Les amours du poète Lieder

Description

Poems of Love (Dichterliebe) or rather fleeting images of the beloved — real or dreamed, sweet and terrible. This cycle of lieder on selected poems by Heine does not trace a chronology like L'Amour et la vie d'une femme, but it does not unfold either in an enigmatic circle of fragments like the Liederkreis op. 39. From the lovely month of May to the Marian icon of Cologne, the love lyricism of the first six lieder is at once contemplative and ambiguous: listen to the piano postludes. No spring for the disappointed lover, but an amalgam of dreaminess and biting irony: Ich grolle nicht (no. 7) opens a new series of five uneasy lieder, sometimes sarcastic, where the ruin of the idyll means the separation between a solitary self and the world all around, as the piano divorces itself from the voice (no. 9). A second hinge with a summer morning, gently sinister (no. 12), which foreshadows the postlude of no. 16. Between these two lieder, the durations stretch out, themes reappear (the garden, the dream, the dance), in an increasingly strange atmosphere of fantasy. A heavy coffin is carried briskly to the sea, containing the poet’s desires and songs: the end. By his concise genius of equivocation, between fantasy and derision, Heine was Schumann’s brother, who had originally included in Dichterliebe other poems by him: Dein Angesicht, the face of the beloved already seen dead, or the bizarre ghosts of Mein Wagen rollet langsam. The Liederkreis op. 24 (Heine still) is a twin cycle, intertwining depressive meditation (no. 3), vehement farewells (no. 5), tender metaphors of the coffin (nos. 4 and 9). In three short lieder that condense a story of unhappy love, Der arme Peter illustrates an art of turning the simplicity of popular tone into a funereal abyss. But beyond Heine, the ecstatic horizon of death (Requiem op. 90, after a Latin lament attributed to Héloïse before the tomb of Abélard) or the mysterious communication with the spirit of the absent (Geisternähe) deeply animate Schumann’s voices. Yet nothing is more mobile than the invention of his lieder. Beside the broad lyrical gesture (Widmung, Der Nussbaum), there abound poems in half-voice (Ständchen, Loreley), at the edge of silence (Alte Laute), but also floral pieces, penetrating (Röselein, Röselein!) or sprightly (Märzveilchen, Er ist's) — so many fanciful outlines, like the imaginings of the fortune-teller (Die Kartenlegerin). (Jean-Philippe Grosperrin)