SEARCH FMS

FMS CONTENT:

MUSIC LESSONS

WEDDING PIANO

PROFILE

PRICING

RESOURCES

CONTACT

 

LATEST FMS BLOGS

LATEST PICS & POEMS

 

 

FREE-MYSELF.COM
SHOP4PINK
TFF MYSPACE

Society’s ruling groups, certain sections of class and, quite possibly, gender being particularly clear examples, maintain control over the culture they belong to by creating it through a representative language, music being one of the strongest and most convincing tools, empowered by a collective disbelief in its cultural significance, the manipulation of which is restricted to those in power through literature and education. The masses who do not belong to these specific groups, such as those of the female gender, are oppressed because they themselves, as well as those at the top of the pecking order, are convinced by both the visual and oral aspects of this constructed reality through an unending process of social conditioning and cultural reproduction. John Shepherd claims that “...it is impossible to understand the practice of music in modern, Western societies without simultaneously exploring how the practice, understanding and management of music have attracted specific and powerful forms of gendering.” and this point is carried further when we look at more general ways in which the needs of a ruling group are met in the manner in which we communicate. Shepherd’s idea is that all forms of communication are geared toward these groups in the interest of the maintenance of their status above others, in all aspects of social interaction, because this interest is self-reinforcing. In reference to the way Western people come to understand and describe the world around them, he argues that, where circumstances allow, vision reveals, more quickly and effectively than hearing, the location of objects in time and space and, therefore, manipulating objects relies more heavily on sight. It follows, then, that vision facilitates control over abstract cultural constructs and such control encourages an ‘item-centred’ rather than structural understanding of the world and this is precisely why Western literature is saturated with the use of simile and metaphor, and the aesthetic of ownership and consumerism. The notion of difference creates meaning in spoken and written language and so Western thought is dominated by a series of interconnected, binary dualisms such as good / evil, self / other, black / white and male / female. These differences are how we understand the world around us by association, allowing us to categorise everything by grouping objects according to certain ‘yes / no’ characteristics. If, then, relative value is placed upon these dualisms and categories, as is the natural course of a decision making process where one chooses something as preferable to another, then the path is opened up to the practise of prejudgement and, because we have seen that ideas can easily spread through the workings of media sources such as literature, art and music, among many others, only one ‘error’ of judgement is required to cause mass social upheaval in the form of nazism and the like, this strengthened still further if the person responsible for such a mistake is one who we, as a collective, have empowered, for example, by way of government. Martha Minow notes that :-

When we identify one thing as unlike the others we are dividing the world; we use our language to exclude, to distinguish and to discriminate.

However, Shepherd continues by saying that “mental and cultural constructs are abstract – they take on life in a society only when they are mapped.” and so much study has been made of how metaphors in song allude to women in a derogatory light , often making reference to female genitalia and crude, sexual commentary in the discussion of ‘romantic’ issues. It can be cited that many of these metaphors are unavoidable because of the nature of the world we live in, for example, the lyrics for the seventh song in Schumann’s Liederkreis von Heine, Op. 24 read :-

...und mein Schiffchen segelt munter, rings umglänzt von Sonnenschein. Ruhig seh' ich zu dem Spiele goldner Wellen, kraus bewegt; still erwachen die Gefühle, die ich tief im Busen hegt'. Freundlich grüssend und verheißend lockt hinab des Stromes Pracht; doch ich kenn' ihn, oben gleißend, birgt sein Innres Tod und Nacht... Strom, du bist der Liebsten Bild!..

Clearly, Heine’s text contains blatant sexual innuendo to the degree of cliché, the speaker’s boat referring to his penis which sails gaily, “sunshine glistening around it” as it is reflected by a shimmering liquid . However, this poses questions of how one should, as a poet in the year 1827, speak about the various, often contradictory, feelings associated with the act of sexual arousal and subsequent copulation. This most basic of human ‘needs’ and desires is something that was just as pertinent in the early part of the nineteenth century as it is almost two hundred years later and, like today, was a subject that was suppressed despite an almost universal understanding and / or empathy of the most complex issues related to these acts. The concern, though, is not how the subject is approached but how it is masqueraded as the voice of Romanticism, a dichotomy of the innocent exploration of an inner yearning for companionship with imagery of lust and sexual fulfilment. As critics of such material, it is important that the questions regarding the appropriateness of the use of certain language in writing not necessarily be directed only at the compositions and poems that are under the spotlight but, rather, that it also be turned to one’s own methods of judgement in a consideration of the extent to which we are being hypocritical in denouncing a work that does nothing more than attempt to give an impression of the way an individual feels, especially when these sentiments are shared by a mass population to which we belong. Consequently, an important point in striking a balance in a feminist interpretation of any song is to decide which of the meaningful differences between gender groups, if any, are innate and which are constructed for the purpose of oppression. It would, therefore, be ignorant of us to attack Schumann’s representation of women as being less able to perform certain tasks etc. if this was actually the case, and so an accurate depiction of reality, unless we were commenting more on its function to manipulate the ‘weakness’ and so to a lesser degree on the music’s ability to portray this actuality, in which case the analysis may be more suited to those in the field of sociology.

