Schumann’s song cycle seems to have little to say about the realities of a woman’s life, but its emotional depths and the music’s sheer beauty still touch us. Carolyn Sampson explains how her new recording gives its passive heroine a little more life
Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben is a song cycle that depicts, in eight poems, a woman’s love and life. Its texts, poems by Adelbert von Chamisso, sum up a woman’s life roughly as: 1. I can’t think of anything but him; 2. He’s wonderful and I am not worthy; 3. OMG – he said he loved me; 4. I am his and have the ring to prove it; 5. Girlfriends: today I leave you for him; 6. I am pregnant with mini-you; 7. I feed my baby and am fulfilled; 8. Your death is the first time you have truly hurt me.
How does any self-respecting modern woman perform the song cycle today, in which the female protagonist is defined solely in relation to the man and her role as wife and mother?