breathethedownbow:

fyeahclassicalcomposers:

I dunno if you guys could tell, but I’m very into the lives of the Schumanns, and as an extension, Brahms, and I did a lot of research over a year about their stories and works and everything, and even incorporated a lot of those elements into my writing (including the names of people I mention henceforth)

So the other day we were assigned this academic reading in theory and I just completely lost my, excuse me, shit, because this guy decided that theory papers, especially those on metrical theory, were too boring so he wrote it as Eusebius, Raro, and Florestan, AKA Robert Schumann’s alternate personalities with which he wrote music reviews (most likely before his mental health began to take a turn) and potentially even pieces (afterwards)

The premise is that the theorist’s piece on metrical dissonance in Schumann’s works has been sent back through time and Eusebius and Florestan are reading it and commenting on it and if you think musicians or theorists are boring you better open your eyes for Johannes Brahms’ sake

and now you know I am not joking

but as you can see

there’s a reason I’m losing my shit

holy mother of Franz Liszt

coffee freaking models of dissonance

you thought you nightblogged huh

we are Chiarina

music theory fanfiction

complete with ship

(source)

(background: in my NaNo 2011 novel, three of the characters were Raro, Eusebius, and Florestan and I just I cannot handle this)

symphonie-fantastique:

Robert et Clara Schumann, vers 1850.

_{La Musique de Piano, I | [listen here] | a selection of enlightening piano compositions by Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn and Schumann}

_{i. liebestraume - liszt | ii. venetian gondolied - mendelssohn | iii. tristesse - chopin | iv. des abends - schumann | v. un sospiro - liszt | vi. lieder ohne worte op. 85 no. 1 - mendelssohn | vii. nocturne in c sharp minor - chopin | viii. von fremden landern - schumann | ix. au lac de wallendstadt - liszt | x. lieder ohne worte op. 30 no. 1 - mendelssohn | xi. raindrop prelude - chopin | xii. in der nacht - schumann | xiii. consolation no. 3 - liszt | xiv. romans sans paroles op. 19 no. 1 - mendelssohn | xv. nocturne op. 9 no. 1 - chopin | xvi. traumerei - schumann | xvii. mephisto waltz no. 1 - liszt | xviii. sonata op. 106 - mendelssohn | xix. prelude in e minor - chopin | xx.davidsbundlertanze - schumann | xxi. les adieux - liszt | xxii. fantasie op. 28 - mendelssohn | xxiii. ballade no. 1 in g minor - chopin | xxiv. piano sonata no. 1, mvmnt. 1 - schumann}

mindmeinmusic:

Robert Schumann’s Angelic Sounds

From the middle parts of his adulthood, Schumann started claiming that he heard tones in his ears all the time. He described them as angelic voices or sounds; much of his outlook on music was shaped by these sounds that he heard at all times. Later in his life these sounds began to torment him and he constantly looked for escape. His wife Clara admitted him to an asylum late in his life, in which his condition worsened. He ended his life a few years later by jumping into the river. His tragic life dealing with these sounds may be the only reason that we have such beautiful music from him, but it is regretful that it anguished his entire life. 

Bittersweet Symphonies:
Johannes Brahms & Clara Wieck Schumann

In 1855 Johannes Brahms wrote the pianist Clara Schumann a naked cry of frustration: “I can do nothing but think of you… What have you done to me? Can’t you remove the spell you have cast over me?” The situation between them at the time was messy - very messy. Clara was 35, Brahms 21, she famous, he rather more infamous. She was married to the composer Robert Schumann, and the pair had seven young children. On the other hand, for more than a year, Clara’s husband had been in an asylum and Clara had not been allowed to see him. When Robert fell off the edge, Brahms had hastened to her side.

Now Brahms, Robert’s protege and discovery, was helplessly in love with Robert’s wife. They had not expected it, didn’t want it, and so on. Brahms loved and admired Robert. Shortly before jumping in the Rhine to escape the demonic oratorios in his head, Robert had made the name Brahms known across Europe, declaring this student from Hamburg the coming saviour of German music.

Brahms, meanwhile, was living with Clara and the children - his bedroom on a separate floor, to be sure, but spending most of his time consoling her, helping with the children, and going nearly out of his mind with yearning.

In those years Brahms was slim, beardless and drop-dead handsome. Gossip was sizzling in musical circles. Clara was yearning mightily, too, but as with Brahms her feelings were tangled up with anxiety and guilt. Robert and Clara had been, after all, the supreme musical romance of the Romantic period. Clara was the love of Robert’s life, his prime musical champion, the heroic force that had held together his splintering mind longer than anyone could have imagined. Continue Reading >>

Frederic Chopin and Clara Wieck Schumann

Robert Schumann’s critical praise introduced the name Fryderyk Chopin to Europe. His wife Clara’s performances secured a place for Chopin’s music in the piano repertoire. In return, Chopin had very few kind things to say about Robert’s compositions. But he described Clara as “the only woman in Germany who can play my works.”

