Together We Stand

Some say music has an incredible power. The power to heal, to touch, to invoke the most powerful of emotions ranging from the most extreme joy to the deepest sorrow, and to evoke memories once thought forgotten. While it is true that orchestral music stirs up these feelings, vocal music is exceptionally powerful at this; the combination of text and melody working together systematically to create something much more than what it seems. A truly great composer of a vocal work is one who can take these elements and make something magical out of them. Robert Schumann is one such composer.
The first Lied out of Schumann's song cycle Dichterliebe (literally "poet love"), "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai" ("In the wonderful/beautiful month of May"), is a prime example of how music and text can synchronize so beautifully, one can get lost in a reverie just by listening to such song. The text was written by Heinrich Heine, whose text, in fact, was used by Schumann in the entire Dichterliebe song cycle. Heine was especially known for his sense of irony in poems; specifically, his ability to create a bittersweet "happy yet sad" feeling. The lyrics to "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai" speak of all the rosebuds bursting open ("alle Knospen sprangen"), all the birds singing ("alle Vögel sangen"), and seem to imply a cheerful spring setting in the "beautiful month of May."
If one looks more closely, however, there is a hint of sadness to this otherwise content scene. Heine waits until the very last line of the poem to bring up the words "longing" and "desire" ("Sehnen und Verlangen"), both words that have a not-so-happy connotation. The feeling of longing, or pining, usually stems from a feeling of unrequited love or heartbreak, in which a person is longing for something/someone which he cannot have for some reason. The same is true for the feeling of desire- when something is desired, it is probably unattainable for the person. In the last line of the first stanza of the poem, the speaker informs us "love burst out" in his heart ("da ist in meinem Herzen die Liebe aufgegangen"). If love burst out in a good way, however, the speaker would not be feeling longing and desire toward the end of the poem. Thus, we can conclude that something very wrong happened in this person's love life. If we look at the following fifteen Dichterliebe Lieder, we can see the speaker struggling with this. He says in the second Lied, "Aus meinen Tränen sprießen", that his tears sprout forth "many blooming flowers" and that, if she will only love him once more, he will send her flowers and the nightingale will sing at her window. At the very end of the cycle, he speaks of a great coffin he will bury his love in. Obviously, this guy is not in very good shape, even though Heine (as well as the speaker) might try and fool us by putting on a façade of "happy springtime flowers and birds".
Robert Schumann must have faced a challenge to make his music fit the text set by Heine so perfectly; to allow all the facets of the multi-layer emotions to shine through. He firstly sets the song in A major. or is it really A major? There are implications of a minor key throughout the piece, giving it a haunting and unsettling feel. Are things really as joyous as they seem? Obviously not, we can deduce from strictly the accompaniment itself. In fact, the ever-present E-sharps throughout the treble clef imply F-sharp minor rather than A major. Toward the end of each verse, we also hear a G-natural, implying D major, of all things. Since it is not a normal occurrence to cadence in what would be the subdominant key (or submediant if we truly are in F-sharp minor), something is amiss. The overall effect of this tonal ambiguity indicates that all is not perfect, and therefore, the listener feels a definite unsettlement. To add to the complications, the piano part ends on a dominant seventh chord in the relative minor (C#7)! What kind of happy song would do that?
Another tactic Schumann uses to create moods to go along with the text is his usage of ascending and descending melodic lines. For example, during the lyrics "im wunderschönen Monat Mai", the melody sounds like it is clearly in A major. This makes sense because the listener thinks "major key, hmm, must be happy. yep, wonderful month of May." However, when the speaker begins to speak of how he's feeling physically ("in meinem Herzen"; "ich habe gestanden), the melody and accompaniment simultaneously become less and less sure of their key signatures, just as the speaker becomes less and less sure of how he's feeling. Ultimately, when he speaks of his longing and desire in his heart, the song has now completely wound up in D major- yet only for a measure. This shows just how uncertain the speaker really is of his current situation, and the way the piano has a back and forth motion (the bassline arpeggiates upwards until a leap to the higher treble register and stepwise downward motion) tugs at the listener's heartstrings. It sounds almost as if Schumann is trying to literally "pull" the listener into the heart of the speaker, so we can feel what he is feeling and empathize with his sorrows.
After looking at the combined elements of melody and text in "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai", one begins to truly appreciate the song. It is such a song that the listener might become so truly enthralled with it that she can forget her own life and problems for the moment. When a piece of music can accomplish this feat, it is truly a work of art. It is possible that, were either the music or the poem by itself, the effect would be similar. It would not, however, be as powerful as the effect of those two fundamentals combined and working in sync with the other. I, personally, have become so enraptured with this particular piece that I have played a recording of it practically nonstop for the past few days, ever since hearing it for the first time. The glorious mixture of Heinrich Heine's beautiful poetry with Robert Schumann's gorgeous melody is a thousand times more effective and awe-inspiring than either of these components would be alone.