Clara Schumann
A Life in Perfect Time
€5.20
DOWNLOADABLE E-BOOK
Immediately available to your e-mail
The Women in Time series brings forgotten brilliance to the surface – full-length literary biographies of women whose lives bent the course of their fields, even as history tried to write them out. These are human portraits, not hagiographies: unsentimental, exacting, intimate, and immersive. They tell the truth behind the myth, the music behind the silence.
She was the most famous pianist of her century – and then she disappeared. In this arresting, deeply human biography, Clara Schumann reclaims her voice.
From prodigy to matriarch, from editor to widow, Clara Schumann’s life defied every expectation placed on her as a woman in nineteenth-century Europe. For over sixty years, she performed across the continent, premiering works by Brahms, Beethoven, and her husband Robert Schumann. But she was also a composer in her own right, writing music of radical clarity and restraint – music that was nearly erased from the canon she helped build.
In Clara Schumann: A Life in Perfect Time, the story unfolds with literary depth and historical precision. We follow Clara’s transformation from child virtuoso shaped by her father’s iron discipline, through her turbulent marriage to Robert, and into her years of uncompromising professional independence. We hear the inner silence of a woman who carried other men’s genius on her back, while her own compositions were forgotten. We see her friendships with Brahms and Joachim. We witness her grief, her discipline, her late return to composition. And we watch, at last, as her music begins to return to the stage.
This is not a romantic portrait – it’s a reckoning. Drawing on Clara’s letters, scores, reviews, and diaries, this biography lets her speak in her own rhythms. The result is a portrait of virtuosity not as spectacle, but as survival. With unsparing insight and intimate storytelling, A Life in Perfect Time restores Clara Schumann not just to history, but to sound.
For anyone who has ever played the right notes and still gone unheard – this is the book that remembers.