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 child prodigy as a pianist, 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. Despite the arrival of eight babies, Clara continued to have concerts regularly, as she was the primary bread-winner in the family. 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 an 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
