This intriguing book by a leading scholar of Robert Schumann’s lieder represents the fifth installment of the newly launched Music in Context series, published by Cambridge University Press. Accordingly, Hallmark provides biographical, historical, and literary perspectives for reassessing Chamisso’s poetic cycle and Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. Both works, as many know, depict a woman’s progression from newfound love to marriage, motherhood and finally widowhood. Of course Hallmark’s contextual considerations must also encompass the recent past, since Frauenliebe has prompted rich critical readings from scholars in the last few decades. Of these Ruth Solie’s well-known 1992 feminist readingFootnote ¹ has ‘pride of place’, both for its stimulating content and for the ‘new wave of study’ it launched (p. 4). Solie’s notion that Frauenliebe represents an ‘impersonation of a woman by the voices of male culture’Footnote ² nevertheless provides the point of departure for much of Hallmark’s work, which seeks to provide ‘a more balanced view’ of Chamisso and Schumann by understanding their ‘achievements sympathetically from within their own era and culture’ (p. 2).

While acknowledging the undeniably subordinate position of early nineteenth-century women, Hallmark takes issue with the notion that Frauenliebe offered them unacceptable images of their sex and marriage. In Chapter 1 he reminds us about the newness of the German middle class – the very class about which and for whom Chamisso wrote. Here the nuclear family replaced the extended one of earlier agrarian times, promoting greater intimacy and more open expression between husband and wife, parents and children. Attitudes toward motherhood also had changed, as children were increasingly reared not by members of extended family but by mothers. Breastfeeding (celebrated in Chamisso’s seventh poem) reinforced the new intimacy of the middle-class family as mothers assumed this role from wet-nurses. While bourgeois marriage may ‘look like a trap rather than an ideal to us’ today, Eva Figes suggests that this idealization of family life occurred also because ‘it was so difficult to attain’.Footnote ³ Gaining economic security in these new times meant a delay in marriage for most men, and since the Wartezeit for girls began as early as 14, a wide disparity in age was common between husband and wife (the case for both Schumann and Chamisso, who were respectively 9 and 21 years senior to their spouses). Given such age differences, and given the status that marriage could bring, women were likely ‘predisposed to look up to their fiancés’ (p. 10). Thus the worshipful attitudes expressed in Frauenliebe – even while penned by a man – probably had a ring of truth for much of Chamisso’s readership, female and male. Yet Hallmark also notes the role that posturing might play in such expressions, later arguing persuasively for rehearing the protagonist’s claim of unworthiness in song 2 as one such posturing. Age disparity also meant earlier widowhood, making the oft-critiqued husband’s death in Frauenliebe likely seem realistic for his contemporaries. (The words of one real-life widow – paraphrased in poem 8 of Frauenliebe and discussed by Hallmark – occurred after a happy marriage of just one and one-half years.) Throughout his survey of cultural and ideological developments, Hallmark quotes both women’s and men’s voices, and while acknowledging problematic aspects of the new middle-class family and economy (including the development of Geschlechtscharaktere), he concludes by saying that ‘we should probably avoid the simplistic notion that early nineteenth-century women by and large perceived themselves as victims of repressive societal attitudes’. And while Chamisso and Schumann were ‘both creatures of their era’, to view them as ‘complicit perpetrators of male domination’ seems, for Hallmark, ‘an unwarranted and ungenerous conclusion’ (p. 20).

Kristina Muxfeldt has highlighted an 1839 comment describing Chamisso as a poet able to assimilate all that was foreign to him.Footnote ⁴ Hallmark’s chapters 2 and 3 – the longest study of Chamisso’s life and works yet to appear in English – provides context for this comment and for Chamisso’s own remark that ‘I am everywhere a stranger’. Born of French aristocrats but later a German bourgeois citizen, a Catholic who became a Protestant, a successful poet and novelist who also sustained a notable career as a scientist – Chamisso needed constantly to adapt to changing contexts and a flexibility of viewpoint. Reinforcing his cosmopolitan outlooks was his three-year voyage around the world as a naturalist aboard a Russian naval ship. Chamisso not only discovered numerous new plants and animals (Hallmark notes that over 60 Latin scientific terms bear his name), he also studied the languages and customs of native cultures to which he was exposed; one inhabitant of the Marshall Islands became an especially close friend.

