This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Charles Smith rated it really liked it Feb 26, Dee rated it did not like it Jan 24, Barbara rated it liked it Mar 31, Pierre-Stephane Delport rated it it was amazing Jul 07, Ka rated it really liked it Apr 27, Steven marked it as to-read Nov 29, Ernest Martynyuk is currently reading it Jul 12, Steven Chang marked it as to-read Feb 17, Lito added it May 28, Tgr added it Jul 21, There are no discussion topics on this book yet. About May Clarissa Gillington Byron. May Clarissa Gillington Byron. Barrie's Peter Pan books. She published under the names May Byron, M.
Gillington and Maurice Clare. Byron specialised in writing biographies of great artists, before going on to rewrite some of J. Barrie's works for younger readers and to write cookbooks. Her Dublin-born father was an aspiring clergyman, then working as a clerk, whilst her mother born in Huyton, Lancashire. The family moved to Bisley, Surrey when her father found work as a chaplain at the Brookwood Hospital, the local asylum. In , Mary "May" and her sister published a book of poems, dedicated to their parents.
It included some poems that they had published previously in other books. She went on to write a series of biographies, describing the day-to-day lives of various artists. Gillington; her married name, May Byron; and her pseudonym, Maurice Clare. May Byron is best known for her authorised abridgements of the Peter Pan novels.
Bach's music was, however, performed in the church.
Childhood | Poetry and Prose
And there were concerts by Leipzig's Gewandhaus orchestra for Schumann to attend. But law school would begin - though Schumann soon wrote home that "its ice-cold definitions would crush the life out of" him. So he spent rather more time dreaming at the keyboard. He would play, especially the music of Franz Schubert. When Schubert died that year of , Schumann was heard crying throughout the night. About Schubert, Robert wrote:.
A close friend and fellow disciple of Jean Paul's was a law student at Heidelberg; Schumann would go there. But still at Heidelberg law did no more than sometimes touch Robert's mornings "with a biting frost". Schumann hadn't even gone there directly There had been a visit to Goethe's birthplace in Frankfort, an English girl "with the lisp of an angel" to be enchanted by. There was northern Italy And this couldn't go on forever. A decision had to be made: Either music or law.
My life has been for twenty years a struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you prefer, between music and law. Of course music won.
Robert Schumann's Piano Lessons by Clive Uptton at the Illustration Art Gallery
Schumann returned to Leipzig to study with Friedrich Wieck. Clara was now eleven years old. Clara was already an accomplished artist, soon to give concerts throughout the German-speaking world. But with Schumann - Robert told her ghost stories; they played blind-man's bluff with Clara's younger brother Alvin, and they took long walks together in the country-side.
Schumann would look at the sky, with Clara tugging at his coat to keep him from stumbling over the stones. Sometimes Clara would pause and say to herself, "How happy I am!
There was always music in Wieck's house. It was there that Schumann first met Mendelssohn and Chopin. To try to speak of Mendelssohn Schumann wrote, would be "to try and analyze grace or weigh moonlight". Of Chopin, Schumann said simply, "Hats off, gentlemen - a genius! Schumann had many musical friends in Leipzig. They would meet at coffee houses - especially at the Kaffeebaum.
In the pages of this "somewhat madcap" New Musical Journal, in bright, imaginative language, the higher and poetic calling of music would be championed over "lyrical commonplaces" and virtuosity for its own sake. Taking the Romantic theme of character "doubles" - the spontaneous, fiery self as opposed to the quiet dreamer -, Schumann returns to Jean Paul Richter, from whom, Schumann wrote, he had learned more about counterpoint than from any of his music teachers.
Florestan and Eusebius were, then, the contrasting voices - the Allegro and Adagio - of Schumann's musical personality. A further voice, Master Raro, served as "the mediator between them". Raro was decidedly not that "rare music master" Wieck, but it was early noticed that the name 'Raro' links the names Clara and Robert. Clara was now a young woman of seventeen. And one evening, when Robert was leaving for the day and Clara was lighting his way down the back staircase, they quietly confessed their love for one another.
See a Problem?
Schumann's mother was overjoyed by the news. Wieck flew into a rage. He threatened to shoot Robert if he ever came near the girl again. Clara was put under strict watch, her mail was opened, and she was not allowed out of the house alone. Wieck carried it so far that legal action had to be taken. The outraged father had raised Clara to be an artist, not a housewife.
In this way began the struggle for Clara that would last four long years. Schumann wrote to Clara:. During these years Clara would continue to make concert tours, and Robert - Schumann wrote music. The piano cycles from these years were to establish his reputation as a composer. With these piano cycles, Schumann invented a new musical form. Short pieces followed one another without transitions; they were linked only by "open-ended phrases that could serve both as beginnings and endings". One of these cycles was Opus 16, Kreisleriana. Its title comes from a creation of E.
Yet though the music was named after Hoffmann's Kapellmeister Kreisler, Schumann's heart was elsewhere. He secretly wrote to Clara that each composition was a portrait of her. The titles of my pieces were added afterwards, as hints to how the music should be conceived and played. Their letters were some consolation while Clara was away.
But when she returned to Leipzig, it was harder for them. But Schumann found that circumstances in the Austrian capital would not allow him to establish himself there musically; his music was no more welcomed by Vienna than Franz Schubert's had been before him. However, he did visit the graves of Beethoven and Schubert; and it was while in Vienna that Schumann discovered Schubert's C major Symphony the 9th Symphony.
He sent the symphony to Mendelssohn and it was performed that same season. When Schumann returned to Saxony, the long legal struggle was over. Clara was his own. Schumann was thirty years old. What he had called "all these nights of anguish, sleepless with the thought of you, and all this tearless grief", was at an end.
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But they studied music together, and they gave concerts. Clara played; Schumann composed. In the years that followed he turned from piano cycles to vocal and orchestral music. These were years - as always with Schumann - of complete self-abandonment to promoting the cause of music. So when Mendelssohn withdrew from the conductorship of the Gewandhaus orchestra, Schumann was deeply hurt that the position was not offered to him. To drive away this dark mood, he could take a "cure by counterpoint", studying Bach's fugues. But Schumann was now disillusioned with Leipzig. So in he took his family to live in Dresden.
A Day With Robert Schumann
But Clara was soon to doubt whether anyone there had blood in their blue veins - there seemed to be no heartfelt love for music. Indeed, the Saxon capital was a "musical desert", and the Schumanns could not be happy there. Schumann was, nonetheless, now a father of four children, and for them - and out of the sympathy he had always had with children - he composed first a piano, and then a song album for young musicians.
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But things did not go well for him there either. Robert's conducting had never gone well.
She herself was perplexed: But as Clara's biographer Litzmann was to say: Schumann "listened to the music in his own mind rather than to the actual performance".