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Author: Martin Geck
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 0226284697
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRobert Schumann (1810-56) is one of the most important and representative composers of the Romantic era. Here acclaimed biographer martin Geck tells the story of this multifaceted genius, set in the context of the political and social revolutions of his time.
Author: Martin Geck
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-11-01
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 0226284719
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRobert Schumann (1810–56) is one of the most important and representative composers of the Romantic era. Born in Zwickau, Germany, Schumann began piano instruction at age seven and immediately developed a passion for music. When a permanent injury to his hand prevented him from pursuing a career as a touring concert pianist, he turned his energies and talents to composing, writing hundreds of works for piano and voice, as well as four symphonies and an opera. Here acclaimed biographer Martin Geck tells the fascinating story of this multifaceted genius, set in the context of the political and social revolutions of his time. The image of Schumann the man and the artist that emerges in Geck’s book is complex. Geck shows Schumann to be not only a major composer and music critic—he cofounded and wrote articles for the controversial Neue Zeitschrift für Musik—but also a political activist, the father of eight children, and an addict of mind-altering drugs. Through hard work and determination bordering on the obsessive, Schumann was able to control his demons and channel the tensions that seethed within him into music that mixes the popular and esoteric, resulting in compositions that require the creative engagement of reader and listener. The more we know about a composer, the more we hear his personality in his music, even if it is above all on the strength of his work that we love and admire him. Martin Geck’s book on Schumann is not just another rehashing of Schumann’s life and works, but an intelligent, personal interpretation of the composer as a musical, literary, and cultural personality.
Author: Judith Chernaik
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2018-09-18
Total Pages: 418
ISBN-13: 0451494474
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDrawing on previously unpublished sources, this groundbreaking biography of Robert Schumann sheds new light on the great composer’s life and work. With the rigorous research of a scholar and the eloquent prose of a novelist, Judith Chernaik takes us into Schumann’s nineteenth-century Romantic milieu, where he wore many “masks” that gave voice to each corner of his soul. The son of a book publisher, he infused his pieces with literary ideas. He was passionately original but worshipped the past: Bach and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Byron. He believed in artistic freedom but struggled with constraints of form. His courtship and marriage to the brilliant pianist Clara Wieck—against her father’s wishes—is one of the great musical love stories of all time. Chernaik freshly explores his troubled relations with fellow composers Mendelssohn and Chopin, and the full medical diary—long withheld—from the Endenich asylum where he spent his final years enables her to look anew at the mystery of his early death. By turns tragic and transcendent, Schumann shows how this extraordinary artist turned his tumultuous life into music that speaks directly—and timelessly—to the heart.
Author: John Worthen
Publisher:
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780300163988
DOWNLOAD EBOOKShattering longstanding myths, this new biography reveals the robust and positive life of one of the nineteenth century's greatest composers This candid, intimate, and compellingly written new biography offers a fresh account of Robert Schumann's life. It confronts the traditional perception of the doom-laden Romantic, forced by depression into a life of helpless, poignant sadness. John Worthen's scrupulous attention to the original sources reveals Schumann to have been an astute, witty, articulate, and immensely determined individual, who--with little support from his family and friends in provincial Saxony--painstakingly taught himself his craft as a musician, overcame problem after problem in his professional life, and married the woman he loved after a tremendous battle with her father. Schumann was neither manic depressive nor schizophrenic, although he struggled with mental illness. He worked prodigiously hard to develop his range of musical styles and to earn his living, only to be struck down, at the age of forty-four, by a vile and incurable disease. Worthen's biography effectively de-mystifies a figure frequently regarded as a Romantic enigma. It frees Schumann from 150 years of mythmaking and unjustified psychological speculation. It reveals him, for the first time, as a brilliant, passionate, resolute musician and a thoroughly creative human being, the composer of arguably the best music of his generation.
Author: John Daverio
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 624
ISBN-13: 0195091809
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis work focuses on the work of the romantic composer Robert Schumann.
Author: Jon W. Finson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 342
ISBN-13: 9780674026292
DOWNLOAD EBOOKArguably no other 19th-century German composer was as literate or as finely attuned to setting verse as Robert Schumann. Finson challenges assumptions about Schumann’s Lieder, engaging traditionally held interpretations. Arranged in part thematically, rather than by strict compositional chronology, this book speaks to the heart of Schumann’s music.
Author: Nancy Reich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2013-07-15
Total Pages: 420
ISBN-13: 0801468299
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis 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.
Author: Peter F. Ostwald
Publisher: UPNE
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 396
ISBN-13: 9781555530143
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAfter obtaining access to long-sought-after archival material about the final years of Robert Schumann, Lise Deschamps Ostwald, the author's widow, is finally able to detail the composer's last years at the mental institution in Endenich, fulfilling her husband's original intent "Schumann is a remarkable piece of work...Soberly and objectively, it unearths information that no previous Schumann researcher--in English at least--has come near duplicating."--Harold C. Schonberg, The New York Times Book Review "Peter Ostwald, a San Francisco psychiatrist who is also a trained musician, has dug deeply...and applied his professional knowledge to the fashioning of a fascinating, perceptive psychobiography of the nineteenth-century Romantic master."--Arthur Hepner, Boston Globe "Ostwald...offers new insights into one about whom the musical world has never ceased wondering."--Robert Commanday, San Francisco Chronicle --Book Jacket.
Author: Michael Musgrave
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-07-02
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781107532250
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRobert Schumann had a difficult start as a composer. Denied any significant musical upbringing, he took a long time through indirect routes to establish himself as a major composer. Persistent illness also dogged his work. His final catastrophic mental collapse has combined with the autobiographical and secretive aspects of his music to cast for posterity a veil of ominous mystery over his entire life. Yet this is only one view. Schumann battled his personal demons and was acutely self-aware and organized. He transformed himself from a brilliant youthful fantasist in small forms into a composer of extended works in every genre. This book provides a new focus on Schumann as a practical working musician interacting with the professional world to develop his creative gifts to the full, and examines the central role of Clara Wieck Schumann in helping to bring this about.
Author: Ronald Taylor
Publisher: Universe Publishing(NY)
Published: 1982
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Ronald Taylor has written the first full-length account of the life, times and work of Robert Schumann for many years. Based on a fresh reading of the original German sources, this wide-ranging, authoritative biography reveals the mind of Schumann behind the traditional image of the sad, romantic comoser of lyrical songs and piano music. Born into a literary family in Zwickau, Saxony, Robert Schumann (1810-56) was a contemporary of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner, and Ronald Taylor shows how throughout his life the twin strands of literature and music interacted. His artistic creativity was most perfectly expressed in miniature, in small-scale works for the piano and in songs, but in addition he composed much orchestral and other work on a grander scale: all this while his life was marred by dramatic crises and sadness. The crucial moments in Schumann's life are movingly recaptured: his four-year struggle, against her father's opposition, to marry the pianist Clara Wieck, his fight against his reticent, withdrawn nature and disturbing extremes of mood (possibly exacerbated by syphilis); his financial worries and the disappointing reception of his music; and finally his attempted suicide and decline into madness. By relating Schumann's work to his intellectual and spiritual life, to the historical currents of his age and to the specific context of 19th-century Romanticism, Ronald Taylor has written a coherent, thoughtful and ultimately tragic biography of one of the musical geniuses of the 19th century."--Dust jacket.
