This beautifully written novel breaks new ground for award-winner
Janice Galloway. Meticulously and thoroughly researched, it
recreates the life of the immensely gifted concert pianist Clara
Wieck, who at 19 married the multi-talented but ill-starred Robert
Schumann, pianist, composer and music critic. In just 16 years of
marriage, Clara bore Schumann eight children, tirelessly encouraged
him in his work, and supported him through the terrors of
protracted episodes of mental illness, an affliction which
culminated in his death at the age of only 46. In telling Clara's
story, Galloway gives the reader the anatomy of a unique marriage
and working partnership: Clara and Robert made music together and
wrote a tender marriage diary. But this novel also presents the
couple as individuals in their time: 19th-century Germany, which
their friends Liszt, Mendelssohn, Wagner and Brahms also inhabited.
Also shown are the petty rivalries, the difficult and tedious
travel, the discipline and sheer hard work of the professional
musician's world. The novel can also be read as a feminist
interpretation of a dedicated life. Clara was raised by a wilful
and tyrannical father who vested all his hopes in her and who was,
predictably, violently opposed to her marriage. In a sense she was
passed from one chauvinist to another, for Schumann found it
difficult to cope with his wife's fame, and when self-absorbedly
ill was often very cruel to her. In Galloway's version both men
were skilled in the arts of emotional blackmail, and the medical
experts often blamed Clara for not knowing her domestic place,
despite the fact that it was her talent and organizational skill
that kept the family going. This deeply moving book shows a very
human Clara who nevertheless is unwavering in her devotion to her
husband and family: while admiring her indomitable strength,
prepare to shed tears of pity for her plight. (Kirkus UK)
Janice Galloway's new novel is based on the life of Clara Schumann: celebrated nineteenth-century concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms - who was also the wife of Robert Schumann, the mother of his eight children, and the woman who cared for him through a series of crippling mental illnesses. Clara is a meticulously researched account of two remarkable and highly dramatic musical careers, but primarily it is a novel about timeless, common things: about the inescapable influences of childhood, about creativity and marital life, about communication and silence, about how art is made and how art, in turn, may erode or save the life that nourishes it.
Clara takes as its heart an examination of the place of love in a life of increasing isolation and alienation.
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