms is reflected in the postlude. Entwined counterpoint in contrary motion roves over the two staves and indicates a conversation of male and female voices as well as a colloquy of mirror images: In musical terms the opening strophe of the song is set to an enchanting melody which nevertheless manages to encompass the contours of natural speech, and to suggest that the formulation of ideas and feelings is taking place then and there.

This is true of the improvised feel to the music throughout the song. The second strophe is less sinuously melodic, beginning with figurations of gradual chromatic ascent separated by crotchet rests; once again these suggest spontaneous improvisation as well as breathless emotion. The song is completed by a repeat of the first verse thus the form of the whole is ABABA followed by that eloquent four-bar coda where the two mirrored forms seem to melt one into the other. Die gaben Milch und Butter mir, Und weideten im Klee. Was sie befiel, wer weiss es nicht? Dass ich kam ins Niederland!

It was not like this in the Highlands, Alas! No woman was as happy as I In the valleys or on the hills! Who used to give me milk and butter And used to graze in clover. And there I had threescore sheep, Alas! Who warmed me with their soft fleece In the frost and winter snow. No one in all the clan Enjoyed greater fortune than I; For Donald was the most handsome of men, And Donald, he was mine!

What befell — who does not know it? Master and servant perished. Had I never come to the Lowlands, Alas! No one can now be unhappier than I From the highlands down to the sea! It was na sae in the Highland hills, Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie! Nae woman in the Country wide Sae happy was as me. Feeding on you hill sae high And giving milk to me.

Skipping on yon bonie knows, And casting woo to me. Naw woman in the warld wide, Sae wretched now as me. When we encounter this music for the first time we imagine that the Scottish widow without orphans is galloping as she sings. She is a beggar who has taken many weeks to walk to the low country. The melody ascribed to her lyric by Burns himself is melancholic and slow. After the Scottish troops are routed she sets off on her charger and brings the news of this catastrophic defeat to the wider world, more specifically to us, the audience of Myrten.

In fact she seems to be telling us about the terrible sequence of events without dismounting, and as her horse moves through the stalls. The postlude has her galloping off into the distance as she prepares to spread word of English infamy in all directions. It is also possible that the accompaniment depicts only anger and outrage, that these triplets represent stifled sobs and stabs of resentment where the turbulence of the music represents her emotions rather than her physical movements — on horseback for example.

Schumann sees the Scots as a warlike race, an impression that a reading of Ossian or an acquaintance with the Schubert settings of Ossian which were published between and would have reinforced. It is as if an almost involuntary smile passes over her lips as she adumbrates her possessions — Donald having being the chief of them. There is good reason here for the performers to allow a short fermata in the music.

The shift into C major for the continuation of the words is wonderfully effective; here the submediant has the effect of a plagal passage in a song which suddenly refers to God or the Church. The advent of Charlie Stuart has occasioned all this horror and loss, but we are left in no doubt by the tone of the music that he is a hero and that his cause is still a shining one. She does not blame the Bonnie Prince but goes on to give a brief outline of the way in which the outcome of Culloden was a victory of evil over good. Defiance is the keynote here, with tears fought back.

We sense helplessness and desperation allied to a grim determination to set things aright somehow. The portrait is bleak but is shot through with humanity and even touches of rueful humour. Schumann has miraculously caught the Scottish fighting spirit and the national grit — perhaps here better than in any of his Burns settings. Clara was hereby commanded to be as stoic in adversity as this heroine: Since loving him I love you all the more.

Let me press you to my heart And kiss you, as he kisses me. Only since loving him Do I truly love you now, For giving me my life That has become so radiant. Here the bride-to-be addresses her mother. She married him in ; at the time she was nineteen and her husband thirty-one. She bore him five children four boys and a girl — Clara of course in the eight years they were married.

Wieck was impossibly authoritarian with more than a touch of fanaticism; his personality seems to have been too much for Marianne to bear. When they separated in Clara was only five. There is no record of especially close relations between Clara and her stepmother. Contact between mother and daughter was amiable enough, but at a distance.

No, the person to whom Schumann imagines Clara addressing her pleas for release was her father, Friedrich Wieck: We sense that the invisible interlocutor in this song is not making it at all easy for the singer. Between the verses she or he, if an imaginary Wieck has postulated that the bride-to-be is ungrateful, and that she is not dutiful enough in her filial love.

