Schumann's Shoebox

[amw]

True, but I'm surprised that the latest Henle edition (among others) has fallen victim to that particular typo.

[Madiel]

True, but I'm surprised that the latest Henle edition (among others) has fallen victim to that particular typo.

Henle? Wow.

*goes to look*

Yep, and they are quite definite about it. Everywhere in the critical commentary PDF it's "Leid" and in the English part it gets translated as "Sorrow", so they know what they're doing. But the old editions on IMSLP including the one edited by Clara all say "Lied". Henle says nothing about it so it doesn't look as if they are resolving a controversy or anything.

[Madiel]

I've decided to email them. See what they say.

[amw]

Definitely interested. It seems like in addition to the first editions they had access to an autograph held in a private collection, which must be where the title comes from, but they could only get hold of a handwritten copy by someone else.

[Madiel]

The first doesn't make much sense in German, really... And knowing Schumann even the least bit, around the time these were composed (1830 -- or any time, really), "Leid ohne Ende" makes all the send. Compare, in mood, to op.68, for example ("Erster Verlust"). I find it is fairly unambiguously "Leid ohne Ende" and everything else is an over-correction from a non-native speakers that somehow got stuck.

Um, how is Clara Schumann/Breitkopf and Hartel a non-native speaker? And what exactly doesn't make sense about "song without end"? If you can have a song without words (Lied ohne Worter, Mendelssohn), I fail to see what's wrong about a song without end.

And frankly I don't know what's sorrowful about it. "Erster Verlust" is in a minor key. The piece we are talking about is in a major key, so I'm doing a comparison of mood and not getting any similarity in mood at all.

[Jo498]

While it is a possible typo in either direction it is very unlikely that a German editor in the 19th century would not have spotted such an error. Nr.2 is titled "Leides Ahnung", so it would be really strange if Clara or a person at Breitkopf would have misread "Leid" instead of "Lied" in the later piece
I definitely disagree that "Lied ohne Ende" is senseless or even odd in German and I am afraid that it could really be ambiguous unless there is a clear autograph or sth. like that. (Therefore it is strange that it is not adressed in a critical edition.)
For me the piece is not sad enough for "endless sorrow" but "song without end" is not obviously fitting either (it would rather be applied to a round or sth. like that, apparently there was a student song in the mid-19th century called "Lied ohne Ende" but this would have been a folksy and maybe ribald song with many stanzas, nothing as poignant as Schumann's piece.

op.124 is a collection of older pieces from the 1830s, I am not sure one can easily argue biographically here.

[Madiel]

I can in fact find several references on German websites to "Lied ohne Ende" that have nothing to do with Schumann, including the student song and a later composition called "Ein Lied ohne Ende", so it clearly makes perfect sense in German.

EDIT: Oh, I even found audio for another one. Track 4/Track 12, depending on whether you want vocals. https://www.kindermusikkaufhaus.de/kuenstler/beate-lambert/von-liebe-umgeben/

[amw]

The Fantasiestücke connection also seems to me to make "Lied ohne Ende" a more likely title, considering that it shares a key and approximate tempo with (and is in some ways a counterpart to) the final piece of that set, Ende vom Lied. Afaik the piece is dated to mid 1837 and was found in the same sketchbook as sketches for the Fantasiestücke.

(The title is fitting in that the piece is based on a 4 bar melody that is repeated and varied but never comes to a conventional conclusion. Of course Schumann could have also meant the piece to be "endlessly sorrowful" and maybe would have enjoyed the present day ambiguity.)

[Madiel]

With Mendelssohn it's Lieder ohne Worte...

Seriously?  Lieder is plural, Lied is singular, and you can quite readily find both depending on whether one piece is presented or several.

I am genuinely questioning your German at this point, after a remark like that.

EDIT: And in the case of op.109, you're just flat out wrong. It has been quite happily called "Lied ohne Worte" since its publication.

[bwv 1080]

https://www.youtube.com/v/TYdxYpRMlRE

This was a direct inspiration for RS's op 28, particularly the duet texture in the 3rd mvmt (at about the 6:30 mark) tying to the duet in Op 28 no 2

[Madiel]

Henle's reply:

The Henle edition of the "Albumblätter" gives no comment to the title of no. 8 because all disposable sources (the engraver's copy corrected by Schumann, the original edition also corrected by Schumann) have "Leid ohne Ende". However, we have no access to the autograph in a private collection, and so we cannot indicate the title of this source.
But we guess rather an error in the Breitkopf edition of the Complete Works than a different reading by Clara taken from the autograph.

So they are saying the now far more common "Lied" is not on the original edition. Interesting.

[Madiel]

Also interesting: I've just found a PhD paper saying that Lied ohne Ende (the alternative "Lied" title is noted) contains a motive representing Clara also found in other Schumann pieces such as op.17. Certainly I can find other references to such a motif existing.

It attributes this to longing for Clara during a period when they were kept separated by her father.

[milk]

I see a good recommendation for this on musicweb. Anyone else heard this?

[SurprisedByBeauty]

I see a good recommendation for this on musicweb. Anyone else heard this?

Am in the process.

#morninglistening to #Schubert on @piasclassicsusa:http://amzn.to/2rlxagD 
w/#MathiasGoerne & the finest artistic a... http://ift.tt/2rl27kd

[milk]

Am in the process.

#morninglistening to #Schubert on @piasclassicsusa:http://amzn.to/2rlxagD 
w/#MathiasGoerne & the finest artistic a... http://ift.tt/2rl27kd

Let us know if your socks are knocked off. 

[SurprisedByBeauty]

Let us know if your socks are knocked off.

Will do. (It would take a lot, right now, for it to knock 'em off, though, because I pulled the knee-highs all the way up and tucked them in under the Lederhosen.  )

[milk]

Will do. (It would take a lot, right now, for it to knock 'em off, though, because I pulled the knee-highs all the way up and tucked them in under the Lederhosen.  )

[Eli]

Recently getting into Schumann. His piano quartet has blown me away. I prefer it to the quintet, which is also great. The 4th movement is amazing..Being May I've also given Dichterliebe many hearings. So intense!

[Madiel]

I've started a chronological exploration of Schumann (partly because I've just bought the Hyperion song box set, which is presented chronologically).

Putting together a reasonably decent chronology was the first challenge: opus numbers are frequently no help, though in fact a surprisingly large amount of information about composition dates is available thanks to Schumann's very extensive writing.

Right now I'm listening to Papillons, and I feel like I finally understand it these days. But is there any precedent for music like this? To my ears it's a truly astonishing work, with all these little fragments of waltzes and polonaises welded together. I can't think of anything I've heard pre-Schumann that resembles it, though maybe that's just my limited knowledge.

[amw]

Papillons was not only a revolutionary and probably unprecedented work but also one that, in its extreme atomisation and "jump cuts" between different types of music, is without successors until the twentieth century avant-garde. (Ok, a few other 19th-century composers did imitate it—Dvořák's Silhouettes for one. To my ears less successfully, because Dvořák demands too much of a structure from his materials.) Like I said I can't immediately think of any precedents either, and Schumann wasn't listening to music when he was writing it; he was reading novels by Jean Paul.

He took the Romantic formlessness of the novel to extremes: Schlegel called his novels soliloquies, in which he makes his readers take part [...]. Jean Paul habitually played with a multitude of droll and bizarre ideas: his work is characterized by wild metaphors as well as by digressive and partly labyrinthine plots.