Schumann: Frauenliebe und Leben, Op. 42

The British mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, twice nominated for a Grammy, here performs a collection of songs by Robert Schumann, which combines two song cycles from the extremely prolific song year 1840 with several songs from the composer’s last years. She is accompanied by Eugene Asti.

Sarah Connolly fell in love with Schumann’s songs in her youth. She has sung them since her early days as a performer and in the booklet she and Eugene Asti write, ‘at the heart of Schumann’s music on this recording lie a profound melancholy and a personal and completely honest, open-hearted empathy for the poetry, which is totally disarming. All the stories and situations depicted in these songs were so much a part of the composer’s own life experience that we just cannot help but be touched and moved by them. Perhaps it is for these reasons that our love for Schumann is especially great, and we feel privileged to be able to share this extraordinary music with you’.

It is often claimed that Schumann’s late songs, which include the first seven on this CD, show a composer in decline – a charge that is refuted by such wonderful Lieder as the Wilhelm Meister settings and ‘Nachtlied’ (Goethe), ‘Der Einsiedler’ (Eichendorff), ‘Aufträge’ (L’Egru), ‘Mein schöner Stern!’ (Rückert), ‘Requiem’ (Dreves), the Lenau settings of Op. 90 and the Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, all of which are as fine as anything Schumann wrote in 1840, his great ‘song’ year.

The album’s key work is the rarely recorded Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, songs on five poems attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots. They were his last Lieder and the most austere that Schumann ever wrote. He composed the set in 1852 during a period of deep depression and offered the work as a Christmas present to his wife, Clara. It is also matched here by ‘Requiem’, setting a translation by Leberecht Blücher Dreves of an old sacred Latin text. This requiem, from Op. 90, was one of four that Schumann composed in the last years of his creative life, and it seems likely that the proliferation of such settings around 1850 had symbolic import – ‘requiems, after all, are written for oneself’, as Schumann once confided to a friend.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson - 1 March 1954 - 3 July 2006

Wigmore Hall Live are proud to release on their Archive series this very special 1999 live recital by the great, beloved American born mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson who tragically died in 2006.

The dramatic intensity and passionate commitment to her material earned her countless comparisons to Maria Callas.

Noted for her interpretation of Handel and Bach, this recital of lieder by Schumann and Brahms demonstrates the breadth of her repertoire and her meticulous artistry.

After her death, she won the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Performance for her Rilke Songs and again in 2008 for her performance of her husband's Neruda Songs

This fifth disc in the Naxos series of the complete Schumann Lieder features one of the key works of the entire 19th century song repertoire, Frauenliebe und -leben (Awoman’s Love and Life).

Written during the summer of 1840, at a time when Schumann and his wife-to-be Clara Wieck were fighting her father in court over their right to marry, these bitter-sweet, passionate yet intimate settings embody a nineteenth-century patriarchal conception of love and marriage, when a woman was expected to be submissive and deferential.

For all the sexist overtones, however, the sincerity of feeling expressed in these songs is never in doubt and Frauenliebe und -leben continues to number among Schumann’s most popular works.

"Sibylla Rubens [is] an artist of whom more and more should be heard.” MusicWeb International on a previous lieder disc