In the first half of this two-part post I try to understand why a 21st Century opera singer is discomfited when singing some early 19th Century text set beautifully to music. Having failed in that venture, the second half of the post contributes to the modernisation of the musical arts by offering updated versions of the narrative of some famous operas.
Stirring the plot – Part 1
Andrew Ford has been presenting Radio National’s Music Show since 1995. It is a great asset – a treasure trove of conversation, performance and analysis of music – ancient and modern and everything in between. But listening to an episode recently had the effect on me, for the first time, of needing to stop the car, get out and shout. You could say I Woke to a new reality.
Andrew was chatting with British soprano Carolyn Sampson about her recent recording of Robert Schumann’s song cycle FrauenLiebe und-Leben (“A Woman’s Love and Life”). She has found a way to program it, he said, “to enable a twenty-first century woman to sing it without gritting her teeth”.
Schumann wrote the piece in 1840 using poems written ten years earlier by Adelbert von Chamisso. The poems describe the stages of love for a man through which a woman passes, ending when she declares that by dying he has hurt her for the first time. (Robert Schumann apparently presented the song cycle to Clara as a wedding present. Clara outlived him by about forty years.)
Here’s a sample of the 1830 text:
Since I first saw him I think I must be blind; Wherever I look I see only him as in a trance. His image hovers before me, Emerging from the deepest gloom, even brighter.
Andrew Ford introduced the conversation by describing the words as “tricky in the 21st century.” Carolyn Sampson reported that several of her colleagues had expressed discomfort singing these texts. But she wants to defend the Song Cycle on the grounds that it still has much to offer and shouldn’t be written off.
“The issue that many people have with it is that it’s a male poet, a male composer, writing about this image of a woman’s life that is distressingly old-fashioned.”
“What we wanted to do by adding songs by Robert Schumann setting other poets, and songs written by Clara Schumann, his extraordinarily talented wife, was just to create an extra dimension.”
“- – we can really get on board with a lot of these songs and the texts; it’s very touching and the song about feeding a baby – I do relate to that; I don’t define myself by being a mother, on the other hand it’s a huge part of who I am. So there is an awful lot to which we can relate. But there are lines that people find difficult, indeed that I [Carolyn Sampson] find more challenging:
‘I want to serve him, I want to belong to him completely.’”
Carolyn says she feels the poems were “written with the best of intentions. And we can’t cut off swathes of song and opera repertoire by only performing things that reflect our 21st Century society.” Amen to that.
Carolyn and her accompanist, Joseph Middleton, have added to the song cycle:
“For example, after the wedding song we’ve then put in an extraordinarily tender song about the first experience of physical love. And then there’s a more stormy encounter; and then we get on to presenting the idea of the pregnancy. So we have just tried to expand it and give her a few more chances to say her piece.”
An article by Carolyn Sampson in the Guardian newspaper (https://tinyurl.com/yjoazztm) attests to the fact that music can trump words:
“Schumann’s song cycle seems to have little to say about the realities of a woman’s life, but its emotional depths and the music’s sheer beauty still touch us.”
“The song cycle is a work that I have loved for many years. I was first attracted by the sheer beauty of the music. It’s somehow simple and charming on the surface, but with hidden depths – often in the piano part – – the music speaks where words no longer can”.
But the Guardian article also sums up what I see as a problematic view of the world:
“How does any self-respecting modern woman perform the song cycle today, in which the female protagonist is defined solely in relation to the man and her role as wife and mother?”
Towards the end of the interview Carolyn says: “We all need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century”. Credit to Andrew Ford for taking her gently to task for this unkind and over-generalised assertion.