In any but a master hand this form would become monotonous. But with Schumann’s mysterious accompaniment it is all magic. The close is peculiarly characteristic. The voice part comes, as we have said, to a tonic close, but the accompaniment makes a false cadence of it and the piano part continues to its own logical ending. The piano part has become utterly organic and independent. Played by itself, it would offer no clew as to where the voice part ended. That deceptive cadence is Schumann’s ultimatum to the singer. ‘The song is not ended,’ he seems to say, ‘merely because you have finished singing. The song is the voice part _and_ the piano part one and indivisible. If you hurry through the postlude, or belittle it, or treat it as a useless appendage to the voice part, you are no artist. If you consider the voice part more important than the piano part, or yourself more important than the song you are singing, go and give your feeble talents to vaudeville songs.’ And for audiences, too, this song has a message: the listener who begins to applaud before the piano part is finished (and there are few even to-day who do not) is no true listener. Let him go and listen to a brass band; he has no business with the art-song. The five children’s songs, opus 40, offer little of interest. But the cycle, _Frauenliebe und Leben_ (‘Woman’s Life and Love’), is undoubtedly the most famous and possibly the greatest song cycle in all musical literature. The poet, Adalbert von Chamisso, selects eight crucial moments in woman’s life and puts into her mouth for each of the eight an exquisite lyric, expressing with wonderful delicacy her emotions and moods. The poems are perhaps a trifle exaggerated in the romantic fashion of the time and certainly do not altogether tally with the emotions of the modern woman. But the groundwork of typical psychology is expressed with such persuasive eloquence and such literary charm that no one can read the poems without feeling that he has lived through, in some measure, the experience of which they tell.