A Historically Informed Performance of a Woman's Love and Life

In order to give an outstanding performance of this celebrated song cycle, the most important thing, besides learning the music, is to learn the history behind it. It greatly helps the performer to have knowledge of the music, which in turn helps with communicating the narrative to the audience. The information presented in this paper is derived from scholarly journal articles and books by professors and historians who have studied Robert Schumann in the Romantic period and the influence of his German song cycles. The purpose of this paper is to examine the origin of the text used in Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben. The paper will also discuss how Schumann, in his “year of song,” set Chamisso’s poetry to music in a most effective manner and introduce the possibility of two voices within the song cycle: the heroine as the main character and her husband-to-be, who is voiced by the accompaniment. It will also provide a brief analysis and an interpretation of the lyrics of the eight songs within the cycle. Understanding the artistry of the music in correlation with the meaning of the text will help the performer capture the variety of the intended emotions throughout the eight songs. The point of giving a historically informed performance is to provide the audience with every opportunity of understanding the thoughts and emotions the performer is conveying through the music, no matter the language.