Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben song-cycle shows no sign of losing its popularity, with more versions than ever listed in the record catalogues, many of them recent. Yet commentators routinely admit a degree of embarrassment, not about Schumann's music but on behalf of his chosen poet, Adelbert von Chamisso.

The cycle describes how a God-like man chooses his bride, fathers a child and dies. It is told by the wife, not in retrospect but as a series of songs, each in the present tense. We move through the cycle like an album of photographs, each capturing a moment of intimate feeling. Yet, for all the supposed domesticity, there is very little material detail. We know little of the couple's status but nothing suggests she is a drudge or ill-used. Attacks on the poems tend to treat them as a pamphlet on marriage guidance, though any woman who modelled herself on the singer would soon drive her husband as mad as herself.

The poems may have read more naturally in a period when a woman was expected to show passivity and deference. Exactly when that time was, no one can say, but pamphleteers have always attempted to bring it about. Composers' wives and sisters set a bad example, it is true, sacrificing their own creativity to promote that of their husbands. Nor does it help to read that Chamisso married at forty a girl of eighteen. However, our feelings about what used to be called The Loves of the Great Composers are no excuse for not reading Chamisso's poems properly.

Chamisso was of French aristocratic birth and German was his second language. His passion was botany and he made substantial contributions to the subject. Written in 1830, ten years before their musical setting, the poems do not belong to the milk and water school of keepsake-verse but are an exotic hybrid of the authentic Romantic movement with the cult of sensibility. To the blushes, kisses, rapidly beating hearts of that school, the poet brings another strand which appears to stem from German religious mysticism, specifically the sermons of the heretical Meister Eckhardt.

Though it appears to be about a loving marriage, the cycle paradoxically expresses a soul in total isolation. These are songs from a place deep within the personality which enjoys and suffers and endures. The Holy feelings are cherished in the heart for their own sake.

In the first song. the singer, like a mystic encountering Christ, is dazzled by her man. He is compared to the sun. By the second poem he has become a distant star. This withdrawal and quietism is typical of the entire cycle. Now, like Mary, she considers herself an unworthy maid. Her ego is annihilated and with a mystical self-denial she sees herself blessing the man's chosen bride, who must be the worthiest of women.

In the third song, she expresses disbelief that she herself is the chosen one. Her wish is now to die in this dream. Though resting on his breast, she seems to hover above the situation in a reverie, a self-sufficient world of feeling.

The ring she sees as a symbol of Infinity. It gives her the gift of solitary endless space which is filled out by the promise of inexhaustible life. The ring is also a bond and she feels transfigured by the act of giving herself completely.

The call on her sisters to prepare her is the reappropriation of the Biblical language of The Song of Solomon or the book of Hosea in which the woman is identified with Jerusalem and the bridegroom with the promised Messiah.

In the next stanza, an Annunciation of her pregnancy is made. Despite her joy, she sees only her husband in the coming baby not herself. She wishes to hide her lovely dream in the cradle. This nativity is very like that preached by Eckhardt, one which takes place in the soul. This baby is indeed one of thought or prayer.

In the penultimate poem, the flesh and blood baby arrives and she sees only herself in it. Only a mother's joy is real and men are to be pitied. The baby is now hugged to herself as she hugs her feelings throughout.

The last song is the most mysterious of all. In the pain of bereavement, she undergoes a mystical restoration of her virginity. The veil is returned and she withdraws deeper into herself. At a social level, the idea is banal but in context, it recalls the very peculiar notions in Eckhardt of a place in the soul which is impenetrable even to God himself.

The question arises of whether Chamisso is indeed writing an allegory of Christian mysticism or whether he approaches these ideas accidentally by pursuing a very extreme notion of female passivity. He may have merely intended to give a religious colouring to a homely picture. Yet, coloured enough, any mother and child is bound to resemble an icon.

Chamisso's most celebrated work apart from these poems is the story of Peter Schlemihl, the man without a shadow. For Chamisso, this Faustian tale represented his own status as a man without substance and was closely bound up with his feelings of exile. It is hardly far-fetched to see in the song-cycle another exercise in the withdrawal of the selfhood from the world.

In drawing out these associations, it is important to stress that Schumann does not underline them any more than a Flemish artist would have glamourized a Madonna. He can approach the heavenly with his own colouring, enraptured as he was at this period by the full enjoyment of his beloved Clara. To have approached the task on his knees would have clouded the picture with self-consciousness. As it is, his setting does nothing to hinder the deeper implications of Chamisso's poetry. As a musical lecture on the rôle of women in marriage it would never have captivated audiences for the last one hundred and sixty years.

 © James Beswick Whitehead, 2001