While the best-known surviving declamations, or, as they are more frequently termed, melodramas, are for voice and orchestra (Berlioz' Lelio, ou le retour a la vie, Schumann's Manfred, and to a lesser extent Benda's Ariadne at Naxos and Pugnani's Werther), there's also a repertoire of melodramas just for voice and piano. These were most popular in Germany, where Liszt and Schubert as well as Schumann experimented with this genre.

He had seriously considered the idea since 1845, but it wasn't until 1849 that he wrote Schön' Hedwig, a ballad by Friedrich Hebbel, loosely based on medieval themes. Three years later he returned to the genre, with another Hebbel ballad (Die Ballade von Heideknaben, The ballad of the boy on the heath) and one by Shelley, in a German translation (Die Fluchtlinge, The fugitives.)

Heideknaben tells the story of a boy whose dream foretells his own murder, and Schumann writes appropriately spooky music, often with a Weber-like chromaticism, and, during the meeting of the boy and his killer, thudding chords that for a twentieth-century listener will inevitably suggest the music from similar dramatic scenes in silent films. However, while it is not one of Schumann's masterworks, and today seems banal because of what came after it, it still has a certain appeal as a period piece, a kind of nineteenth-century radio drama for Hallowe'en. In Die Fluchtlinge, the original text describing the elopement is far more descriptive, and gives Schumann more scope for writing atmospheric music, particularly in the beginning, where he paints the storm and waves with rumbling, tense chords and tremolos. Interestingly, in the end, when one would expect the music to be loud and powerful, as Shelley's text describes the father's curses upon his daughter as louder than the storm, the music, while still rumbling and tense, is soft and not terribly threatening, as if the listener, like the lovers themselves, is moving away and hears only at a distance.

Unlike his lieder, the connection between text and music is loose, and the music is not as powerful or appealing as his compositions for piano alone, and so while these melodramas provide an interesting insight into Schumann's creativity and musical thinking, they are mostly interesting as a source of insight into Schumann and his other works, and of passing interest in their own right.

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