Clara : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: After all the good reviews I read of this book I thought I would love it. Usually I enjoy biographies. I found that this book is written in a style that makes the story a bit difficult to follow. I gave it my best shot but I did not enjoy it at all.

Rating:
Summary: A Novel of Clara Schumann
Review: Clara Schumann's (1819-1896)life continues to fascinate and inspire. I recently saw the world-premiere of an opera, also titled "Clara" at the University of Maryland by the American composer Robert Convery. Clara Schumann is the subject of an excellent website and of recent biographies, including "Clara Schumann: the Artist and the Woman" by Nancy Reich. Clara Schumann's compositional output consists of only about 60 works, but it continues to be recorded and performed.

Janice Galloway's novel, "Clara" (2002), introduces the reader to a remarkable woman and to her times. Clara was the daughter of Frederick Wieck, a notable piano teacher, and of a woman who left Wieck to marry another man when Clara was young. Clara Wieck was a child prodigy with virtuosic ability at the piano. At the time, the role of piano virtuoso was just coming into its own.

Clara fell in love with the great romantic composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856), ten years her senior, when Schumann was a student of Wieck. Her father bitterly opposed the marriage, but the couple persevered and were married with permission from the German courts. The marriage was difficult, as Robert needed absolute quiet in order to compose and was moody and tempramental to say the least. The couple had eight children, and Clara proved determined to pursue her calling as a concert artist. Schumann's instability gradually lead to insanity and he was institutionalized for the last years of his life following a failed suicide attempt. The novel covers Clara's life up through the death of Robert Schumann with only brief allusions to her life as a concert pianist following his death. Clara outlived Robert by 40 years.

This book presents a complelling picture of lives filed with the love of music. Robert was a highly gifted composer while Clara devoted her great talents to the art of interpretation. Ms. Galloway shows well the vicissitudes of the creative life, both for the composer and the interpreter. The book is love story, rarer than might be supposed in today's world, presenting a picture of a gifted couple's devotion to each other. In particular, it presents a compelling portrait of Clara Schumann with her devotion to a difficult individual through his descent into psychosis.

Ms. Galloway stays close to the facts of her story, gets inside her characters, and avoids the temptation to judge or to editorialize based upon the values of another age. She presents balanced portraits of the characters in her story and allows the reader to see the nuances and ambiguities inherent in all human conduct. For example, Ms. Galloway lets the reader see that Wieck had a point, after all, in his doubts about the marriage and about Robert's mental instability which was surely visible over the years. Ms. Galloway also points out Clara's growing devotion to what she was born to do -- play the piano -- and how her independence sometimes rested uneasily with her love and commitment to Robert. Her love for Robert was surely the most important force in her life.

The novel moves slowly at times, but it builds as it progresses in both writing style and in depth of understanding. The novel does an outstanding job in linking the events of Clara and Robert's lives into their music. I enjoyed the treatment of Robert Schumann's "Carnaval", a great work for the solo piano and a favorite of mine, his song cycles, piano concerto, symphonies, and other compositions which receive thoughtful attention in the book.

The paperback edition of this book includes some good questions suitable for book groups together with a revealing interview with Ms. Galloway. The book shows how music and creativity enable people to reach the best of what is in them and to transcend the pain of sorrow and suffering and the banalities of the everyday. I found this book a moving presentation of the love of a woman and a man for each other and of the love of both for music. I was both inspired by the story of Clara's life and also moved to revisit Clara's music and the music of her tormented but gifted husband.

Rating:
Summary: A Novel of Clara Schumann
Review: Clara Schumann's (1819-1896)life continues to fascinate and inspire. I recently saw the world-premiere of an opera, also titled "Clara" at the University of Maryland by the American composer Robert Convery. Clara Schumann is the subject of an excellent website and of recent biographies, including "Clara Schumann: the Artist and the Woman" by Nancy Reich. Clara Schumann's compositional output consists of only about 60 works, but it continues to be recorded and performed.

Janice Galloway's novel, "Clara" (2002), introduces the reader to a remarkable woman and to her times. Clara was the daughter of Frederick Wieck, a notable piano teacher, and of a woman who left Wieck to marry another man when Clara was young. Clara Wieck was a child prodigy with virtuosic ability at the piano. At the time, the role of piano virtuoso was just coming into its own.

