Clara Wieck exhibited much promise as a composer in the late 1830s, but in the years immediately following her marriage to Robert Schumann in 1840, she found little time for composition, not least because she was tending to her young children, teaching, and concertizing. Along with a few piano works, the Op. 13 songs were the only works she produced in the early years of her marriage. This one, Sie liebten sich beide (They Loved Each Other), is a setting of a poem by Heinrich Heine and is one of the set's better efforts, achieving in recent times a fair measure of exposure, too. The music is filled with passion in its dark and tense main theme, which exhibits stylistic hints of both Schubert and Robert Schumann. The main vocal line comes in short, halting phrases that form an arch-shaped contour, its closing fall quite lovely and forlorn. Some may wonder that the happily married Clara could write such dark music, brilliant and appropriate though it is for the text about a man and woman afraid to declare their love for each other. The vocal and piano writing, despite the influences cited, are imaginative and quite effective throughout this two-minute maelstrom of repressed desire.

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