Schumann’s Frauenliebe 2015

April 6, 2015.  Schumann’s Frauenliebe.  As far as composers’ birthdays go, several previous weeks were brimming with major talent but this one is pretty meager: Giuseppe Tartini of  Devil’s Trill fame being the most interesting of the bunch.  So we’ll use it to publish a little essay Joe DuBose wrote about Robert Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und –leben.  To illustrate it, we’ll use the recording made by the great British contralto Kathleen Ferrier in 1950.  Ferrier, the favorite singer of Bruno Walter and Benjamin Britten, died of breast cancer in 1953, just 41 year old.  Fortunately, she left a number of recordings treasured by music lovers ever since.  John Newmark is at the piano. ♫

The year 1840 saw at least 138 songs flow from the pen of Robert Schumann, which has since become known as his Liederjahr, or “Year of Song.” Until that year, Schumann had composed virtually exclusively for the piano. Yet, neither the sudden shift to vocal music, nor the abundance of this creative outpouring, was purely coincidental. It marked the culmination of his courtship of Clara Wieck, and their long-awaited and hard-won marriage.

Schumann first met Clara in March 1828, when both were invited to a musical evening in the home of Dr. Ernst Carus. Impressed with Clara’s skill at the piano, Schumann soon after began taking piano lessons from Clara’s father, Friedrich, during which time he lived in the Wieck’s household. Schumann and Clara quickly formed a close bond that would eventually blossom into a romantic, though clandestine, relationship. In 1837, on her 18^th birthday, Schumann proposed, and Clara accepted. Friedrich, however, who had a rather unfavorable opinion of Schumann, refused to give the composer his permission to marry his daughter. The long courtship and Friedrich’s refusal was a great strain on the relationship. Clara and Schumann exchanged love letters, and were forced to meet in secret. Schumann would even wait for hours in a café just to catch a brief glimpse of Clara as she left one of her concerts. The couple sued Friedrich, and after a lengthy court battle, Clara was finally allowed to marry Schumann without her father’s consent. The wedding took place in 1840.

Frauenliebe und -leben (A Woman’s Love and Life) was one of the song cycles, along with the Liederkreis of Eichendorff and Heine’s Dichterliebe, composed during the intense creative episode surrounding Schumann’s marriage to Clara. The cycle of poems, written by the German poet and botanist Adelbert von Chamisso in 1830, describes events in the life of a woman—from her first meeting with her future husband, to their marriage, the birth of their child, and his seemingly untimely death. Adelbert’s cycle consists of nine poems. However, Schumann set only eight, omitting the poem, Traum der eignen Tage. His setting displays a departure from the Schubertian Lied, with the piano taking on an increasingly independent and important role in portraying the essence and mood of the text. Schumann’s sense of unity is also evident in the reprise of music from the first song as a postlude that concludes the last. While Schumann’s is the best known, two other notable settings of Adelbert’s cycle were composed by Carl Lowe and Franz Paul Lachner. (Continue)

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