Chamisso’s sympathetic understanding of diverse peoples, European and otherwise, informed his poetry, which as Hallmark shows is anything but one-dimensional. Anticipating the work of the Young Germans, Chamisso’s socio-political verse of the 1820s might critique political repression and censorship, decry working conditions for factory workers or express the plight of the poor. Other subjects range from the gruesome (e.g. ‘Die Giftsmischerin’, about an actual Berlin woman executed for poisoning eight family members) to the prosaic (e.g. ‘Die alte Waschfrau’, a sympathetic portrait of a working-class laundress) to the humorous (e.g. ‘Hans Jürgen und sein Kind’, about a drunkard who rescues his baby from the pond while citing lines from song 7 of Frauenliebe – ‘Upon my heart, upon my breast, you my bliss, you my joy!’ – only to discover he’s holding the tomcat, a wife’s ruse to sober him up). Chamisso’s poems frequently adopt naturalistic language and sometimes unfold from the protagonist’s point of view, whether male or female, middle or lower class; even the Berlin poisoner, whose monologue, Hallmark suggests, may represent the first such depiction of the criminally insane, tells her story without an imposed moralizing tone (and in such cases we may detect Chamisso the naturalist-observer in action).

The above already provides some sense of the varied female portraits in Chamisso’s output, indicating that Frauenliebe ‘cannot be taken as his single or chief perspective’ (p. 106). To provide a wider context for Frauenliebe, however, Hallmark focuses on Chamisso’s portrayals of middle-class women. Many such poems adopt first-person perspective, which Hallmark defends against Solie’s charge as representing a ‘spurious autobiographical act’Footnote ⁵: whether in lyric, narrative, or dramatic literature, ‘to deny a writer the freedom to “impersonate” someone else’s thoughts and feelings … appears to be an unjustified restriction on his or her artistic freedom’ (p. 107). To underscore the freshness of Frauenliebe’s lyric monologues, Hallmark contrasts the poems with Amadeus Wendt’s 1829 Bilder des weiblichen Lebens – almost surely the model for Chamisso’s cycle. Where Wendt’s poems seem prescriptive, with pious overtones, abstract sentiments, and an omniscient narrator, Chamisso’s lyric monologues project a more descriptive and personal tone, enhanced by ‘flashes of psychological realism, humor, and sharp feeling’ (p. 104). Other traits illustrate the diversity of Chamisso’s female portrayals. Muxfeldt has already noted how Frauenliebe reverses an old poetic trope by substituting a present, passionate female protagonist for the distant, abstract woman admired from afar.Footnote ⁶ Hallmark provides additional insight by exploring the sexual undercurrents, fairly frank for their time, not just in Frauenliebe but elsewhere too. Chamisso also provides less-than-idyllic portraits of marriage: the poetic cycle Tränen, for instance, explores ‘a decidedly unhappy, arranged marriage’ even while paralleling traits of Frauenliebe (p. 83). Other poems might depict middle-class love and marriage from only male or both male and female perspectives. The 22 poems of Lebenslieder und Bilder – an admittedly ‘textbook depiction of gender-based characteristics’ (p. 86) – give equal voice to their male and female protagonists. Other poems tap into realistic concerns of the day: marriage as desirable but difficult to achieve, or worry about age differences. ‘Was will ich sagen’, for instance, was written for Chamisso’s young bride and contrasts his grey hair and sore heart with her youth and good health.

Hallmark devotes the second part of the book to musical considerations. Chapter 4 explores other musical settings of Frauenliebe, and a table shows that over 50 composers set all or part of the cycle, demonstrating an enthusiasm that surprised even the poet. We also learn that Schumann’s 1840 song cycle was by no means the first, nor was his decision to reprise opening materials at the end of the cycle. (Franz Kugler’s decidedly inferior 1830 setting, the first to appear, did so as well; Hallmark suggests that Kugler, an acquaintance of Chamisso, may even have inspired the poet to write Frauenliebe.) Nor was Schumann the first to set the cycle selectively: Carl Loewe’s 1836 cycle not only omitted the ninth poem (the widow’s conversation with her granddaughter – also left off by Schumann and critiqued by Solie as severing the protagonist ‘from all connections to women’s culture’) but the eighth as well (the husband’s death).Footnote ⁷ Throughout this chapter Hallmark speculates about Schumann’s knowledge of earlier settings and possible influences they exerted on his own song cycle.

