Schumann

A challenging new biography of a major composer whose life and works have been the subject of intense controversy ever since his attempted suicide and early death in an insane asylum. Schumann was a key figure in the Romanticism movement that swept Europe and America in the 19th century. All the contradictions of the age enter his works, from his passionate love songs to his great ‘Spring’ and ‘Rhenish’ Symphonies. He was intensely original and imaginative, but he also worshipped the past—especially Shakespeare and Byron, Raphael and Michelangelo, Beethoven and Bach. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archive material, Chernaik sheds new light on Schumann’s life and music, and she vividly brings the composer’s world and his extraordinary artistic achievement to life in all its rich complexity.

Born in New York, Judith Chernaik now lives in London. She is best known for founding London’s popular Poems on the Underground, which offers poetry of all times and places to a mass audience, a programme which has taken off in cities worldwide. She is the co-editor of anthologies of Poems on the Underground and her other publications include The Lyrics of Shelley, four novels and many essays, reviews and short stories in the TLS, Guardian, Times, New York Times, Yale Review, most recently essays on Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin in The Musical Times.