Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman
Year: 2001
Author: Nancy B. Reich
Length: 385 pages
For a talented woman like Clara Schumann, she usually played a major role in biographies of her husband, Robert, or their mutual friend, Johannes Brahms. This was not the case in Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman, which took the complex life of this virtuosic pianist and made all its parts focus on Clara. If anyone ever wants to learn about the fascinating life of this woman, this is the book to read.
While the biography of Clara’s daughter, Eugenie, had lots of useful, intimate information about Clara’s later life, this book fully explores all phases of Clara’s life. From her time under her father to the drama of Robert’s courtship and the eventual life as a widow who still had to support a sizable family, this book breaks down each of these life moments in a thorough way that helps tell her story. Of course, her life was much more than family, and this book also felt like a fully researched documentation of her extremely long career.
For a woman to be as successful as she was for this time, Clara Schumann should be held in high regard. That this book took the time to break down Clara’s talents as a composer, which were aside from her natural talents as a pianist, was useful to show that she wasn’t just the wife of a famous composer—that she could also create with the best of them. Even the interpersonal relationships between her and the litany of famous musicians and composers was an intriguing section of this book that showed how ingrained she was with the artistic culture of music in 1850s Germany.
A fully comprehensive look into the amazing life of Clara Schumann, I give Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman 5.0 stars out of 5.
