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"'Ich Grolle Nicht, by Schumann, no," Stern commented, as one by one they examined the records. "'Ave Maria, Arcadelt-Liszt no, though it's magnificent. That's the one you sing best of all, Beta. How often you've sung it to me! Remember, at the bungalow, how I used to lay my head in your lap while you played with my Samsonesque locks and sang me to sleep?
Schumann and Kierulf were his favorites, so he performed "Du bist die Ruh," "My loved one, I am prison'd" "Ich grolle nicht," "Die alten bösen Lieder," "I lay my all, love, at thy feet," "Aus meiren grossen Schmerzen mach' ich die kleinen Lieder" all with the same calm superiority, and that light, half-sportive accompaniment.
So much has this impressed the students of the composer that more than one able critic has ventured to prophesy that Schumann's greatest claim to immortality would yet be found in such works as the settings of "Ich grolle nicht" and the "Dichterliebe" series a perverted estimate, perhaps, but with a large substratum of truth.
After this they made Ashurst sing, Stella playing him accompaniments from a book of Schumann songs, till, in the middle of "Ich grolle nicht," two small figures clad in blue dressing-gowns crept in and tried to conceal themselves beneath the piano. The evening broke up in confusion, and what Sabina called "a splendid rag." That night Ashurst hardly slept at all.
What caused the failure of Schumann's only opera was not a lack of dramatic genius, but of theatrical instinct. He believed that in "Genoveva" "every bar is thoroughly dramatic;" and so it is, as might have been expected of the composer of such an intensely emotional and passionate song as "Ich grolle nicht" and many others.
At first, you understand, he could lay the entire blame on the De Brézés; he was sure they had in some mysterious way constrained her, and though he was angrily, tragically, suicidally wretched, it was one kind of woe a clean, classic woe, I will call it. He believed it shared by her in the secret of her uncongenial conjugal life. 'Ich grolle nicht, he could say, and all that.
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