Dichterliebe

Dichterliebe, 'A Poet's Love' (composed 1840), is the best-known song cycle of Robert Schumann (Op. 48). The texts for the 16 songs come from the Lyrisches Intermezzo of Heinrich Heine, composed 1822–1823, published as part of the poet's Das Buch der Lieder. Following the song-cycles of Franz Schubert (Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise), those of Schumann constitute part of the central core of the genre in musical literature.

Author of the sarcastic Die Romantische Schule, Heine was a vocal critic of German romanticism, though he himself is often described as a quintessentially Romantic writer. In some of his poetry, and notably in Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen of 1844, the romantic lyrical conventions are used as vessels to deploy content of biting, satirical nature. Schumann's Dichterliebe was composed before Heine's Deutschland and does not appear to portray this ironic dimension: scholarship is divided as to what extent Schumann intended to express it.

Heine's Lyrisches Intermezzo consists of a verse Prologue and 65 poems. The Prologue (Es war 'mal ein Ritter trübselig und stumm – There once was a Knight, woeful and silent..) tells of the sorrowful knight that sits gloomily in his house all day, but by night is visited by his fairy (nixie) bride, and dances with her until daylight returns him to his little poet's room (Poeten-stübchen). The 65 poems follow, of which the 16 of the Dichterliebe are a selection. The conclusion of it all is that he is going to put the old bad songs and dreams, all his sorrowful love and suffering into a huge coffin, which twelve giants will throw into the sea. This catastrophe is slightly reminiscent of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, in which the hero ends by drowning himself in the brook which he has followed through the cycle.

Das Buch der Lieder was given its second edition, with preface from Paris, in 1837, the songs were composed in 1840, and the first edition of Dichterliebe was published in two volumes by Peters, in Leipzig, 1844. Though Schumann originally set 20 songs to Heine's poems, only 16 of the 20 compositions were included in the first edition. (Dein Angesicht (Heine no 5) is one of the omitted items. Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, On Wings of Song (Heine no 9), is best known from a setting of Felix Mendelssohn's).

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