"Yet you, a man, have sensed in these songs a depth which hardly the most knowing female heart can feel!" Thus an admirer wrote to Robert Schumann concerning his song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. Schumann’s empathy with the highly romantic inflections of Adelbert von Chamisso‘s poetry may also have arisen from the circumstances that prompted this cycle, for it was written during one of the happiest periods of his life, just before his marriage to Clara Wieck.

Ever since its initial publicati...