Chapter 5 reviews Schumann’s 1840 ‘song year’ and examines Schumann’s compositional process as shown in surviving Frauenliebe manuscripts – viewable on the webpage linked to the book (as are Kugler’s and Loewe’s settings, along with other items). We also learn that Schumann set 13 other Chamisso poems directly after finishing Frauenliebe, including poems with darker subjects (e.g. an abandoned mother, a bride devoured by a lion, and the poem contrasting old age with a bride’s youth, cited above). The diary entry noting completion of Frauenliebe also brought an unsettling comment: ‘Bitter evening with Clara, but I was at fault’.Footnote ⁸ Even for Schumann Frauenliebe’s blissful expressions represented but one facet of middle-class love and marriage.

Chapter 6 provides analyses of each song in Schumann’s cycle, with numerous trenchant observations. Hallmark facilitates some insights by considering the compositional process: manuscripts for song 3, for example, show how Schumann gradually developed a vocal melody and its exact inversion to contrast two emotional states felt by the protagonist. A number of insights also emerge via comparison with other settings: for instance, where composers usually set the seventh poem about nursing as a stereotypical lullaby, Schumann individualized his portrait with exuberant music marked ‘Fröhlich, innig’.

Hallmark’s counterpoint with Solie’s feminist reading becomes more explicit in his discussion of the music. Responding to her assertion that Frauenliebe’s limited keys and B-flat tonal frame represent a mythic woman’s confined environment and ‘endless repeatability’, Hallmark compares the key scheme with other cycles by Schumann, including male-centred ones, finding that Frauenliebe has more or less the same ratio of keys to poems.Footnote ⁹ Other differences arise within individual analyses. For instance, Hallmark hears song 1 as expressing not the woman’s adoration for the man but bewilderment at her new emotional state. He emphasizes the remarkably reserved manner of both the poem (where ‘love’ never appears) and the music – ‘without a doubt the most subdued musical setting’ out of the six that Hallmark considers (p. 175). This hearing in turn prompts a re-evaluation of the piano postlude at the cycle’s end: by reprising song 1 materials, the postlude reinforces how ‘the widow feels herself again facing an unpredictable future’ (p. 234). Moreover, given that ‘a musical return … reminds us that something else has transpired in the meantime’, and given the varied return of song 1 materials, Hallmark hears not ‘endless repeatability’ but a memory of something distant, indicating how much Chamisso’s ‘plausible character’ has changed by the end (p. 232).

Absorbing from the start, Hallmark’s book is eminently readable even for those unfamiliar with Frauenliebe’s recent critical reception. (Concern for accessibility may also explain Hallmark’s reliance on secondary English sources for Schumann rather than critical editions of his diaries and other writings.) Perhaps inevitably we are still left with questions, as Hallmark himself occasionally acknowledges. For instance, did Chamisso write Frauenliebe and other similar works to ‘fill an imagined void in literary production’ by women, as Muxfeldt suggested over a decade ago?Footnote ¹⁰ This speculation seems ‘reasonable’ for Hallmark (p. 91), yet his focus on Frauenliebe prevents him from surveying the literary production of women in this period. Nevertheless Hallmark proposes that Chamisso perhaps responded to this void by publishing poems by women in the Deutscher Musenalmanach that he co-edited from 1832–38. Yet only two such women can be clearly identified, though Hallmark speculates about a third. Were female poets so hard to come by? (In a footnote he remarks, ‘it is certainly true that female poets were rare’; p. 91, n. 15.) Nor do we know if Chamisso solicited their 15 published poems – he knew both women – or if they were submitted independently. Hallmark’s discussion of these poems seems a bit short and somewhat contradictory: he ends by stating that they ‘furnish evidence that many of the sentiments expressed in Chamisso’s poems in the voice of women are accurate’, yet near the outset he notes that the emphasis on ‘the shortcomings of men [is] something Chamisso’s poems lack’, though he probably ‘welcomed their perspective’ (p. 91). Were such verse-form sentiments recognized as exceptional or commonplace? Further scholarship on such matters will surely continue the dialogue surrounding Frauenliebe. For now, we should be grateful that Hallmark has left us a much more nuanced understanding of both the poems and the songs.