Arthur Loesser goes a long way to describing how certain factions of society manipulate a musical, and generally artistic, culture in order to maintain, and in some cases restore, a desired set of attitudes and behaviours away from the arts. He proposes that “In eighteenth and nineteenth century...Europe, young feminine genteel idleness was mostly filled with a number of trivial occupations superficially related to the fine arts.” and goes on to say that “It was absolutely essential to her family’s good repute that a middle-class girl seem to look and behave with a respectable modesty... to exhibit a meticulous personal daintiness... their clothes and hairdress an unfunctional fragility and extravagance.” . To put it another way, women were expected to give out a certain aura that suggests their idleness and general inability, not because either of these were necessarily actually the case, but to uphold the impression that they had no need to concern themselves with any matters of importance and this was achieved in the tasks they were allowed to perform in the musical sphere. Ladies of leisure were encouraged, through a succession of pressures from peers and from the inherent knowledge that one’s position in society was never more than partly stable, to work toward an ‘accomplishment’ such as playing the piano or singing. Such activities served as an outward confirmation that a young lady’s family was, indeed, gentile and as a symbol of their ability to pay for her education and decorativeness. Many European psychoanalysts have written about women not as producers of culture but as signifiers of male privilege and prestige and this point is demonstrated no more clearly than in the use of the pianoforte and voice in the nineteenth century as a means of female self-degradation for the greater goal of elevating the status of their male counterparts, and so in turn their own reputation :-

The keyboard instrument enabled females to preserve a maximum of decorum in the exercise of their musical efforts... one of their best fortified perches from which they could strike their poses toward other classes.

It seems partly contradictory that, if women were silenced by their role as pianists and singers in the chamber, so many Romantic composers chose the medium of art-song, one that utilises both of those instruments to their fullest, to express their innermost feelings about the world around them, and particularly their relationship to the opposite sex. It has been suggested that, in composing Frauenliebe und –leben for pianoforte and female voice (as the speaker in the poetic content is a woman) with much of the musically relevant material in the keyboard part, Schumann makes a statement about the relative role of performers of different genders, the wanting female only contributing relatively insignificant material to the score. The main reason for judging the piano, which itself was often played by women at the time, as being somehow more important seems to be in its habit of ‘controlling’ the female character by finishing small and large scale phrases that would otherwise have been vocal. However, it seems appropriate to point out that this is the case in many of the Schumann songs, whatever sex the speaker happens to be, Im wunderschönen Monat Mai from Dichterliebe being an obvious example, the roles arguably reversing in the fourth song in the same cycle, Wenn ich in deine Augen seh, as the piano echoes the poets melody and rhythm as he sings “Wenn ich in deine Augen seh, so schwindet all’ mein Leid und weh!” Also, the nature of the piano as having much greater capabilities than the human voice in as far as range of pitch, volume and polyphony are concerned is significant to this point. Nevertheless, Citron goes further than this by suggesting that, not only do the instruments and their relative importance indicate a composer’s sexual stereotyping, and therefore oppression of women, but, the soundscape or musical texture used in a piece can also give us an insight into such matters. Her theory, also relevant to Dichterliebe No. 4 among many other works, is that homophony, for example, constructs a hierarchical relationship between its two members, a dominant melody over a subordinate accompaniment. She goes on to say that “counterpoint allows for a multiplicity of voices with a kind of slavish imitation” , condemning that style as reflective of the attitudes of mankind. Having removed the options of writing music for two instruments where one takes a more active role in creating a sense of motion, and both homophony and polyphony from the composer’s palette, it seems possible that the only true ‘politically correct’ music that is a viable option, according to Citron, is one written for solo, single line instrument which leads us to question the very nature of such ideas.

