‘Elsa Dreisig’

When 18-year-old Robert Schumann met the great poet Heinrich Heine, he had expected a bitter misanthrope. Nothing could have been further from the truth: before him stood a friendly man ‘with an ironic smile on his lips’. That same irony surfaces in Heine’s poetry collection Lyrisches Intermezzo, in which a sombre, versifying knight locks himself up in his room as he pines for a lost love. With a sense of drama, he decides to place his ‘angry old songs’ in a coffin. Carried by giants (the coffin weighing a ton), he lets his great sorrow sink to the bottom of the sea. In the space of a few days, the newly-wed Schumann spun sixteen of Heine’s poems into a lied cycle about the opposing forces of love. Dichterliebe depicts all the romantic clichés with equal eagerness, from the initial butterflies to the bitter pill of rejection.