Clara fell in love with the great romantic composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856), ten years her senior, when Schumann was a student of Wieck. Her father bitterly opposed the marriage, but the couple persevered and were married with permission from the German courts. The marriage was difficult, as Robert needed absolute quiet in order to compose and was moody and tempramental to say the least. The couple had eight children, and Clara proved determined to pursue her calling as a concert artist. Schumann's instability gradually lead to insanity and he was institutionalized for the last years of his life following a failed suicide attempt. The novel covers Clara's life up through the death of Robert Schumann with only brief allusions to her life as a concert pianist following his death. Clara outlived Robert by 40 years.

This book presents a complelling picture of lives filed with the love of music. Robert was a highly gifted composer while Clara devoted her great talents to the art of interpretation. Ms. Galloway shows well the vicissitudes of the creative life, both for the composer and the interpreter. The book is love story, rarer than might be supposed in today's world, presenting a picture of a gifted couple's devotion to each other. In particular, it presents a compelling portrait of Clara Schumann with her devotion to a difficult individual through his descent into psychosis.

Ms. Galloway stays close to the facts of her story, gets inside her characters, and avoids the temptation to judge or to editorialize based upon the values of another age. She presents balanced portraits of the characters in her story and allows the reader to see the nuances and ambiguities inherent in all human conduct. For example, Ms. Galloway lets the reader see that Wieck had a point, after all, in his doubts about the marriage and about Robert's mental instability which was surely visible over the years. Ms. Galloway also points out Clara's growing devotion to what she was born to do -- play the piano -- and how her independence sometimes rested uneasily with her love and commitment to Robert. Her love for Robert was surely the most important force in her life.

The novel moves slowly at times, but it builds as it progresses in both writing style and in depth of understanding. The novel does an outstanding job in linking the events of Clara and Robert's lives into their music. I enjoyed the treatment of Robert Schumann's "Carnaval", a great work for the solo piano and a favorite of mine, his song cycles, piano concerto, symphonies, and other compositions which receive thoughtful attention in the book.

The paperback edition of this book includes some good questions suitable for book groups together with a revealing interview with Ms. Galloway. The book shows how music and creativity enable people to reach the best of what is in them and to transcend the pain of sorrow and suffering and the banalities of the everyday. I found this book a moving presentation of the love of a woman and a man for each other and of the love of both for music. I was both inspired by the story of Clara's life and also moved to revisit Clara's music and the music of her tormented but gifted husband.

Rating:
Summary: Galloway's Masterpiece
Review: Galloway's two previous novels were superb, but the ambitious "Clara" establishes her as a major writer of our time. Prodigious research allowed her to write Clara Schumann's story as if from within--as though she were a member of the Schumann household telling the story in a 19th-century coffeehouse. The style is colloquial and dramatic, like a barroom raconteur's. Galloway is aware of the repressive social customs that held Clara's abilities back--a few times she sneaks in the phrase "a room of one's own"--but doesn't allow ideology to mar the story.
Fans of the Schumanns' music and of innovative contemporary fiction will find much here to sing about.

Rating:
Summary: A passionate and vivid love story
Review: Janice Galloway's Clara is such a complex and modern character, particularly for the period she lived in. Galloway portrays her as such a strong, independent woman with a fiercely stubborn streak, yet also having such compassion and tenderness towards her husband Robert. Clara arranges her concert tours, organizes the household, writes her own music, teaches students, tends to her ailing husband, and manages to produce eight children! No easy feat. Whether her independent streak was forced on her by the shortcomings of Robert, or by her fiercely dictatorial father is unclear. Galloway hints that it was probably a mixture of both.

During all this time Clara's life was bound up with her husband's and they were separated only by the exigencies of her profession. She devoted herself not only to his society, but also the to bringing out of his music much of which owed its reputation to her. The story gives us a powerful overview of her life from her time as a child and a musical protégée under the tutelage of her strict and authoritarian father. Then we move onto her meeting, strained courtship and eventual marriage to Schumann. The novel is also notable for introducing us to many of the other composers of the period - Chopin, Brahms and Mendelssohn - all friends and respected colleagues of Clara and Robert Schumann.