The ability to manipulate discrete objects, and on a larger scale, society, is aided by the arbitrary relationship between sound and object, by separation of the characteristics of sound with those of materials, in that the imagery that constructs such metaphors is transferred in some way to sound, in spoken language and in music but it is difficult to define what these are and how they work on a practical level. This arbitrary quality of language, both spoken and musical, is guaranteed a cross-sensory operation and so the inherent characteristics of sound can have no necessary relationship with the inherent characteristics of such objects as visually defined – “these can be open-endedly manipulated.” Music has been utilised to take full advantage of this sound / vision relationship in many forms and guises, as Chadwick states in the phrase “language defers meaning and constructs subjectivity negotiated through political, social and economic forces.” This principle is clearly demonstrated in the word painting of vocal music of the Romantic generation and much earlier, in madrigal writing, for example. In many ways, these techniques, to explicitly describe the text of a song, are nothing more than an extension of textual metaphor and many feminist music theorists attempt to assemble a theory of the musical language that is used to describe female characters, and femininity generally, in a whole range of pieces in order to understand the way these factors have oppressed the potential of women, up to and including our own generation. As a composer of music, rather than words, Schumann can have only limited control over precise cultural phenomena in that music is a language that the majority of people come to understand by aural traditions only and this is reflected in its societal utility. Music is an auditory experience devoid of specific, explicit meaning but, through its use in conjunction with spoken language and theatrical production, has magnetized a whole collection of ‘inner meanings’ that an audience is able to understand in a quite precise way and that theorists such as McClary can consider and deliberate about but only ever have a practical estimate as to their full cultural significance. It is certain that Schumann intended very specific dramatic colours in the use of identifiable musical indicators, such as relative and impartial changes in key. We can identify some of these by studying what key a given section of music is in, in relation to the subject matter it contains, and this yields some interesting results, a few general trends shown in Appendix B, although it is important to be surely aware of large scale structures when attempting such an endeavour. The key structure is often the musical line upon which a song cycle hangs and this can confuse the function of certain keys in selected situations, not least because often the tonal area Schumann chose for a particular work could have both a cyclic and a narrative role. For example, in Frauenliebe und -leben, the return to B flat major in the epilogue effects a reconciliation in both the key structure and the train of thought in the cycle, the opening key also being B flat major. In contrast to that, the end of the fifth song of the cycle rests on the interval of an open 6th in the left hand of the piano part, which foretells the following narrative details of fulfilment (in remote keys of G and D) and loss (in tonic minor). The key structures of other Schumann song cycles, such as Liederkreis von Eichendorff, Op.39, can be found to have a much more structural significance than narrative because, in this case, the cycle is not really linked to a story or idea as such but contains trends of style and tone. Most of the poems in this collection are about a scene, a season or a time, these being factors that hold the cycle together as a coherent whole, the songs themselves being more contained and withdrawn than in some of the other Schumann cycles perhaps because they have in common their nocturnal characteristics. Also, at all of these times there is, in the words of Eric Sams, “...an overwhelming personal emotion and feeling, as if in a dream, that, with the slow passing of time, something momentous is about to happen.” , i.e. there is a sense of a teleological growth of expectation and, therefore, tension. The tonal areas help carry this tension without need of specific linear narrative, these being mainly contained within a perfect 4th, between the tonics of E and A, and move from F sharp minor to F sharp major.

As with any features of biological and cultural development, the processes that lead to music gaining an inner meaning that is, at least partly, separate from its structural, musical requirements, take place on a two-way street, the decipherable codes in music being pre-existent when a composer comes to write a piece with dramatic intentions and those very codes being vulnerable to change and restructuring according to the new works that appear. In writing music to a text, however, Schumann and the other songwriters make use of spoken language in a way that allows both the musical content and the textual content to speak more loudly than they could possibly have individually because of the process described above. In fact, music in song has the ability to alter the meaning of certain lyrics by pre-classification and pre-evaluation of its genre, perhaps mainly in individual instances that have little or no bearing on society at large but definitely with the potential, through repeated usage, to have a far more significant impact. Most of the association between words and music (and, so, picture and sound) are understood without necessarily being stated in the context of a song or other vocal composition due to the learning procedure that a population is put through in their daily lives. Again, much of the coding that is inherent in music is indefinable since it works on a variety of cultural levels, each with a different impact. However, as with the study of keys, we can achieve an insight into the extra-musical workings of the Schumann songs by examining the differing narrative characteristics given when certain chords and motifs are sounded, or vice versa, and the correspondence that Schumann made explaining these relationships. For example, it is well known that Schumann set aside a particular motif to refer to his, at the time, bride-to-be, Clara Wieck, this being a stepwise movement of scale degrees as follows : 3-2-1-7-1 . This particular theme, and variations of it, can be found in numerous places, both in melody and accompaniment, among the works of Schumann, not least in his lieder, probably due to the nature of the narrative content and the intensity of the human voice. Having written to Hirschbach in 1839 that he had always considered vocal music to be inferior to that of purely instrumental , Schumann admitted the following year, a period that is held as one of his most creative due to the writing of one hundred and forty songs, that he was beginning to feel frustrated with composing for piano alone as it was inhibiting his creativity . This is perhaps because he had come to realise what a massive impact words and music could have when they converge into an art form that is arguably more than the sum of its parts.

