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Clara (Paperback)

by Janice Galloway (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd; illustrated edition edition (6 Jun 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0224050494
  • ISBN-13: 978-0224050494
  • Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.2 x 3.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 716,112 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Clara's grappling with the rigidities of historical character and its conjuring of a totally alien milieu--the German music scene of the mid-19th century--are all the more impressive given that Galloway's previous prize-winning novels, The Trick is to Keep Breathing and Foreign Parts, were much less ambitious in scope, dealing with contemporary lives, of a young Scottish drama teacher and two women on a driving holiday in France respectively. But Galloway's regular readers will recognise in Clara many of the features of the earlier novels and of her short story collections Blood and Where you Find It-- show a deep concern with psychology, especially psychology pushed to its extremes, and a deliberate eschewing of sentiment even when the narrative screams out for it, underpinned by a sly humour.

Reaching her prime before the dawn of recorded sound, Clara Schumann is now sadly only known by report as the perfect champion of her husband Robert's music, an acclaimed virtuoso pianist who had her own international career in European concert halls in the latter half of the 19th century. The bare bones of her biography however hint at hidden depths: the mother, Marianne Tromlitz, who left her husband and daughter for another man; the father, Friedrich Wieck, who nurtured her career single-mindedly; the marriage, violently opposed by her father, to Robert Schumann, who soon fell into depression, ending his short life in an asylum. Janice Galloway has taken full advantage of the raw materials of the first half of this extraordinary saga, to produce a rich and compelling fictional life.

In this novel there's also a deep understanding of the social politics of Clara's background, most impressively done through her father's social climbing, hidden behind an apparently classless artistry. Galloway renders all this in an indulgent, exquisitely limpid prose: the end result is an outstanding novel, the most ambitious and most impressive of her career to date. --Alan Stewart



Review

An impressive novel based on the life of Clara Schumann, the celebrated 19th century composer and concert pianist, a friend of Brahms and the wife of Robert Schumann who cared for him through a series of crippling mental illnesses as well as being the mother of his eight children.
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A stunning piece of writing, 19 Aug 2002
By A Customer
Janice Galloway's other works have all been wonderfully written but this book is breathtaking. Perhaps it is the scale of the task, capturing the internal life of a musician, muse, wife and mother from so very long ago that makes the piece so wonderfully impressive. Clara's love is so beautifully rendered - a madness of her own, almost - that it is at the same time thrilling and terrifying. The best thing I have read in a very very long time.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A love story as romantic and turbulent as Schumanns music., 11 Mar 2003
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
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

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Compelling and fascinating recreation of an artist's life, 16 May 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Clara (Paperback)
I don't have much to add to the two previous reviews except to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and appreciate how much hard work and research must have gone into its making. The author is especially successful at recreating the details of nineteenth century life and in emphasising the difficulties faced by Clara as a professional woman trying to make her way in an age when most women never went out to work except as domestic servants. References to the cultural milieu and musical personalities of the day tend to be a little elliptical and readers not already familiar with the Schumanns' story and nineteenth century musical history might find the narrative hard to follow in places. Otherwise I highly recommend this book.
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Unlike some other reviewers, I found the idiosyncratic style of this book rather tiresome, and it is possibly a little on the long side. Read more
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