Schumann

In Love and Music

Stephen Walsh

An illuminating and perceptive potrait of the formative years and remarkable early works of one of Romanticism's most treasured composers.

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, acclaimed music critic and biographer 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 young and talented Clara, with whom an emotional and creative bond was beginning to form.

A prolific writer who also wrote poetry, prose, and even plays, Walsh draws on the diaries and letters of a man in the throes of the era's florid, torrid literary Romanticism. Schumann: In Love and Music, reveals how Schumann's dedicated diary-keeping and writing, when merged with his love of improvising at the keyboard, created a new set of genres that captured the spirit of Romanticism like no other composer before him.

 

Stephen Walsh is Emeritus Professor of Music at Cardiff University and the author of a number of books on music including Debussy: A Painter in Sound, Musorgsky and His Circle and the prizewinning, two-volume biography of Igor Stravinsky. He served for many years as deputy music critic for The Observer and writes reviews for a variety of publications. 

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Endorsements & Reviews

Praise for Stephen Walsh

"Walsh weaves in subplots across decades and geography and explores the influence of relatively obscure composers with generous, contagious curiosity." The New Yorker

“Compelling. Finely tuned. Walsh employs a delightfully fluent prose to carry the general reader along.” The Guardian

“An enjoyable and impressive achievement. Lively yet learned. Walsh depicts Debussy’s Paris with the same verve and scholarship that he applies to the man.”
The Economist

"Stephen Walsh has followed his magnificent, two-volume Stravinsky biography with this smaller but no less brilliant gem of a book on Debussy. Combining psychological perspicacity about his subject’s life with deep insight into his music, Walsh has made me not only better understand the composer—he has also made me want to re-listen to and re-reflect upon every piece that Debussy ever wrote.” Harvey Sachs, author of Toscanini: Musician of Conscience

"An excellent work of history. Walsh writes with clarity and insight. First-rate."
The Wall Street Journal