Up to the time Schumann was thirty years of age (1840), his compositions
were confined to works for the piano. These piano works include some of
the very greatest and most inspired of his compositions for the
instrument. In 1840 Schumann married Clara Wieck, daughter of his former
pianoforte teacher. This marriage was accomplished only after the most
severe opposition imaginable upon the part of the irate father-in-law,
who was loath to see his daughter, whom he had trained to be one of the
foremost pianists of her sex, marry an obscure composer. The effect of
this opposition was to raise Schumann's affection to the condition of a
kind of fanaticism. All this made a pronounced impression upon his art
and seemed to make him long for expression through the medium of his
love songs. He wrote to a friend at this time, "I am now writing nothing
but songs great and small. I can hardly tell you how delightful it is to
write for the voice, as compared with instrumental composition; and what
a tumult and strife I feel within me as I sit down to it. I have brought
forth quite new things in this line." In letters to his wife he is quite
as impassioned over his song writing as the following quotations
indicate: "Since yesterday morning, I have written twenty-seven pages of
music (something new of which I can tell you nothing more than that I
have laughed and wept for joy in composing them). When I composed them
my soul was within yours. Without such a bride, indeed no one could
write such music; once more I have composed so much that it seems almost
uncanny. Alas! I cannot help it: I could sing myself to death like a
nightingale."
During the first year of his marriage Schumann wrote one hundred of the
two hundred and forty-five songs that are attributed to him. In the
published collections of his works, there are three songs attributed to
Schumann which are known to be from the pen of his talented wife. As in
his piano compositions Schumann avoided long pieces and preferred
collections of comparatively short pieces, such as those in the
_Carnaval_, _Kreisleriana_, _Papillons_, so in his early works for the
voice Schumann chose to write short songs which were grouped in the form
of cycles. Seven of these cycles are particularly well known. They are
here given together with the best known songs from each group.