Chopin’s Variations on the Mozart aria “La ci darem la mano” inspired Robert Schumann to write his rave review— “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius” —in 1831. And who better to play it than a young piano prodigy named Clara Wieck, barely 12 years old at the time. It’s the first Chopin piece she performed.

By then Clara was already on her first European concert tour, which included a stop in Paris. Chopin didn’t attend. But when Chopin visited Leipzig in the fall of 1835, Felix Mendelssohn introduced them. Clara played some of her own music, a piece by Robert and two Chopin etudes. The performance reportedly moved Chopin to tears.

This was a time of transition for the piano recital in Europe. Audiences and critics had a taste for light, showy repertoire. After a recital she gave in Hamburg, Clara’s father Friedrich Wieck wrote that one reviewer called Chopin’s music “musical nonsense.” He added later, “How people must wonder at Clara, who plays such crazy things by preference.”

In HIS critical writing, Robert Schumann dismissed that sort of response as philistinism. And Clara only increased her focus on the new Romantics: Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin, turning recitals into a more serious musical platform. All of these composers would die young, but Clara carried on as an eloquent champion of their legacy. Robert said his wife was “a greater virtuoso” than Chopin: “Clara…gives almost more meaning to his composition than he does himself.” [x]

Robert Schumann & Clara Wieck

Robert Schumann, composer and pianist - Clara Schumann, virtuoso pianist, composer, and wife of Robert Schumann - their lives and careers intertwined almost indefinably in history.

Friedrich Wieck recognized Robert’s talent, but from the first, he doubted Robert’s stability and discipline. These early impressions of the young man influenced Herr Wieck in his later assessment of his qualifications as a suitable husband for his daughter Clara Josephine Wieck.

Clara Wieck, nine years younger than Robert Schumann, was a gifted pianist. Under her father’s tutelage since the age of five, Clara had long been recognized as a musical child prodigy with a touring career that began at age nine. As a teenager, she was elected to the honored Music Society of Vienna.

Friedrich Wieck, still convinced of Schumann’s lack of fortitude, forbade his daughter to see Robert. For more than sixteen months, Robert was exiled from the Wieck’s home. Alone and dejected, he poured his emotion into the composition of “Fantasy in C Major.” On her eighteenth birthday, Clara found an extremely distressed - and by some accounts, drunken - Schumann. Their relationship was reestablished and Robert asked Clara’s father for her hand in marriage. This was denied.

While Clara appealed to the courts, she refused to disobey her father and marry Schumann without either her father’s permission or the court’s sanction, fearing loss of her inheritance and with it, financial security. The courts did finally grant the appeal and Clara Wieck became Clara Schumann at the age of twenty-one, her husband thirty.

The year that followed was one of the most prolific of Robert’s lifetime. He produced over one hundred Lieder, many of which were composed for his wife to play. Clara encouraged him to broaden his style, leading him into orchestral music as well as chamber works. Robert combined his love for the piano with symphonic orchestration, producing the “Piano Concerto in A Minor.”

Clara continued to tour and also taught at the Leipzig Conservatory. She composed twenty-three opuses and countless piano songs, including polonaises, waltzes, and a piano concerto. Still, female composers were not readily received by the musical world. Clara wrote in her diary, “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose - there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?” Clara chose instead to become the chief interpreter of her husband’s music. He wrote. She played.

The years from 1854 to 1856 were fraught with frequent periods of depression and the onset of auditory hallucinations. At times, Robert confessed to hearing variations of themes from the spirits of Schubert or Mendelssohn. It was during one of these times that a frustrated Schumann made his way to the Rhine River and tried to drown himself. Rescued by fisherman and quite shaken, Robert asked to be taken to an asylum. He died there in 1856.

After Robert’s death, Clara Schumann toured the concert piano circuit to support herself and her children. She edited her husband’s work, still the principal interpreter of his genius, not only at the keyboard but in its preservation. Clara died in 1896. [x]

Frederic Chopin and Robert Schumann

They were two pillars of the Romantic Generation, born three months and 400 miles apart. One was a Polish exile who made his fortune in Paris; the other, a German, eventually betrayed by his own imagination.

As a young music critic, Robert Schumann introduced the 21-year-old Chopin to Europe with the famous words, “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” Schumann was also the one who wrote, “The works of Chopin are cannons concealed amongst flowers.“ And this: “He plays just like he composes, in other words in his own unique way.”

That’s not to say Schumann was unfailingly positive about his Polish contemporary. He noted “blemishes” in Chopin’s Op. 25 Etudes, and famously wrote that in his Piano Sonata No. 2 Chopin had “yoked together his four maddest children.”

Chopin seems to have had far less to say about Schumann. For one thing, he was not a critic. For another, he did not admire Schumann (or many other composers, for that matter). Typical was his reaction to Schumann’s “Carnaval.” According to a second-hand account, Chopin told his publisher it was not music at all.

On the other hand, Chopin did dedicate his Ballade No. 2 to Schumann. And different though their music and their opinions of each other may have been, posterity has yoked Chopin and Schumann together. As critic Harold Schonberg put it, their innovations demonstrated that “a small but perfect form, one that captured and exploited a single idea, could be its own aesthetic justification.” [x]