The riposte is spirited; she offers to kiss her parent as she has learned to with her paramour. Perhaps this would not be such a good idea! Beneath this the piano writing falls in sighing quavers, a cadenza of a kind, and the equivalent of a shiver of rapture which runs down the spine as well as the stave. For her final bout of pleading the girl suggests that her discovery of romantic love has only now made her grateful for her very existence — something she owes to her mother.

But this is the only moment of forced prosody in a song which perfectly conveys the mixed tone of affection and impatience with which children address their parents; it sounds improvised, as if the singer were thinking on her feet as to how best to explain her feelings and justify them. This miniature ends with a passage with a vocal peroration a cadential phrase encompassing a high A which is as radiant as the words which have inspired it.

Chopin - Etude Op.25 No.12 in C minor: Ocean sheet music for Piano

The postlude is a long one, especially in the context of this short song. This beautiful, tender piano music perfectly conveys the physical rapprochement that is beyond words and explanations. It is enough that one realises that the singer has at last got through to her parent. Memories of the caresses she has enjoyed with her beloved fuel a new-found emotional freedom which enables her to establish a more spontaneous means of communication with her family.

Rarely does Schumann show himself to be a more understanding and tender commentator on human nature. There is a stillness in this single-page song which suggests that the singer is speaking not face to face, but rather heart to heart. Once again we hear only her side of the conversation: The girl is more or less asking for permission to embark on a physical relationship within wedlock of course! How will this love affair end? How will things turn out? Are you sure that your feelings will not change? Sweetly steadfast, the girl can envisage neither change, nor the end of something which seems eternal.

I do not yet know, she says, how things will change. Die Wiege der Freiheit, des Mutes ist dort. Wohin ich auch wandre, wo immer ich bin: Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow; Farewell to the straths and green valleys below; Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods;.

This is probably the least interesting song in the cycle from the psychological point of view.

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It is not a conventional love song and its placement in Myrten is also hard to justify. The possible link between Mendelssohn, the Highlands and this song is touched on earlier in this booklet. What the composer does achieve on the other hand is a vocal melody which, in its progressions of I-IV-I-V, has something of the air of a genuine Scottish folksong.

The piano ritornello which is heard at the beginning of each verse, and also as a postlude, suggests hearty annoyance at having to leave rather, than nostalgia or tears in the eye. In fact this music has the rallying qualities of a communal song, and Schumann possibly envisaged this lied as less of a personal statement than as a rollicking drinking ditty. Make sure that you go to the Lowlands; There, my boy, you may steal; Steal money and steal happiness And to the Highlands come home to me!

One should not perhaps blame Gerhard and thus Schumann for not capturing the tone of independence and strength in these gleefully amoral words which flout all authority. Quite apart from the idea of bringing up a child to aspire to illegal activities, Burns is alone in his time for allowing his characters as he allowed himself to glory in the joys of parenthood out of wedlock. The poet seems to have linked the joys of sex with the pleasures of fatherhood; his own illegitimate children were a matter of pride and affection for him in an age which very often treated them otherwise.

This mother seems completely unworried about the illegitimacy of her son; instead she seems positively to relish the memory of his conception. It is a crucial detail like this which is lost, and had to be lost, in the German translation. The poet himself disowned these words at first: It was later said that these were originally Gaelic which Burns had merely rendered into low country dialect, but his own hand in this poem seems apparent in every delicious line. Schumann composes a charming strophic song — a little lullaby with ethnic touches. Those winsome syncopations which leap upwards in fourths, fifths and then sixths in the vocal line seem to capture the lilt of Scottish speech; the composer may even have imagined that the dominant pedal which pervades the bass clef almost throughout evoked the drone of the pipes.

But on the whole the music cannot be said to cross over the borders of Biedermeier prettiness: Both simple and vocally challenging, this music contains delight a-plenty, as well as tenderness; but in this cosy atmosphere where Robert surely projects Clara and his own children, yet unborn, there is little trace of the wild northern culture that spawned these words, nor of the gloriously shameless hussy who sings them.

But let the strain be wild and deep And deprived of every joy! I tell thee, minstrel, I must weep, Or this heavy heart will be consumed! It has been been nursed by sorrow, And ached for long in sleepless silence, And now it is doomed to know the worst, Let it break or let it be healed in song. The texts quickly became popular throughout Europe and were translated into various languages. This song is about the suppression of pent-up emotion; the singer seeks release in tears that can only be provoked by music.

