'Ah Clara, I am not worthy of your love': Rereading 'Frauenliebe und Leben', the Poetry and the Music

In setting Chamisso's Frauenliebe und Leben, Schumann discovered in the poems a subtext that he reflected in the music. Although the heroine of the poems manifestly aspires to be humble and submissive, as was widely expected of women in her day, she emerges, to those who read closely, as more independent and spirited than she herself knows. By shaping details in his songs' vocal line, Schumann captures the heroine's independence of spirit, as well as her resentment when her husband proves unequal to her high expectations; and by casting the piano as the heroine's husband, Schumann gives voice to a man's inner fears of disappointing or injuring the woman he loves. Schumann's music thus offers a penetrating insight into the Frauenliebe poems, even while expressing the composer's own deep anxieties, on the eve of his marriage, about his worthiness to wed the prodigiously gifted Clara Wieck.