Overview

A piano prodigy, Clara Schumann made her professional debut at the age of nine and had embarked on her first European concert tour by the time she was twelve. Clara charmed audiences with her soulful playing throughout her life. Music was a constant source of inspiration and support for this strong and resilient woman. After the death of her husband, Robert Schumann, Clara continued her brilliant career and supported their eight children. Clara Schumann's extraordinary story is supplemented with her letters and diary entries, some of which have never before been published in English. Gorgeous portraits and photographs show the members of Clara's famous musical community and Clara herself from age eight to seventy-six. Index, chronology.

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9780756951948

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Although Reich is careful to view the remarkable musician Clara Schumann in her own time, modern-day readers will take her extraordinary story and think about it from a late-twentieth-century perspective. Psychoanalysts will have much to say about her temperamental, demanding father; feminists will speak about a woman who dared to perform in public a week before the birth of her child; family therapists will marvel at a woman whose mentally ill husband left her as the sole provider for her seven surviving children. Reich never lets us forget that Clara Schumann is a talented woman in a world dominated by men, relating how the director of a leading music conservatory in Frankfurt wrote that no woman would ever be employed there, except for Clara: As for Madame Schumann, I count her as a man. This heavily researched book draws on primary sources, both Clara's own diaries and her voluminous correspondence with her husband (more comfortable writing than speaking to each other, she and her husband maintained a joint diary) and other musicians of the times. Few of us are aware that Clara Schumann's better-known husband, composer Robert Schumann, owes much of his fame to his wife's persistence in including his compositions in her legendary piano performances and to her dogged efforts to make his music part of the public domain. Reich's lucid, quietly passionate biography, liberally illustrated with photographs and reproductions, ensures that Clara Schumann's remarkable life and achievements stand on their own.

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