A Poet's Love

The final song, "Die alten, bösen Lieder," is the poet's ultimate intention to take all of his pain and sorrow enclose them in a coffin to be flung into the sea. Symbolically, it would take twelve giants to handle this coffin, an image used by Heine to describe the crushing strain of an intolerable burden.³³ As the introduction states the immensity of the task and the song explains what must be done, the music moves to the dominant­but not directly­and the giants march off with the coffin and dispose of it. As it sinks, the poet is at last silent in sad acceptance as the piano provides a comforting postlude that brings the tonality of the cycle to D major (enharmonically, C major), the dominant of the first tonality in the cycle.

According to Stephen Walsh, it was not Schumann's practice to end a work like a song cycle on such an ironic note, but he turns the irony around and maintain that the love, for all the pain it caused, had a function.³⁴ The postlude leaves the cycle in a sense of endless renewal.³⁵ Indeed, Schumann treated the work as a "unity, a convincing whole, with wide- ranging and carefully thought-out key scheme."³⁷ Not to suppose that Schumann was in any way clairvoyant, but the concept of "coming to terms" with one's love did resolve positively for him--they were wed September 12, 1840.