SCHUMANN: The Faces and The Masks

The author is a New Yorker, long resident in London, and best known for founding London's popular 'Poems on the Underground'. For her ground-breaking account on Schumann's life and works, drawing extensively on new material, she enlists her experience as a scholar and novelist and her lifelong love of Romanticism in poetry and music. Schumann held a passionate conviction about the art of music as 'food and drink' to his fellow musicians in their youth and that music must respond to the times and be forward-looking while building on the greatest works of the past. His music was closely interwoven with the key events of his life and the people he loved, especially his wife Clara, herself a great musician and artist. We have the enduring magic of Carnaval and Kinderszenen, the great song cycles, a wealth of chamber music, four symphonies, the Manfred Overture and many other orchestral and choral works. Begins with his life in Leipzig in the 1830s, his collapse and recovery Dresden December 1844-47 and his music directorship in Düsseldorf September 1850-53. His extraordinary artistic achievements must be set against recurrent illnesses, self-inflicted obstacles, and misjudgements as detailed in these pages. It is a ground-breaking account of the major composer whose life and works have been the subject of intense controversy ever since his early death in an insane asylum. Schumann was intensely original but worshipped the past - Bach and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Byron, Raphael and Michelangelo. He believed in political, personal and artistic freedom, but struggled with the constraints of artistic form. He turned his tumultuous life into music that speaks directly to the heart. Chernaik sheds new light on Schumann's sexual escapades, his fathering of an illegitimate child, the true facts between the courtship of his wife Clara and her monstrous father's opposition, his troubled relationships with fellow Romantic composers Mendelssohn and Chopin are freshly explored, and the full medical diary kept at Endenich Asylum, long withheld. A richly complex biography with nine illustrations including a beautiful watercolour of Clara at ages 17 and 34 and facsimiles of his musical scores. 352pp.