Frauen-Liebe und Leben (Woman's Love and Life) is a cycle of poems by Adelbert von Chamisso, written in late 1829 and early 1830. They describe the course of a woman's love for a man, from their first meeting to her widowhood. The poems were widely popular and set to music by many composers, including Carl Loewe and Franz Lachner. Robert Schumann's song cycle on the text is the most widely known.
Adelbert von Chamisso wrote the cycle of nine poems in late 1829 and early 1830. [1] : 102 It was first published in Franz Kugler's Skizzenbuch (Sketchbook, 1830) as "Frauen Liebe und Leben". They were part of a "Musical Appendix" where Kugler set Chamisso's words to music. [2] Kugler socialized with Chamisso and dedicated the Skizzenbuch to him. [1] : 113 Amadeus Wendt soon included the poems as "Frauen-Liebe und Leben" in his Musenalmanach (Muses' Almanac), which was published in 1830 for the following year. [3]
In 1831, the poems were published twice in the first editions of Chamisso's poetry and his complete works. [4] [1] : 111ff The cycle was widely admired in Germany, particularly by young women. [5]
The nine poems in the cycle are untitled.
Chamisso classified the cycle as lyric narrative poems. His decision to write from the woman's perspective was also in the German tradition of role-playing poems ( Rollengedichte ). [1] : 103, 107 The poet's wife, Antonie, was nineteen years younger than him and the foster daughter of his friend Eduard Hitzig. She is supposedly the model for the woman in Chamisso's cycle. [6]
The heroine's subservience and naivety have been summed up as "an elegant view of how the more authoritarian paterfamilias hoped to be regarded by his wife, and particularly how he assumed she would greet his death". [7] : 52 She has also been dismissed as "a doormat". [8] Chamisso filled a gap in contemporary poetry by writing from a woman's perspective. Likewise, the songs composed to his poems gave female singers a rare opportunity to sing first-person material. [9]
Frauen-Liebe und Leben's first appearance in print were as lyrics for Franz Kugler's songs. Dozens of the cycle's poems were individually set to music by other composers. [1] : 112 Chamisso was a botanist by trade, and he was stunned by the fondness composers had for his verse. In 1832, he wrote to a friend, "People sing my songs, they are sung in the salons, composers scramble for them, children recite them in school, my portrait appears after Goethe, Tieck and Schlegel as the fourth in the row of contemporary German poets." [10]
In September 1836, Carl Loewe set the poems as Frauenliebe, Op. 60, for mezzo-soprano and piano. Only the first seven were published together during his life. [11] The ninth song was published in 1869. In 1904, Breitkopf & Härtel published the eighth song for the first time in a complete edition of Loewe's works. [12]
Around 1839, Franz Lachner composed Frauenliebe und -leben, Op. 59, for soprano, horn or cello, and piano. He returned to the text in 1847 and created an arrangement for soprano, clarinet, and piano. [13]
Robert Schumann set Chamisso's poems on July 11 and 12, 1840. [14] His manuscripts are still extant. They mostly outline the voice part on single staves, with just a few bars of piano postlude at the very end of No. 8. [15] He dedicated the cycle to Oswald Lorenz. [9]
1840 was Schumann's "year of song" in which he wrote numerous lieder and several song cycles: Liederkreis, Op. 24, Liederkreis, Op. 39, Frauen-Liebe und Leben, Op. 42, and Dichterliebe , Op. 48. [16]
Chamisso's text mirrored Schumann's personal life at the time. [17] He had been courting Clara Wieck, but her father refused permission for the marriage. Schumann compared Clara's father to a character in Chamisso's poetry. [18] Clara sued her father in order to marry without his permission. She won just five days before Schumann drafted Frauenliebe und Leben. [19] : 222
The composer's major editorial decision was to jettison the ninth poem in the cycle. He made several minor changes to the source material, reversing lines and changing words. In both the second and third songs, Schumann repeats the first stanza as a coda. In the sixth song, he omits the third stanza. [1] : 242–248
The postlude returns to the initial key and reprises material from the first song. [20] The quotation emphasizes the cyclicality of the material. [21] The device yielded frequent comparisons to Ludwig van Beethoven's 1816 song cycle An die ferne Geliebte . [22] [9]
The prevalence of the word "innig" (intimate/inner) in the tempo markings is typical for the composer's songs. [23] Schumann illustrates the narrator's simplicity with clean vocal lines and an almost spare piano part. The accompaniment is so frequently chordal that the cycle is hymnlike. Instead of elevating Chamisso's mediocre verse, Schumann seemed to succumb to it. [7] : 53 Nonetheless, the cycle has been called Schumann's "greatest achievement in song". [24]
Clara Schumann frequently performed the piano part in the cycle. [21] When she heard Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient perform the cycle in 1848, she concluded, "I cannot imagine 'Du Ring an meinem Finger' more beautifully sung". [25] The German baritone Julius Stockhausen added the cycle to his repertoire in 1862. He also taught it to his students. [9] [26]
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