Schumann in Love and Music

Before Robert Schumann met the concert pianist and composer Clara Wieck and settled into their marriage, he was a quintessentially Romantic anguished young man. In Schumann in Love and Music, Stephen Walsh explores the wilder years of the composer's teens and twenties, animating the remarkable piano music he wrote in this period - including Papillons, Carnaval, Kreisleriana - in the same breath as Schumann's emotional life, which orbited around his affairs and his (mostly unrequited) infatuations with women, as well as his growing relationship with the teenaged Clara. Drawing on the diaries and letters of a man in the throes of the era's florid, torrid literary Romanticism Walsh argues that that through his diary habit, alongside his love of improvising at the keyboard, Schumann created a new set of genres that captured the spirit of Romanticism.