Clara is a beautifully and passionately written love story, and Galloway writes in a style that blasts us with images of their profound and very deep love. Her work is extremely ambitious in its scope - using threads from their music, letters, diaries, and itineraries, and also incorporating a type of "stream of consciousness" where we are see into the minds of the main protagonists. Galloway creates piece of work that is absolutely breathtaking in scope and complexity, and a real challenge to read.

But the novel is so much more than a love story. The reader constantly is bombarded with images from the Victorian era: the musical community of the 1800.s; the sites of Leipzig, Vienna and the other cities if the area; the sounds of the performances; the smells of the cities; the sexual attitudes, childbirth, and the domestic and household life of the period. Galloway's research is indeed meticulous and I'm sure the reader will find a lot to appreciate in this fine piece of work. Clara isn't an easy novel to read, but I'm sure that if the average reader sticks with it, they will be richly rewarded and they will finish having an interesting insight into the life of the wife of one of the world's greatest composers.

Michael

Rating:
Summary: Devotion
Review: Unlike some other reviewers, I found the idiosyncratic style of this book rather tiresome, and it is possibly a little on the long side. But there is no doubt that at the end one is left by the unforgettable image of a terrible situation. Bullied by her monstrous father in childhood and young womanhood into becoming a great musician in her own right, Clara Wieck does at last escapes him into marriage with Robert Schumann. He adores her and she is devoted to him. As Robert's mental condition deteriorates to the point where he has to go into an asylum, Clara's devotion never falters. If he says the most terrible things about her, she is convinced that he does not mean them (and in a way that is true, since Robert is in desperate need of her love and support), while at the same time she refuses to accept the severity of his mental illness. Though others can visit Robert in the asylum, doctors refuse Clara access to her husband until he is at the point of death. There is of course much more to the story, including a brilliant career as a pianist and seven children. But the painful story of her childhood and marriage holds centre stage



Rating:
Summary: A love story as romantic and turbulent as Schumann¿s music.
Review: With single-minded determination, born from years of mental discipline, thirty-seven-year-old Clara Wieck Schumann, dressed in black, took the arm of her friend, Johannes Brahms, and was escorted to the piano, where she would begin a new phase of her life, as a widow and the sole support of the eight children she bore composer Robert Schumann. Clara was well schooled for her life of self-denial and duty. A brilliant pianist and former child prodigy, she had been controlled by her domineering father, and she had had to sue him so that she could marry Robert Schumann, an unstable composer whose own demons exerted control over her life.

Robert Schumann's instability, according to the author, began at a very early age. As a young man, he believed that he was inhabited by two people, Florestan and Eusebius, and he often alternated marathon composing sessions (once producing 27 pages of music in a single day) with times in which he could find no inspiration at all. He had to have silence when he was working, and he was inconsistent in his behavior, often blaming Clara for small infractions over which she had no control. She had no life of her own. She was the primary bread-winner in the family, giving concerts regularly, despite the arrival of eight babies and the difficulty of practicing without disturbing Robert. Unappreciated and unrecognized by the public, Robert became frustrated and depressed, eventually admitting himself to an asylum, where he died in 1856, at age 46.

The ill-starred love story of Clara and Robert Schumann is as romantic as the music of Schumann and his contemporaries, but Galloway keeps this novel on a factual level, as much as possible. There are no flights of fancy here, no imaginative soaring into the stratosphere of romance, and no attempt to recreate the passionate feeling of their love or of their music. She has done enormous research into their lives and presents her novel as if time and circumstance are being filtered through the consciousness of Clara, her father, or Robert. Her recreation of domestic situations and scenes, combined with what the various participants have said about them in their (real) diaries and journals allow her to reflect their inner turmoil while remaining fairly objective as a historian.

Galloway's novel is thoroughly researched, full of information about the Schumanns, and sympathetic to Clara's enormous personal burdens. She is largely successful in bringing Clara to life. We never see Robert as a "normal" person, however, and the reader remains at a distance from him, observing, rather than feeling, what is happening to him. Yet Clara lived for forty years after Robert's death, and this reader would have appreciated a brief Afterword telling what she did during that time. Tied inextricably to Robert throughout their marriage, one can only wonder if she eventually found happiness on her own after his death. Mary Whipple