More than a control over the way that a lyric is likely to be received by an audience with its musical colouration, Schumann’s poetic voice speaks through purely in his selection of the texts to which he chose to set his compositions and the way that these were often altered for the sake of his creativity. Issues of relative importance are immediately raised whenever two art forms come together in collaboration, whether it be text, music and theatre in opera, dance and music in ballet or in the case of poetry and music in song. The significant difference in this latter case is that the poetry was, more often than not, originally written as a stand-alone form of expression, fixed in its own context without the need of music to legitimate it as an artistic whole. Only when a composer chooses to set one piece or other to music is the genre of art song born, as opposed to a libretto written specifically for an opera, albeit by a different person than the musical composer, which, from the outset, was intended to be placed alongside a musical craft. Clearly, it is much rarer for a poet to come across a piece of music and attempt to write a lyric to go with it, especially with a view to the piece being sung rather than spoken in a performance of such a work. This is largely because poets, in general, do not possess the specialist tools that are required to construct a vocal part to a piece of music, and likewise why many songs fail to inspire due to the composer’s inability to understand the nuances of a poetic text and so fail to bring these across in a musical version of that text. Nevertheless, whichever way round the process takes place, the choice of text and music is a very significant factor in unravelling the personal whims of an artist, the society in which he places himself and at what level in any supposed hierarchical arrangement he is positioned. As explained above, even in adding a musical element to a poem or collection of poems, the composer irreversibly defiles the poet’s work in his additions to it and confesses a personal agenda with intentions that consider a new work as more important, relevant or valuable than the original. Schumann was notorious for using the poems he chose to set to music in any way that he considered suited his songs, often missing sections of the poetry out, planting his own meanings on some of the text, by way of ‘unsuitable’ word and scene painting, and, allegedly, indiscriminately altering and miscopying poems without contemplating the effect his changes would have on the poem’s meaning. Sams even suggests that Schumann critically misunderstood whole sections of certain poems that he set to music, rarely offering an equivalent to, specifically, Heine’s obvious irony and innuendo . In this sense, it hardly matters how the texts were changed because it seems that Schumann was incapable of doing them justice by representing their poetic contrariness in music. However, it is clear that many of the alterations Schumann made to certain texts were intentional and absolutely in order to further the original poetic meaning rather than to transplant one of his own on the lyrics. An example of this is in the sixth song of his Op. 24, Liederkreis von Heine, where he chooses to repeat the word “gleich” – “immediately” – in order to illustrate the urgency of the situation described in the rest of the poem, his music contributing to the screening of the poet’s emotions by slowing to highlight the reluctance of an inevitable departure away from his loved one. This rather strengthens the point that, in setting a poem to song, it is essential to gain both an individual perspective on the words that are used in the poem if you hope to communicate anything about your own artistic and political thought processes and a clear understanding of the original poet’s intentions so that these may be incorporated and strengthened as and when it is appropriate. Therefore, changing the poem to suit one persuasion or another is more than just acceptable, but sometimes necessary and always inevitable because the nature of art is one of creativity. Another example of his alteration of text appears in the second song of Schumann’s choral Op. 84 where Baron Ernst Von Feuchtersleben’s original “faithful heart” was transformed to read “poor heart”, indicating quite different sentiments about the character that the song refers to. So, as Komar asks, “How do we judge Schumann’s response to the poem?” It may be more appropriate to word the line of enquiry “Is it Schumann’s task to explicitly highlight every nuance of the text and does this actually increase our understanding or enjoyment of it?”. If Schumann destroys the sense of irony in a poem with his ‘inappropriate’ use of musical language then, firstly it speaks of the composer’s ideology (or possibly, ignorance) and, secondly it must be noted that, unless the text itself is altered, the irony will still stand in the lyrics but this element of the song is transposed to another level as a result. When presented with a song, an audience is still able to think of the text in a way that is separate from the musical experience brought before them, especially when it is a well-known text or story , just as one is aware of, or can consciously become aware of, a particular line among a larger orchestral texture. A similar notion is in the structure of a poem or cycle in that the order of the poetry has a major influence on the way we understand it, in that a linear narrative works precisely because we are not supposed to know the end or when it is going to happen until we have heard the whole piece. The power of irony lies in the fact that what is being said in the text is in the form of a dichotomy , so perhaps if the text contains subtle ironies then it is down to the skill of the composer to write a song that maintains that subtlety to the degree that the analyst accuses him of missing it completely, after all he has chosen the poem for its content and relation to other texts and so the setting to music can only add a personal interpretation to whatever was already present.

