Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer
*Starred Review* The most romantic of Romantic composers, Schumann (1810–56) yet took J. S. Bach and Beethoven as his masters, and his music is full of references to both. Geck notes virtually all those allusions and inspirations as he hews closely to his demonstration of his subject’s originality. Schumann, he argues, more than any other composer of his generation, created his music out of his own intellectual and emotional life, which accounts for its brook-like, episodic flow in comparison to the architectonic thrust in the works of Haydn and Mozart as well as of Schumann’s neoclassicizing friend, Mendelssohn. German Romantic literature and the progressive politics of his time furnished Schumann with further, nonmusical inspiration for individual compositions as well as general artistic direction. Finally, his marriage to concert pianist Clara Wieck, achieved after years of obstruction by her father, sustained him psychologically and professionally, which makes its last years, after his mental collapse in 1854, when she was counseled not to visit him in the asylum, so innately poignant that Geck can close the book both quietly and powerfully. Throughout, Schumann’s compositions, more than the events of his life, are discussed in a manner that, avoiding technical analysis, demands the attentive reading, preferably with recordings at hand, that well-seasoned music lovers will, very soon after they start it, rejoice to give this superb biography. --Ray Olson