Schumann selected the eight poems of Minnespiel (Love Game; 1849) from Friedrich Rückert's Liebesfrühling (Love's Springtime) of 1823. Four of the settings are solos, two are duets, and two are quartets. The debt Rückert's poetry owes to folk song prompted Schumann to set the verses with generally simple, tuneful melodies.

In "Meine Töne still und heiter" (My sounds, quiet and clear), a solo for tenor, an introduction on the dominant indicates that the narrator wishes to send his songs up to his beloved at her window because he cannot see her himself. The song proper, a strophic structure in C major, tells how his beloved looks down upon him. The melody becomes slightly chromatic in the middle of the verse. A passage for piano closes the song.

"Liebster, deine Worte stehlen" (My love, your words steal [my heart]), for soprano, expresses the wish of a woman to run off with her beloved. Chromatic harmonies propel the song, which increases in intensity as the woman becomes more passionate.

The third song, the alto and bass duet "Ich bin dein Baum" (I am your tree), features independent vocal lines with large leaps. The alto tells the bass that she is his tree, her fruit is for him alone; the bass, her "gardener," pledges himself to his faithful tree. After the song passes through distant harmonies, the final verse speeds up to close in E flat major.

The fourth song is a slow lied for tenor, "Mein schöner Stern!" (My beautiful star!). It is marked by constant repeated chords and a leaping and falling melody.

In "Schön is das Fest des Lenzes" (Beautiful is the spring festival), a quartet for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, flourishes on the piano separate the lines of the poem. At two points, the bass and tenor pair up against the soprano and alto. Otherwise, all four voices move together.

In "O Freund, mein Schirm, mein Schütz!" (O friend, my shield, my shelter), for alto, chromatic harmonies and dissonant notes on strong beats provide a sense of urgency, as does the syncopated right-hand piano part.

The soprano and tenor duet "Die tausend Grüsse" (The thousand greetings [we send you]), features a lilting melody that conveys the distance between the lovers. Minnespiel ends with the quartet "So wahr die Sonne scheinet" (Just as the sun shines), which features a passage of staggered entries in the middle as the accompaniment begins to move in triplet rhythms.

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In so many of Robert Schumann's songs he affectionately used the poem's flowery subject to represent his wife, Clara, yet in "Mein schöner Stern!" Op. 101/4 (My Beautiful Star), he uncommonly equated her presence with that of a radiant, healing star. Without changing a word, the composer meaningfully enhanced Rückert's writing with elusive music that opens in E flat major and carefully slips through many other keys. Even though the composer used the text to plead his wife to cautiously protect herself and her light as she lifted him out of darkness, in reality his mental illness had obvious, irreversible effects on Clara and their marriage. The delicate second verse is a melodic duplication of the first; the accompaniment's lines in both stanzas are made of beamed eighth notes in the treble and low octaves in the bass. The tune was written in Kreischa, where the Schumann family fled to escape the Dresden revolution. It is the second song for tenor solo in Minnespiel, Op. 101, which also includes one song for soprano solo, one for alto solo, two mixed duets, and two mixed quartets.

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