But, according to Eric Sams, “Schumann’s selection of poems was [also] indiscriminate”, going on to say that “...he foisted his own meaning on them, repeated lines, verses and selected words for his own purpose, added, altered and miscopied at will.” although the question of whether or not he chose poems without any criteria as to their subject is debateable, especially in the light of Sams’ contradictory statement in the same book that reads :-

Schumann often knew the poets he used and selected them because they shared his liberal and agnostic views. Therefore...he chose poems which either directly mirrored his own feelings or could be adjusted to reflect them.

Clearly Schumann, like any other person with a desire to write songs, had a very precise reasons for choosing the specific texts for his pieces, Myrthen (Op. 25), for example, containing twenty-six pieces from various poets including Goethe, Rückert, Byron, Moore, Heine, Burns and Mosen. These reasons were a manifestation of both a personal political and romantic view of the world and the taught, cultural idiosyncrasies that have come to be naturally ingrained into his personality because, as Citron puts it, “Music is communication! The composer is embedded in particular cultural circumstances that affect the way a piece is written” . All of these symptomatic traits become easily identifiable when one studies the main trends that appear in the subject content of Schumann’s vocal works, and specifically to this essay, those that relate to gender characterisation. For example, his song cycle Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love), sketches the story of an unhappy love from the perspective of a mournful, reflective poet who looks back on how things used to be, the narrative running in more or less a linear manner as the speaker turns from memories of happiness to how things fell apart and finally the symbolic burial of his love, desire and pain in the present, the text selected from sixty-five of the Heine poems to make a fairly coherent tale. On examination of the musical content, as it stands in response to the poetry, Lawrence Kramer suggests that the cycle is an expression of Schumann’s well-documented mobile ideas of sexuality. It seems the case that Robert Schumann was strongly drawn to fantasies of gender mobility and feminine identification in man and “he clearly identified his creativity with a feminine principal that he desired within himself” . Spillman and Stein agree, noting that in the nineteenth century there was a rise in the celebration of the contradictory as a reaction against what was considered to be oppressive rationality and orderliness :-

This merging of contradictory ideas created confusion, bewilderment and ambiguities of time, place and persona. Instinct collided with reason.

In other words, Schumann’s instinct was one of male supremacy but his reason is one of sexual open-mindedness, the latter ultimately informing the former. The reasoning, liberal side of his personality is partly demonstrated in his correspondence to friends where there is mention of wearing women’s clothes in order to get into a state of mind necessary to write music in the manner that he desired (see Appendix A). About the final song of the Dichterliebe cycle, Lawrence Kramer remarks that :-

...the jilted poet assumes a hypervirile postume and repudiates both femininity and art... The song, however, dissolves into the lyrical, feminine...

Therefore, the difficult academic debate as to the way musical works of Schumann and his contemporaries went a long way to uphold and strengthen the oppression of female creativity, and so sexuality, is challenged when historians study this aspect of the composer’s life. One explanation could be that a personal struggle was set up in Schumann between the predominantly male society that moulds opinions and creates realities of male supremacy, teaching them to work for the conservation of that male control on society, and a personal sense of individuality that derives from a creative, egalitarian and ultimately feminine way of thinking. This feminine ideology can be viewed, not as an image of bisexual sensation breaking free from a masculine entity, as Kramer suggests in his article, but rather, as the text suggests, a look back on the female image, that being an ideal for women rather than for men; something for men to control rather than be “jilted” by. Both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine elements are present in Schumann’s music, according to Kramer, but it is a matter of debate as to which of these qualities most strongly sings through in his compositions. It was the case in nineteenth century Europe that the suggestion of the dominance of feminine characteristics in a musician’s work often provoked a defensive reaction and, so, actually lead the way for artists to reject that part of themselves and consciously write with a ‘masculine’ approach. Nevertheless, wherever the masculine / feminine balance lies, if indeed there is such a place, it is clear that both the composer and the poet of the original texts had very personal, autobiographical reasons for choosing those specific words for their art, Schumann creating the cycle Dichterliebe and Heine a collection of sixty-five poems from which Schumann chose sixteen. According to Arthur Komar, the poems of Heine’s collection were “referring to 1821 when his cousin, Amalie, rejected him in favour of marrying another. Hence his original title for the book of poems being Evil Old Songs.” As we know, one of the primary motivations for Schumann’s composition of his cycle was interlaced with his loyalty to Clara and the frustration of his marriage plans, and this over-layering of motivations demonstrates the true nature of multi-faceted artistic expression as opposed to authorial ownership of poetry and music.

