Schumann

An illuminating and perceptive portrait on the formative years and remarkable early works of one of Romanticisms most treasured composers.

Before Robert Schumann met the concert pianist and composer Clara Wieck and settled into their marriage, he was a quintessentially Romantic anguished young man.

In Schumann in Love and Music, acclaimed music critic and biographer Stephen Walsh explores the wilder years of the composer's teens and twenties, animating the remarkable piano music he wrote in this period—including Papillons, Carnaval, Kreisleriana—in the same breath as Schumann's emotional life, which orbited around his affairs and his (mostly unrequited) infatuations with women, as well as his growing relationship with the young and talented Clara, with whom an emotional and creative bond was beginning to form.

A prolific writer who also wrote poetry, prose, and even plays, Walsh draws on the diaries and letters of a man in the throes of the era's florid, torrid literary Romanticism. Schumann: In Love and Music, reveals how Schumann's dedicated diary-keeping and writing, when merged with his love of improvising at the keyboard, created a new set of genres that captured the spirit of Romanticism like no other composer before him.