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At Doctoral Forum, Schumann Undergoes Radical Analysis By BENJAMIN SOSLAND
Here are some key facts about the song cycle Frauenliebe und leben: Robert Schumann wrote it in 1840, a period during which he composed most of his songs after nearly a decade of writing instrumental music almost exclusively. He had just endured a yearslong public struggle for permission to marry Clara Wieck, a child prodigy who had become a pianist of considerable accomplishment by her early adulthood. Clara's father—he was also her piano teacher and, by most accounts, willing to exploit his daughter's talents for financial gain—forbade the couple to marry on the grounds that Clara's concert career would suffer. He also publicly excoriated Schumann, who was then gaining repute as a music critic, by accusing him in print of a range of improprieties, ranging from alcoholism to sexual promiscuity. Only after a lengthy court battle in which Clara's father was found guilty of slander did the couple fulfill their courtship by marrying on September 12, 1840, a day before Clara's 21st birthday.
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| Rufus Hallmark speaking about Schumann’s Frauenliebe und leben at a Doctoral Forum in Morse Hall on November 2. (Photo by Ira Rosenblum) |
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The eight songs of Frauenliebe und leben (A Woman's Love and Life) depict seminal moments in a woman's life: her first awakening to love, her subsequent marriage, and the realization that she is pregnant. The cycle ends abruptly with the sudden death of her husband. As in most song cycles, the audience comes to know the character in Frauenliebe without ever learning her name, or where, when, and how she lives. Instead, over the course of eight songs, she reveals her inmost thoughts, offering a vivid emotional outline but leaving the audience to infer the more specific aspects of her life. The songs range in character from poignant expressivity to breathless excitement. Schumann's gift for lyricism and his poetic sensitivity are firmly intact throughout. The text of the cycle was written by Adelbert Chamisso, a French-born poet who settled in Germany. His works, which ranged from travelogues to fiction, were especially popular during his lifetime, even considered progressive, for their depictions of daily life and domesticity. He created a niche market that held special appeal to women.Those are some basic, indisputable facts. Anything else one can say about Frauenliebe und leben—and there is a lot—is opinion. For musical analysis and poetic criticism do not reveal truth; they are "merely someone's assertion," posited Dr. Rufus Hallmark at a recent Doctoral Forum, "Putting Words in Schumann's Mouth: The Analyst (or Editor) as Ventriloquist (the Case of Frauenliebe und leben)," held on Election Day. Like its counterparts in art and literature, music analysis does not reveal an objective reality. Instead it leads to "informed observations," Dr. Hallmark said. At the same time he warned against giving up on analysis altogether, saying it remains one of the best ways to develop a deeper understanding of music. Dr. Hallmark is the chair of Rutgers University's music department. He has taught at M.I.T. and Brown and was previously the director of the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. He was educated at Davidson College, Boston University, and Princeton, where he received a Ph.D. in musicology in 1974. (His dissertation, "The Genesis of Schumann's Dichterliebe," as well as other publications, are available in the Juilliard library.) Dr. Hallmark is also an accomplished singer, a skill he displayed during his lecture when he sang excerpts from Frauenliebe und leben, accompanied by Hiromi Fukuda, a D.M.A. candidate in collaborative piano.In preparation for the forum, Prof. Hallmark asked the audience to read "Whose life? The Gendered Self in Schumann's Frauenliebe Songs," an article by Ruth A. Solie appearing in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries (Steven Paul Scher, ed., Cambridge, 1992). In it, Solie offers an analysis of Schumann's songs using the "revisionary possibilities of a feminist critical reading ..." She states that "today it is awkward to hear this song cycle," because it indicates that a woman's true identity is dependent upon and, indeed, subsumed under a male-dominated ("patriarchal") society. She dismisses common defenses of the cycle—some scholars are quick to point out the differences between societal structures of 1840 and today—as "a kind of naïve historical relativism." For Solie, overlooking the obvious sexism in Frauenliebe with blanket statements such as "things were like that then" is the product of "sloppy intellectual habits." She calls assertions that Schumann and Chamisso actually showed deep empathy for women "historically inaccurate."Prof. Hallmark deliberately chose a contentious article to show just how divergent analytic points of view can be. "Ruth Solie is a leading feminist scholar of music, and her 1992 essay on Frauenliebe und leben is a major iconoclastic study of the work," he said. "No one can discuss these poems and this song cycle anymore without dealing to some extent with Solie's ideas." That is not to say that Prof. Hallmark agrees with the essay. He countered Solie's arguments with some of his own. For example, to Solie, the rapidly changing harmonies in the second song "Er, der herrlichste von Allen" that lead away from the home key of E-flat represent the woman's inability to overcome societal expectations. (If she were in a stronger position, she would be able to hold her own harmonically. When the song does return to E-flat at its conclusion, it is because she has been forced to conform to societal expectations and "patriarchal rule" has asserted itself.) For Dr. Hallmark, the same return to the tonic represents an independent woman's gumption; she is pulled back willingly by an "overriding desire," not the expectations of 19th-century society. He notes that "Chamisso's poem ends on a glum note of self-abnegation: 'If my heart breaks, what does it matter?' But Schumann, by reprising the first positive stanza of the poem and bringing back his resolute E-flat major vocal melody and piano music, belies this portrayal of the girl's feelings and asserts what he believes to be her underlying self-confidence."Such arguments may strike the average reader as abstruse. Do singers and pianists really need to be involved in such detailed—indeed, contentious—debates about meaning and interpretation in order to perform Frauenliebe? For Prof. Hallmark, the answer is clear: He does not subscribe to the notion that "making music is an activity that should hold the performers above the fray, that they needn't or shouldn't get their hands dirty with problems connected with the works they play, or that they should focus their attention on 'purely' musical matters and not involve themselves with philosophical issues. These literary texts were taken seriously by composers," he adds. "Should performers not take them seriously, too?"
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The next Doctoral Forum will take place on Tuesday, February 1, 2005, from 5 to 6 p.m. in Morse Hall. Frederic Fehleisen (The Juilliard School) will speak on "The Other Theme in Bach’s D-Minor Ciaccona." All members of the community are invited.
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Rather than degrading women, Prof. Hallmark sees a positive side to what, as Solie contends, is a stereotypical portrayal of a woman whose happiness exists only in relation to a male-dominated society. "The happy situation of the young woman in Frauenliebe was not necessarily stereotypical … it may not have been so easy for a girl to marry for love. Her idolization of the man may stem in part from seeing him as her liberator from overbearing parents or from the stigma of spinsterhood. Think of young Clara Wieck, dominated by her commercially exploitative father. How she must have looked up to the idealistic, even visionary composer Robert Schumann, and have treasured him as, among other things, someone who could free her from her oppressive father."As for the acceptability of a work that, by anyone's standard, portrays women without the cushion of political correctness (or even a remotely modern sensibility), the lively question-and-answer session following Prof. Hallmark's talk was unanimous: Deeming works of art unacceptable merely because we disagree with their context or content can make us more comfortable, but doing so is as unenlightened as the work may have been in the first place. After all, as Prof. Hallmark kept reminding us, any interpretation is just someone's assertion, not hard fact. Benjamin Sosland is a D.M.A. candidate in voice.
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