Robert Schumann
(b. Zwickau, 8 June 1810: d. Endenich, 29 July 1856)

Des Sängers Fluch ("The Minstrel's Curse"), choral ballad for solo voices, chorus and orchestra, op. 139, text by Richard Pohl after Ludwig Uhland (1852)

Perhaps no nineteenth-century genre has suffered more from the social upheavals of the modern age than the choral ballad, a tradition once firmly upheld by a network of middle-class amateur choral societies, glee clubs, and semi-professional orchestras and cultivated by composers of the stature of Brahms (Rinaldo, Schicksalslied, Alto Rhapsody), Bruckner (Helgoland), Mendelssohn (Erste Walpurgisnacht), and above all Robert Schumann, whose several contributions were long considered to be pinnacles of the genre. With the disappearance of these institutions - and with them the fondness of the educated classes for narrative poetry in a faux-naïf folk style - much superior music of the romantic age was consigned to oblivion and still awaits rediscovery.

Schumann's choral ballads fall at the end of his career, when he was employed as a choir conductor in Düsseldorf. Foremost among them are the three large-scale settings of ballads by Ludwig Uhland: Der Königssohn, op. 116, Des Sängers Fluch, op. 139, and Das Glück von Edenhall, op. 143, all accompanied by full orchestra, and all dealing with the passing of old societies and the emergence of new ones. Uhland (1787-1862), a self-consciously patriotic poet of international repute, was a favorite among Germany's middle classes, who saw in him a reflection of their own anti-monarchic tendencies. With the failure of the 1848 revolutions and the re-entrenchment in Germany of a narrow militaristic conservatism, the aspirations of the middle classes could find an outlet in art that was denied them in the political arena. Even Schumann, a man otherwise wholly disinterested in the historical events of his time, could respond to this new situation in his immediate social surroundings.

On 25 June 1851 Schumann wrote a letter to his friend, the critic and musical polemicist Richard Pohl, broaching the subject of a new field of musical activity: "Many a ballad might, with a little trouble, be treated with good effect as a concert piece for solo voices, chorus and orchestra," he opined, and asked Pohl to help him arrange Uhland's ballad Des Sängers Fluch. This poem, one of the most famous in Uhland's oeuvre, tells the story of an aged bard who approaches a castle with his young apprentice to sing before the king and queen. The king, a heartless tyrant concerned only with extending his stranglehold on the population, senses a bond of affection developing between the queen and the young minstrel and slays him before the assembled courtiers with a single blow of his sword. The aged bard gathers up the boy's body and leaves the castle, but not before pronouncing a fearful curse: "Woe, woe to thee, assassin! Thou curse of minstrelsy! / Vain, vain shall all thy striving for bloody glory be, / They name shall be forgotten, lost in eternal doom, / As dies the last death-rattle, breathed into empty gloom!" The curse has its desired effect: the last two stanzas depict a barren desert in which only one column of the former castle remains standing - "[a]nd that, already crumbling, may perish in an hour."

Pohl responded with alacrity. By extending the original ballad with nine poems from Uhland's other writings, he transformed the scene in the castle into a dramatic "singing contest" between the king, queen, bard, and young minstrel, with solo arias for each. The role of narrator was assigned to a solo alto, while the chorus was allowed to comment on the proceedings. The result was a far more dramatic work which gave the characters much motivation lacking in the original. Schumann responded with a vivid musical conception that allowed ample room for sharp contrasts and lyrical effusion, perhaps most effectively in No. 4, the young minstrel's "Provencal Song," which became a popular favorite. Especially noteworthy – and perfectly in tune with a singing contest among troubadours – is Schumann's varied use of the harp: decades later commentators could still proclaim of Des Sängers Fluch that "the harp has seldom been used to more telling effect in the modern orchestra" (Kretzschmar, 1890).

Des Sängers Fluch was written in 1852 shortly before Schumann's descent into madness. In the few years remaining to him the work did not appear in print. The first edition, identified as "No. 4 of the posthumous works," was issued in full score and vocal score by F. W. Arnold in Berlin (1858). The work soon acquired a following in England and America, and a vocal score of The Minstrel's Curse, in an "English version by Miss G. Troutbeck," was issued in London and New York by Novello in 1885. Perhaps the most eloquent tribute to the work's popularity and prestige was a piano paraphrase by Liszt of the Provenzalisches Minnelied ("Chanson provençale"), one of that master's last musical utterances, which was written in 1881 and published that same year by Adolph Fürstner (Berlin) and G. Schirmer (New York).

Bradford Robinson, 2005

Performance material: Breitkopf und Härtel, Wiesbaden