A Poet's Love

As promising as circumstances may have seemed for the young Schumann, not all was going well. Taken by the Romantic malaise of Weltschmerz ("weariness of the world"),⁷ Schumann found himself catching syphilis from an illicit affair with a brief lover known only as Christel, for which he would later be treated with arsenic. Presumably unrelated was the inner turmoil he found himself suffering, having auditory hallucinations, insomnia and sudden onsets of angst, memory loss and breathlessness. ⁸ After moving to Heidelberg, he experimented with a chiroplast, a device he referred to as a "cigar mechanism" that was meant to strengthen his middle finger, but instead caused it to go numb and ruined his hopes for a piano career. A brief engagement to Ernestine von Fricken (another student of Wieck's) was called off at the end of 1835 when she was found to be illegitimate, and his love for Clara Wieck was stymied for years by her father's apparent desire to find for her a wealthy groom who might finance lucrative concert tours.⁹

Schumann's pursuit of Clara was undoubtedly the seed for what would be called his most admired song cycle. Dichterliebe, op.48, based on poems from Heinrich Heine's Lyrisches Intermezzo in Buch der Lieder, 1st edition (1823), tells a story of love lost and the process of coming to terms with it. Of all love song cycles, Dichterliebe may be the most realistic, accurately depicting the typical love affair and its typical conclusion¹⁰. Its use of harmony as the preeminent device in the cycle and the simplicity of the tunes deftly depicts Schumann's mastery of writing lieder, and fulfills Schubert's requirement that lied "recreate in a subtle musical realization the most delicate effects of the poem."¹¹