Sally Beamish

Programme Note

Impressions from the life of Clara Wieck-Schumann after the eight songs of Robert Schumann's Op 42 Frauen-Liebe und Leben
Janice Galloway:
I first heard the song-cycle Frauen-LIebe und Leben played and sung (!) to me by Graeme McNaught - a perhaps unlikely source of wonder but that's what it was. In finding out more about its composer, the at once tragic and heroic Robert Schumann, I simultaneously discovered more about his wife, confidante, champion, mother of his children, his Klarchen, Clara. The idea of transmuting the life of the anonymous, fictional `Frau' of the Chamisso texts into the turbulent life of this real woman stuck me as interesting. Using literal German translations and words taken from the famous marriage diaries of Robert and Clara - the words of both and of Frederick Wieck, Mendelssohn and Heine appear in the text, forged to fit suitable metre - and my own 20th-century `hindsight' ideas on tiny fragments of Clara's life. I wrote the first text of eight prose poems, parallelling (and named after) the eight Chamisso poems. The commission, however, was for fifteen minutes. Sally, with the tact for which she is famous, broke it to me I'd written enough for three times that amount. Something had to go.
I went back to the words and condensed, made tiny concrete images usggest wider implications and impressions. Most of all (and at considerable personal cost) I stuck with the love story. The original eight-part structure was lost. I shifted the tenses around and few snippets of the German text remain. What is gained, I hope, is a greater impressionistic feel and more space for the music to work its particular structuring and emotional magic. The 40-year widowhood of Clara Schumann (after the reprise and Robert's death) is suggested in three lines.
Sally Beamish:
In setting this text, which moves me greatly and which has so many specific points of reference - the most important perhaps being its function as a `commentary' on the Chamisso text of the Schumann song cycle Frauen-Liebe und Leben - which find their way into the music. Some are direct quotations from the Schumann settings; some are oblique references (either rhythmic or melodic); and some are passages which simply reflect the compositional flavour of the music of Robert or Clara while remaining fundamentally within my own musical language. The piece is a continuous whole, so individual sections of text - or `songs' - function within that line, moving from a child-like simplicity for Clara's early years to a more complex, passionate expression.