Robert Schumann (1810–1856)

Robert Schumann first met Clara Wieck when he started piano lessons with her father in 1828. He was 18 and she 9, but this was never a Novalis-style cradle-snatching romance: in the first place they were playmates and best buddies in a brother-and-sister way - neither of them had had much other opportunity to be a "normal" child up to that point. It was only after Clara's first big concert tour, when she was 16, that Robert started to fall in love with her, and a couple of years more before they both felt ready to commit themselves to each other.

By that time Clara was earning big money as one of the top concert pianists in Europe, whilst Robert's earning capacity as a music-journalist and struggling composer was barely sufficient to support himself as a bachelor. So it was perhaps understandable that Friedrich Wieck was unwilling to let go of the daughter he'd been training up to be a genius since she was five. But he let his jealousy (whether it was motivated by money or by concern for his daughter) get out of hand, trying to blackmail Clara, blacken Robert's name, and generally cause trouble. (But, astonishingly, he never seems to have managed to prevent them from exchanging letters in secret, and even meeting from time to time.) Eventually, he pushed them so far that they were left with no choice but to take him to court, and they got married on the day before Clara's 21st birthday.

Ortheil's edition of the letters between Robert and Clara is fun, but sometimes rather frustrating: he compiled it from published sources, and (at the time) there were not so many of Clara's letters available, so we often get long stretches of Robert-to-Clara and just have to imagine the replies. The letters are mostly from the period between 1832 and their marriage in 1840, but there is a handful in the closing pages of the book from periods when Clara was on tour by herself and some rather sad letters from Robert's time in the mental hospital in Endenich.

As a correspondent, Robert is the more entertaining of the two - his letters are full of the complicated up and down of his emotions and his imagined presence in Clara's life, wherever she was, interspersed with bits and pieces of musical gossip about his Leipzig friends and occasional jealousy about the people Clara was meeting. Clara is - as we would expect - much more sober and to-the-point, very much the professional musician complaining about bad instruments, noisy or passive audiences, ticket receipts and the rest. But it's fascinating to watch her grow up over the course of the book, moving from what seems to be not much more than a polite echoing of Robert's sentiments to a real feeling that she's as dependent on his love as he is on hers.… (mere)