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contained the above four songs as Nos 5, 6, 14 and 15
of an original twenty-song (rather than sixteen-song)
cycle. The composer removed these four songs when
the cycle was published. As good as they are on their
own terms, it is easy to see why they don’t quite fit:
whether in terms of mood or length they are not the
kind of evanescent fragments which make the carefully
balanced kaleidoscope of Dichterliebe seems so
inevitably all of a piece.
21 June Schumann is now considered an important
enough composer to receive a biographical article in
the Gazette musicale.
2–20 July Vier Duette Op 34 3 cm–cp
These are Schumann’s first duets; Schubert had
scarcely written in this medium, and Schumann uses
as his twin examples the duet-writing of Mozart operas
and of Bach oratorios and cantatas where one
sentence is layered on top of another, often without
regard to comprehensibility—the two singers often
appear to sing against each other. In this set the
Reinick Liebesgarten is fairly conventional, as is the
closing Anastasius Grün reflection on the passing
generations (Familien-Gemälde). It is the two
Scottish settings which are lively and innovative:
Liebhabers Ständchen combines two separate Burns
poems and treats them as one. The soprano vies with
the tenor for the upper hand, and Unterm Fenster is
a perfectly framed little seduction scena worthy of this
incorrigibly amorous poet.
7 July Schumann receives the joyful news that Wieck,
unable to find witnesses to back him up, withdraws
his accusations of drunkenness against Schumann.
11–12 July Frauenliebe und -leben Op 42 3 cq–dn
This most famous of the Schumann cycles, eight
songs in a narrative sequence where the postlude of
the final number recalls the melody of the first, has
attracted much criticism over the years, particularly
from women who feel it impudent for a male poet
to have put such words into the mouth of a female
protagonist. In fact Chamisso was a left-wing reformer
in sympathy with the French Revolution, and if his
cycle fails to fulfil the expectations of the feminists of
today, it is remarkably liberal for the standards of
the time: the narrator is a woman and very much her
own person; she falls in love with someone of a higher
social class (which explains the reverence and diffidence
of the opening songs) but is quickly welcomed
into a relationship of equals, a marriage rather than
merely the humiliating affair that habitually occurred
between well-born gentlemen and serving-maids.
From the sixth song, the radiant Süsser Freund, du
blickest, the listener feels she is entirely in control: it
is she who announces her pregnancy to her flustered
husband in her own time and, in breast-feeding her
child, she pities men because of their inability to
experience mother-love. She displays anger in her
bereavement in an entirely believable way, and is left
to be the stoic heroine of her continuing destiny at the
end of the final song. Schumann and Chamisso would
have expected to be criticized by their more conservative
contemporaries for making a woman both the
narrator and star of a story of this kind—indeed for
making such a domestic scenario the subject of poetry
and music at all—and it is ironic that both poet
and composer (who counted themselves among the
progressives) should be damned by modern commentators
for having failed to demonstrate a better
understanding of twentieth-century social attitudes.
Apart from this, the power of this music has a way
of surmounting its incorrectly perceived failures of
political correctness, and there are very few sopranos
and mezzos today who disdain to sing this work.
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