Written in the same year as Dichterliebe, Frauenliebe und –leben (A Woman’s Life and Love), with text by Adelbert von Chamisso, deals with love from the perspective of a female character who grows up always adoring one man who she eventually marries, this removing her from a supposed community of “sisters”, only for that love to be destroyed by the death of her husband. Eric Sams describes this latter cycle as Robert Schumann’s attempt to see life through the eyes of Clara, looking into the future when he will have no choice but to betray her through death. Richard Wigmore perhaps puts it better in the sleevenotes to a Decca recording of Frauenliebe by saying that “The wonderful outpouring of song in 1840 was a response to profound emotional and psychological need.” He continues by describing this need in Schumann as his passion for wanting Clara and his impatience and pain at their forced separation, his vision of sexual and spiritual fulfilment, and his recurring fears of losing her. This said, it must be emphasised that the poems were chosen by Schumann from a selection of Chamisso’s work and so, whatever the textual content, Schumann can only be given part of the credit for it (by way of his setting) and, therefore, any psycho-analysis of the composer based on these texts must take this into account. Moreover, the personal philosophies and ideologies of Robert Schumann can be studied and understood by the texts that he chose not to use, especially when he selected a small number of texts from a large collection , because, as argued by Leppert, art reveals in the degree to which it hides :-

...art ‘speaks’ of one thing but remains silent on another. It draws attention to one issue not least by distracting us from, or otherwise ignoring, something else.

This concept is a double-edged sword in that an ideology is placed in the limelight by its use and representation in music, this all the more powerful in song owing to the issues coming together in two separate arts, and alternatives are ignored because of their absence, which in turn strengthens the relevance of those included. It is clear though, that one recurring theme in the songs and cycles of Schumann is the tragic isolation of lost love and jealousy and so it could be seen that, whomever he sets up as the voice of that seclusion, Schumann is always speaking from a personal point of view, not least because the lyrics of his song cycles were selected rather than composed by his own hand. In many of his songs, not only the central figure but, more importantly, the speaker is a rejected suitor, often at a significant pivotal event in the sexual life of the characters involved, such as at a wedding feast, examples of songs where this is the setting being in “Der Spielmann”, “Der arme Peter” and “Das ist ein Flöten”. It can be noted, then, that few songs or cycles of this period feature, let alone spotlight, independent female characters who neither engage in sexual encounters with or shun a male heroic figure, allegedly victimising him, in these stereotype plots actually creating the concept of the romantic poet. The male characters, and so their creators in poetry and music, become victims of romances that they, themselves, control and / or fantasize about. She, on the other hand, is represented as being both worthless as a consumer item and consequently judged as being the instigator of the downfall of man and all mankind, this judgement taking place on a societal scale . For example, in the third song of Myrthen, Op. 25, “Der Nussbaum”, the narrator speaker sings the following lyrics :-

...es flüstern je zwei und zwei gepaart...sie flüstern von einem Mägdlein, das dächte die nächte und tage lang, wusste ach! Selber nicht was...

In other words, the poet / composer of the songs and song cycle subconsciously writes from his own perspective, even when the speaker in a song is the narrator or other non-empathetic figure. In Frauenliebe und –leben, Chamisso’s character is male, seen through the eyes, and told through the voice, of a woman and, therefore, we only ever hear the voice of that character’s fantasy – one that Schumann himself presumably shares because he chose to set that specific text to music, an action that suggests he has some affiliation with at least one of the characters in the plot. It is possible, of course, that he actually found himself empathising with the female character and not the male ‘hero’ figure at all, but this is something that is debateable at best. Either way though, the cycle, and the songs within, become an autobiography of a sort, and moreover, an empty, romantic gesture of a poet or poets who demonstrate an emotional need on a personal and cultural level.