Piano-vocal score (German and french texts)

This plaint is sung by an anguished Saul and it is, in turn, a royal command for music of another kind that will bring forth the weeping that will assuage his pain. The petition and its response are thus telescoped into a single song which occupies a central place in Myrten. It is undoubtedly the grandest number in the cycle, a halfway point in a work which celebrates the central role which music has played in the unfolding story of Robert and Clara.

The composer has paid ample tribute to Clara throughout the cycle, but here he salutes his vocation the restorative powers of music itself: The tortured opening — waves of quavers which descend the stave in what may seem to be chromatic disarray, but which are cleverly fashioned to make an elaborate six-bar upbeat to the appearance of the singer — strikes an immediately exotic note. From the beginning we are aware that Schumann wishes to write a piece which consciously attempts to capture the Weltschmerz characteristic of Jewish music. He might well have visited a synagogue in Leipzig, a town with a famous cantorial tradition; it is difficult to believe that he evoked this tone without inside knowledge or aural reminiscences of some kind.

With the change into E major the piano announces a new melody of ineffable sweetness: Instead there is a change of direction which suddenly steers the piano writing into the calm waters of C major, a key which is established by gently rippling quavers; these are the seraphically neutral background on which the voice re-imposes itself in the mood of the previous aria. This time the singer is required to dig deeper into the lower registers of his voice, but this is music fit to calm the most fevered breast, and it makes the same haunting impression as before. The final section of the song unites its two aspects: The final verdict is that there are grounds for hope: The literal translation given above can explain what the poem means line by line, but it can scarcely make sense unless one understands that it is the letter H embedded in the original German key-words which is the cause of all the word play.

Schumann has something up his sleeve that few English poets would have understood. The letter H is the musical letter in German for the musical note B natural for a German the letter B signifies B flat. The answer to the puzzle is blurted out in advance by the octave B naturals in semibreves with which the song opens. After this we have nothing less than an almost non-stop patter song which dances through the staves with twinkling glee. It is now time for the answer to the riddle to be given. Schumann had originally intended to set this word for four-part chorus, a thoroughly impractical touch from the point of view of performance.

Instead he left the note B or H bare on the stave without a word attached to it. This enables the singer to vocalise the note or hum it. This is a joke that can only be made in music and there is nothing else like it in the lieder repertoire. Most audiences, however, are none the wiser. Nun rasten hier, mein Gondolier. Ins Boot die Ruder! Now stay here, my gondolier, gently into the boat with your oar! While I climb the balcony, you keep watch beneath. Oh, if we devoted ourselves to heaven as eagerly As we seek favours of fair women, we could be angels!

Imprisonment or a duel could well be the result. Casanova was famously imprisoned in Venice in Here is the easy lilt of Irish laissez-faire, outrageously confident, and charming in its freely confessional tone. We begin with music of languid sensuality. A dotted figuration in the left hand connected to an off-beat crotchet in the right is a marvellous evocation of an oar pulling through the dark waters and then surfacing in the treble stave, all in a single gliding movement; above this a ghost of a curvaceous Italian serenade is nonchalantly traced, as if the pianist, an invisible companion on this journey, were allowing the fingers of his right hand idly to skim the surface of the lagoon.

With as much cheek as charm, and with the twinkling eye which goes together with the shrugged shoulder, the poet admits to the life of a wastrel. Singers sometimes allow themselves to end this song in a mood of dreamy reverie, as if all thought of mischief had been supplanted by the charm of sitting in the gondola and basking in the Venetian moonlight. Perhaps Schumann meant Florestan to be overpowered by Eusebius at this stage, but I doubt it: Nun rasten hier, mein Gondolier! Das Boot liegt bereit! The boat lies ready! O come now, while the moon Is still covered in clouds, Let us flee, my love, Across the lagoons!

The little ritornello for piano which opens each verse and also serves as a postlude is a charming inspiration: The vocal melody is infectiously carefree, and the chords in alternating hands evoke the strum of an accompanying mandoline. The modulation to B minor in the middle of the verses the song is strictly strophic and over in a trice adds a brief note of suspense that suggests intrigue and danger. The German version of the poem shows what a very good translator Freiligrath was.

O come now, while the moon Is covered in clouds, Let us flee, my love, Across the lagoons! Once peace is declared she is ready to reward her victorious lover with every physical comfort. The implication of the translation is that if this wife sees her husband in battle it is from very close quarters, and that she is equally involved in the battle. It seems that translator and composer, transfixed by Ossianic myth, have been not been able to envisage a more genteel side to the modern Scottish warrior class.