In the singing of these songs the singer must avoid stressing too much the declamatory character of the three slow ones as well as the melodic exuberance of the others. The songs seem on paper to be detached and broken. All the more they must be sung smoothly, discreetly, without undue emphasis. The singer will not go far wrong in following the notes and the time signatures quite literally. Many a singer has been astonished by that old miracle of art--that if the notes are sung as written they will work their own magic. The composer has seen to that. If a song relies wholly on a ‘singer’s personality,’ the composer has failed. So in these songs pure intonation, just rhythm, and careful diction will interpret the poet truly. If the singer finds that with the observance of these values the songs do not express what they should, let him put them aside for a while. As his technical artistic powers grow he will find that the songs have grown along with them. If he is much concerned about bolstering up the song by giving it ‘expression,’ he is sure to be on the wrong track. Of the ‘Romances and Ballads,’ opus 45, we need only notice the spirited _Es zogen zwei rüst’ge Gesellen_. Opus 48, however, is the immortal _Dichterliebe_ series, probably the most individual of all Schumann’s song works. Here, again, we find Schumann suffering somewhat from the faults of romanticism. To put the case briefly, he took Heine seriously. Heine himself, we cannot but feel, was not so taken in by his own poetry. In addition to the ever-present grin which is in almost every one of his lyrics there is a certain playful quality, as though he were only teasing the sentimentalism of the human heart. If Heine suffered only a hundredth part of the pangs described in his mass of short poems he must have had more love affairs than any one man could attend to in three lifetimes. The truth is, Heine was dealing with moods, and Schumann supposed he was dealing with emotions. We see the contradiction to an almost grotesque degree in the song _Ich grolle nicht_ (‘I do not complain’). Here the poet tells his love that he will not complain of his unhappiness because, though she goes about in diamonds, he has seen in a dream that she, too, is unhappy. This is pretty sentiment and charming playful heroics. Tragedy it is not. But Schumann’s music is tragedy of the noblest strain. It strikes an emotional depth which the composer rarely equalled. To such music the Puritans of Cromwell’s time might have left their wives and children to go out and fight on the side of the Lord. We have said that Heine has nowhere in his poems written words that might be put into the mouth of a hero. But in this case Schumann wrote music that a hero might have sung. Perhaps if Schumann’s sense of humor had been a little more human and a little less literary he might have seen the incongruity. But it would have been an unfortunate event, for it would have cost the world the wonderful music of this song.