![]() The strikingly original narrative that he has constructed, while it may present the facts, ![]() Landis has seamlessly interwoven his text with ideas (about language and music, genius, imagination and the nature of human devotion) that are very much his own. But the result is not just biography with a thin veneer of embellishment. ![]() What looks at first glance like a chronological, factual account with hardly any invention. Landis, whose last novel (''Lying in Bed'') was an ingenious, if somewhat discursive, consideration of love and obsession, has here written Schumann's story is told as a semi-formal biography, filled with footnotes (one of which manages to tie together Franz Liszt, Artur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Billie Holiday), nicely constructed pseudo-academicĭigressions and some provocative asides about art and creativity. Men, who acts as a conduit between them and is also possibly Clara's lover. The final links between the two are their memories and Johannes Brahms, the last of his beautiful young This last act lands Robert in an asylum, where he spends his remaining days, with Clara prevented from visiting by the doctor in charge of his care. Finally, he hurls his wedding ring into the frigid Rhine and jumps in after it. Throws books at Clara and has increasingly bizarre visions. At home, he attempts to give music lessons to a table, Conducting a mass in Düsseldorf, he continues moving his arms after the music has ceased, drawing the tempo from his own head. But the Schumanns' union falls increasingly under the thrall of Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Wagner, Hans Christian Andersen, Kierkegaard, Jenny Lind, Heine and Goethe all pass through the narrative. Enriching their lives (and the novel) is the artisticĬream of the century. Landis tells us that their eventual marriage was vivid, full of humor, vitality and a great hunger for music. ![]() History tells us that Friedrich Wieck failed in his efforts to keep the two lovers apart. ''I cannot let you enslave her,'' he tells his prospective son-in-law, while fully intending to keep Clara locked in chains of his own manufacture. In this he succeeded, fighting Robert every step It would become so to the dismay of Friedrich Wieck, a man with ''the sense of humor of a gargoyle,'' whose fierce ambition was to make his daughter a pianist to rival Chopin and Liszt. The bond between them grew into one of the great passions of a most passionate age. Though the study of law would prove only a temporary diversion, undertaken at his mother's insistence, Clara would not. The daughter of his piano teacher, the relentless taskmaster Friedrich Wieck, Clara first met Robert when she was a child of 8 and he a young law Naturally, Schumann's greatest obsession was music, but a close (and related) second was Clara Wieck. His own demons, Schumann was an absolutist in all things, from his fondness for cigars to his fondness for beautiful young men. Composer, music theorist and critic, hypochondriac, lover and, at the last, victim of But this was only the most dramatic of a number of excesses. The tendons that would have given him a wider reach across the keyboard. Most famously, he thwarted his career as a concert pianist by crippling his right hand in a vain attempt to stretch In the course of an impassioned and highly engaged life he tries many, before being finally and wholly ravaged by madness and dying a pitiful early deathīetween his beginning and his end, Schumann lived the life of the perfect Romantic: passionate, flamboyant and always a little bit crazy. He spends the rest of the novelĪttempting to find things that might not only consume but devour him. Landis's penetrating fictional biography of the Romantic composer. ''I would like to be consumed by something,'' says the young Robert Schumann to his chronically ill older sister early in J. A novelist depicts the turbulent life of Robert and Clara Schumann.
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