Classical Music | Contralto

Recorded on 12/31/1969, uploaded on 04/05/2015

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

... The first song describes the psychological state of the woman after first seeing her beloved. His image appears always before her (“Wo ich hin nur blicke / seh' ich ihn allein”) as if in a dream, while everything else appears dark (“Sonst ist licht- und farblos / alles um mich her”). She believes herself blind, because all she can see is him (“Seit ich ihn gesehen / glaub' ich blind zu sein”). Driven to solitude, the company and frivolity of her sisters no longer interests her. Schumann sets the two-stanza poem in a straightforward strophic manner. It begins unassumingly with a simple accompanimental figure in B-flat major. This motif will appear again in the final measures, giving the entire song the sense of being a vision, passing with fleeting pleasure across the listener’s ears, much in the same way the face of the woman’s beloved passes wistfully before her eyes. On the lines “Wie im wachen Traume / schwebt sein Bild mir vor” (“As in a waking dream / his image hovers before me”), the music alternates between dominant and tonic harmonies. The vocal line, outlining a poignant ascending tritone, leaps up to its highest point, only to glide slowly back down to the note on which in began. The bass line, meanwhile, mimics the voice with a somewhat free reversion of the melody. In the final lines of the first stanza, “Taucht aus tiefstem Dunkel / heller nur empor” (“Emerging up from deepest darkness / brighter in ascent”), shadows momentarily pass over the music as it briefly touches upon the key of C minor, while suspensions obscure the otherwise chiefly diatonic harmonies. An expressive downward leap of a major seventh accompanies the word “tiefstem” (“deepest”). Later the surety of a definitive cadence is thwarted by the deceptive motion towards G minor of the piano.    Joseph DuBose

recorded in 1950

courtesy of YouTube