Frauenliebe und -leben

The year 1840 was a momentous one for Schumann. In September he finally married his beloved Clara Wieck in the face of implacable opposition and a protracted legal challenge from her father. The extreme emotions of the year brought forth from him a remarkable flood of songs—at least 138, including four complete cycles. Composed during July, Frauenliebe und -leben (“A Woman’s Life and Loves”) was the third of these and is perhaps the one that is least-often performed, given that its subject matter commends it principally only to female singers. The verses, by the French-born German poet and botanist Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838), are written from the point of view of a woman who falls in love with a man of higher social standing; the text’s outlook may now seem outdated but Chamisso fully inhabits the woman’s romantic life in a period during which expectations for the role of women in marriage and society were rather different from today’s. The cycle develops from the opening song’s halting sarabande through the increasingly passionate second and third songs to the ecstasy of betrothal and marriage in the fourth, fifth and sixth. Baby makes three in the elation of the seventh song but joy turns to grief with the husband’s premature death in the eighth. And, unlike Schumann’s other cycles, Frauenliebe comes full circle with a touching return to the music of the opening in the piano’s poignant postlude.