Dichterliebe Op. 48, Lenau-Lieder und Requiem Op. 90, Wesendonck Lieder

Robert Schumann was the most confessional of composers. And many of the songs from his great Liederjahr of 1840 were in essence love songs to Clara Wieck, to whom he had become secretly engaged just before her eighteenth birthday in 1837. In them he could express overtly what had been merely implicit in his piano music: his fears and longing, his passion and devotion, his pain at their separation, his vision of sexual and spiritual fulfilment, and his recurrent fears of losing her. ‘Oh Clara, what bliss it is to write songs. I can’t tell you how easy it has become for me…it is music of an entirely different kind which doesn’t have to pass through the fingers – far more melodious and direct.’ So wrote Schumann to his fiancée in February 1840. By the end of that month he had composed the Heine Liederkreis, Op. 24, most of the Myrthen (‘Myrtles’) anthology and a dozen other songs. After a brief respite, Schumann’s creative euphoria continued into May, a truly miraculous month that produced the Eichendorff Liederkreis, Op. 39 and Dichterliebe (‘Poet’s Love’), in which he again turned to the pithy verses of Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder.