He did not write his first song until 1840; that is, until almost the end of his thirtieth year. When he did take to song-writing he wrote furiously. There was a reason for it. For after several years of passionate love-making to his Clara, and of almost more passionate stubbornness on the part of her father, the young people took the law into their own hands (quite literally, since they had to invoke the courts) and were married in 1840. The first happiness of married life and the anticipations leading up to it seem to have generated in Schumann that demand for a more personal and intimate expression than his beloved piano could offer. Though he had never been a rapid writer he now wrote many songs at a stretch, as many as three or four in a day. He seemed unable to exhaust what he had to say. By the time the year was over he had composed more than a hundred songs. He declared himself satisfied with what he had done. He might come back to song-writing, he said; but he wasn’t sure.
He did come back to it, but not until his creative powers were on the wane. In the last six or seven years of his life he wrote more than a hundred new songs, but hardly one of them rises above mediocrity. All the songs that have made him famous, and all that are worthy of his genius, date from the year of his marriage.
Just what, in a technical way, Schumann was trying to do in his first songs we do not know. It is probable that the ammunition for his unusual harmonic progressions and his freer declamatory style came from his own piano pieces. Fundamentally we know he admired Schubert almost without reserve, having already spent the best part of a year in Vienna, unearthed a number of Schubert scores, and spread Schubert’s reputation to the best of his ability. Yet there is hardly one of Schumann’s songs that could for a moment be mistaken for Schubert’s, so different was the musical genesis of the two composers in their song-writing. Schumann is a part of the Schubert tradition; but he is just so much further developed (whether for the better or for the worse may be left to the theorists).
With Schumann the tendency of detailed musical description is carried into a greater number of songs and into a greater variety of details. The declamatory element increases, both in the number of songs which it dominates and in the extent to which it influences the more melodic songs. The part of the piano is tremendously increased, so much so that the _Waldesgespräch_ has been called a symphonic poem with recitative accompaniment by the voice. The harmony, while lacking in Schubert’s entrancingly simple enharmonic changes, is more unusual, showing in particular a tendency to avoid the perfect cadence, which would have hurt Franz Schubert’s ear for a time. Schumann’s songs are commonly called ‘psychological,’ and this much-abused word may be allowed to stand in the sense that Schumann offered a separate statement of the separate strands of an emotional state, while Schubert more usually expressed the emotional state pure and simple. No songs could be more subjective than some of Schubert’s later ones, but many, including Schumann’s, have been more complex in emotional content. But perhaps the first thing one feels on approaching the Schumann songs is that they are consciously wrought, that they are the work of a thinker. This is no doubt partly because Schumann, with all his gifts, did not have at his disposal Schubert’s wonderfully rich melody and was obliged to weigh and consider. But it is also quite to be expected from the nature of the man. While Schumann’s songs are by no means so rich as Schubert’s in point of melody, there are a few of his tunes, especially the famous _Widmung_, which can stand beside any in point of pure musical beauty. Still, it must be admitted that Schumann’s truly great songs, even from the output of 1840, are decidedly limited in number.