Ex. 8-10: Im wunderschönen Monat Mai

Robert Franz's setting of Heinrich Heine's "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai" (In the Beautiful Month of May), No. 5 of his 6 Lieder (Op. 25). The same poem opens Schumann's famous song cycle Dichterliebe (A Poet's Love, 1840). Franz even begins on the same chord as Schumann, before the harmony moves off in its own direction.

Franz's first set of songs (Op. 1, 1843) so impressed Schumann that he wrote a long, enthusiastic review of them in his journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal of Music). Liszt championed Franz's music as well. Many of Franz's songs, like this one, set poems by Heine — often poems Schumann had already set.

Franz began to lose his hearing in 1841, in his mid-twenties, around the time of those first songs. A nervous disorder eventually forced him to give up his musical posts in 1868, when he was in his early fifties. In his later years, Liszt, the violinist Joseph Joachim, and others raised money for him through benefit concerts — about 100,000 marks in all — so that he could live without money worries.

From the album Im schönen Strome: Heine Lieder by Christian Immler and Georges Starobinski (2015)
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