The Marriage Diaries Of Robert Clara Schumann

The Schumann Marriage diaries provide a vivid portrait of the unique artistic and personal union between two renowned musicians. For the first four years of their marriage, Robert and Clara Schumann kept a joint diary, recording their entries, at least initially, on alternate weeks. Begun on September 13, 1840, the day after their marriage, the diary opens with guidance from Robert: "This little book . . . has a very intimate meaning; it shall be a diary about everything that touches us mutually in our household and marriage." The diaries reflect the harmony as well as the discord in their marriage. Robert and Clara describe in intimate detail their honeymoon period, the births of their children, their busy social lives, travels throughout Europe, financial problems, separations, and reunions. The book also evokes the artistic milieu of nineteenth-century Germany. The Schumanns came in contact with many musicians, including their close friends Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt, and recorded their insightful reactions to the artists and their music. The marriage diaries cover a fertile period in Robert Schumann's life, during which he wrote the Spring Symphony, the Piano Concerto, most of his chamber music, his first oratorio, "Paradise and the Peri, " and numerous songs. They reflect the frenetic pace at which he worked, as well as his growing bouts of depression, his ambivalent response to Clara's decision to return to the concert stage after a prolonged hiatus, and her anxiety in the face of Robert's changing moods. This edition includes the couple's travel book, written during their stressful concert tour of Russia in 1844, which marked the end of the marriage diaries; RobertSchumann's descriptions of Russian customs; and the poems he wrote in Moscow - all of which provide a fascinating and uniquely detailed glimpse at what it was like to travel in Russia at the time.

Describes the life of the German pianist and composer who made her professional debut at age nine and who devoted her life to music and to her family.

This absorbing and award-winning biography tells the story of the tragedies and triumphs of Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–1896), a musician of remarkable achievements. At once artist, composer, editor, teacher, wife, and mother of eight children, she was an important force in the musical world of her time. To show how Schumann surmounted the obstacles facing female artists in the nineteenth century, Nancy B. Reich has drawn on previously unexplored primary sources: unpublished diaries, letters, and family papers, as well as concert programs. Going beyond the familiar legends of the Schumann literature, she applies the tools of musicological scholarship and the insights of psychology to provide a new, full-scale portrait.The book is divided into two parts. In Part One, Reich follows Clara Schumann's life from her early years as a child prodigy through her marriage to Robert Schumann and into the forty years after his death, when she established and maintained an extraordinary European career while supporting and supervising a household and seven children. Part Two covers four major themes in Schumann's life: her relationship with Johannes Brahms and other friends and contemporaries; her creative work; her life on the concert stage; and her success as a teacher.Throughout, excerpts from diaries and letters in Reich's own translations clear up misconceptions about her life and achievements and her partnership with Robert Schumann. Highlighting aspects of Clara Schumann's personality and character that have been neglected by earlier biographers, this candid and eminently readable account adds appreciably to our understanding of a fascinating artist and woman.For this revised edition, Reich has added several photographs and updated the text to include recent discoveries. She has also prepared a Catalogue of Works that includes all of Clara Schumann's known published and unpublished compositions and works she edited, as well as descriptions of the autographs, the first editions, the modern editions, and recent literature on each piece. The Catalogue also notes Schumann's performances of her own music and provides pertinent quotations from letters, diaries, and contemporary reviews.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

SCHUMANN: THE FACES & THE MASKS is a groundbreaking account of a major composer whose life and works have been the subject of intense controversy ever since his attempted suicide and early death in an insane asylum. Schumann was a key figure in the Romantic movement which enraptured poets, musicians, painters and their audiences in the early 19th century and beyond, right up to the present time. He embodied all the contrasting themes of Romanticism - he was intensely original and imaginative, but also worshipped the past; he believed in political, personal and artistic freedom but insisted on the need for artistic form. He turned his tumultuous life into music that speaks directly to the heart. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archive material, Chernaik provides new insight into Schumann's life and his music, his sexual escapades, his fathering of an illegitimate child, the true facts behind his courtship of Clara and the opposition of her monstrous father, and the ways in which the crises of his life fed into the dreams and fantasies of his greatest music.