And then came "Widmung"

In Clarence Brown's Song of Love (1947), Paul Henreid as Robert Schumann introduces the newly composed "Widmung" to Katharine Hepburn as Clara; later Henry Daniell as Liszt plays his version, and finally Clara has her turn with it. (All the piano-playing is by Arthur Rubinstein, whom we'll hear playing the Liszt version straight through in the click-through.)

by Ken

Among the great creative feats on record, I'm not sure that any surpasses what is often referred to as Robert Schumann's Year of Song, 1840, the year in which he married Clara Wieck, which we talked about back in April 2010. As Eric Sams has put it, "In the 12 months beginning 1 February 1 1840 he wrote over 160 vocal works, including at least 135 of the 246 solo songs in the complete Peters Edition."

Near the head of the list is the collection of 26 songs published as Schumann's Op. 25, Myrthen (myrtles -- "European evergreen shrubs with white or rosy flowers that are often used to make bridal wreaths"), which the composer presented to Clara as a wedding gift and of course dedicated to her. And at the head of Myrthen is "Widmung" ("Dedication"), the exhilarating song we previewed Friday night.

SCHUMANN: "Widmung" ("Dedication"), Op. 25, No. 1


Baritone Hermann Prey, with pianist Leonard Hokanson (1975)

German text by Friedrich Rückert

You my soul, you my heart,
you my joy, o you my pain,
you my world in which I live,
my heaven you in which I soar,
o you my grave in which
I have buried my sorrows forever.

You are rest; you are peace;
you were destined for me by heaven.
That you love me makes me feel worthy;
your glance has transfigured me;
you lift me, loving, above myself --
my good spirit, my better "I"!

You my soul, you my heart,
you my joy, o you my pain,
you my world, in which I live,
my heaven you, in which I soar --
my good spirit, my better "I"!

AS I MENTIONED FRIDAY NIGHT, IT WAS A RECITAL
THIS WEEK BY PIANIST ANNE-MARIE McDERMOTT . . .

Preview: The singular exhilaration of Schumann's "Dedication," and of Liszt's

SCHUMANN: "Widmung" ("Dedication"), Op. 25, No. 1

You my soul, you my heart,
you my joy, o you my pain,
you my world in which I live,
my heaven you in which I soar,
o you my grave in which
I have buried my sorrows forever.

You are rest; you are peace;
you were destined for me by heaven.
That you love me makes me feel worthy;
your glance has transfigured me;
you lift me, loving, above myself --
my good spirit, my better "I"!

You my soul, you my heart,
you my joy, o you my pain,
you my world, in which I live,
my heaven you, in which I soar --
my good spirit, my better "I"!

-- German text by Friedrich Rückert

by Ken

This past week I attended a recital by pianist Anne-Marie McDermott with a reasonably interesting-looking program. As it turned out, the most satisfying music-making, at least for me, was the several minutes devoted to, of all things, Franz Liszt's solo-piano expansion of Robert Schumann's singularly exhilarating little song "Widmung" ("Dedication").

By "little" song I don't mean that it's in any way small-scaled emotionally. Quite the contrary, as I expect you've noticed if you watched the performance above. All I mean is that its running time in performance is normally a mere two minutes, give or take. Naturally Liszt couldn't leave well enough alone, and had to add expansions of his own after each of the song's basic sections. (The song, you'll notice, is basically in good old A-B-A format, with a cunning slip from A-flat major to E major, at the start of the B section, "You are rest; you are peace" -- at 0:29 of the song performance above, 1:41 of the Liszt solo-piano rendering below.)

IN SUNDAY'S MAIN POST, I want to talk a bit about that recital experience, but for tonight I thought we'd just hear "Widmung" both ways, in interesting performances I found online: the breathless one above of Schumann's original (with an odd truncation of the piano's opening-bar introduction) by the American soprano Jessye Norman (born 1945); and below, Liszt's solo-piano rendering-and-amplification in a 1985 recording by that wonderfully poetic Pittsburgh-born piano pyrotechnician par excellence, Earl Wild (1915-2010).

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