Myrthen, Op. 25: Schumann's wedding gift to Clara, complete at last
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In 1840 — the year he finally won the right to marry Clara Wieck over her father's objections — Robert Schumann handed his bride a songbook the day before the wedding. Myrthen, Op. 25 ("myrtles," the traditional bridal flower), is 26 songs stitched from a handful of poets: Goethe, Rückert, Byron, Burns, Heine. It opens with Widmung ("Dedication") and closes with Zum Schluss ("In Closing"), and in between it swings from devotional to folk-plain to strange. PracticeClef now carries the piano part of every song in the cycle — 26 of 26, playable free in your browser.
As with the rest of our Lieder catalog, these are piano parts of voice-and-piano songs: the accompaniment only, not the vocal line, labeled as such on every page. That's still the bulk of the substance in a Schumann song — his piano writing carries as much of the story as the voice does.
Four familiar entries
A difficulty rating below is PracticeClef's published 1–9 scale.
Widmung — Op. 25 No. 1
This piece is in Ab major, sits at level 7 of 9, and takes about 3 minutes to play.
The cycle's opening song and its best-known number, later arranged for solo piano by Liszt. Schumann swings through a distant E-major middle section before the Ab-major dedication returns.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Der Nussbaum — Op. 25 No. 3
This piece is in G major, sits at level 5 of 9, and takes about 2 minutes to play.
"The Walnut Tree" — a rocking, murmuring accompaniment under a poem about a tree whispering of a bride's future. One of the gentler entries in the set, and a good first Schumann song.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Die Lotosblume — Op. 25 No. 7
This piece is in F major, sits at level 5 of 9, and takes about 2 minutes to play.
A Heine setting about a lotus flower that opens only at night, for the moon it loves. Understated arpeggios throughout — nothing showy, all atmosphere.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Du bist wie ein Blume — Op. 25 No. 24
This piece is in Ab major, sits at level 7 of 9, and takes about 30 seconds to play.
Another Heine poem, and maybe the single most-set text in German song — dozens of composers took a run at it. Schumann's version is over almost as soon as it begins, a miniature blessing rather than a big statement.
Open this score when you want to play it.
The riddle that refuses to answer itself
Rätsel — Op. 25 No. 16
This piece is in B major, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about 2 minutes to play.
The text is a riddle poem (attributed to Byron via a German translation), and Schumann plays along: the song never lands on a full B-major chord. It closes on a bare B–D♯ third — because the riddle's answer is a single letter, "H," which in German note-naming is the pitch B natural. The tonic stays incomplete because naming it outright would give the game away.
Open this score when you want to play it.
The easiest way in
Auf einer Burg — Op. 39 No. 7
This piece is in E minor, sits at level 3 of 9, and takes about 2 minutes to play.
Not from Myrthen but from the same Op. 39 batch that went live alongside it — worth a detour because it's a genuine notation curiosity. The score carries zero sharps or flats, an archaic modal convention Schumann uses to paint an old castle scene, and it's one of the easiest Schumann pieces in the catalog to sit down and play.
Open this score when you want to play it.
What "complete" means here
With Myrthen finished, every Robert Schumann engraving in our source corpus is now live — 90 pieces, including all 18 of the Album für die Jugend, Op. 68 character pieces for solo piano. "Complete" means every playable engraving in our source corpus is live, not every piece Schumann ever wrote. Add Clara Schumann's 17 pieces, also fully live, and the catalog carries 107 pieces across the two of them — a real record of a working partnership, not just one famous husband's output. You can browse Robert's full page at /composers/robert-schumann.
Explore it
The full library is free to browse and play — filter by composer, difficulty, or era. Connect a digital piano for live note feedback. Turn on Wait mode when you want the cursor to advance after you play the written notes. See the docs for setup. No account is needed.
A note on the numbers. Every count, key, and difficulty grade in this post comes from each piece's own metadata record. Difficulty is PracticeClef's published 1–9 scale. Duration figures are estimates derived from the score, not measured performances. Pieces marked as piano parts contain the accompaniment only, not the vocal line.