New Year Music

Written by Victoria Baker
Thursday, 29 December 2011 15:34

"Talent works, genius creates" said Robert Schumann, one of the greatest composers of the nineteenth century, and how true it is. If we were to ask Mozart, Shakespeare and Picasso how their wondrous contributions came about, I am confident they would say that these works just "happened" to them. Almost as if, the music or stories just passed through them... The musical genius Stravinsky summed it up better than I ever could when he said of his famous piece The Rite of Spring "I am the vessel through which it passed."

On Jan. 28-29 at 8 p.m. and 4 p.m. respectively, the Greenwich Symphony will have its first performances of the New Year. On the program will be the perennial favorites Handel, Bartok and of course Schumann. Accomplished Violist David Creswell will be the soloist for the Bartok Viola Concerto. For more information log onto Greenwichsym.org.

Schumann may have been the great celebrity of his time but he was, and is, often eclipsed by his talented wife Clara and even more so by the complicated love stories which wove their way around both their lives.

In 1830 Schumann was a law school dropout after having concluded that there was no greater misery than doing such work for the rest of his life. Penniless and vagrant, he appealed to Clara's father, a notorious music teacher at the time, to take him on as a resident pupil. Slowly, over the course of many years, Clara and Robert Schumann's relationship blossomed from friendship into romance. All the while, Clara was rapidly gaining recognition as a prodigy at the piano, performing all over Europe and becoming the sole breadwinner of her family. Clara's father would therefore not consent to the marriage, preferring to keep Clara under his wing. But the devoted couple fought for their romance and they were eventually married.

On September 13, 1840, Robert wrote a diary entry that would spearhead the joint diary writing between him and Clara. The diary chronicled their marriage weekly from the day after the wedding until the summer of 1844. It was to be a method of communication between husband and wife in which they wrote about both their musical and married life. These sort of charming quirks have been a boon to historians in their efforts to chronicle their lives.

Robert Schumann, in his ever prophetic mindset said "To send light into the darkness of men's hearts, such is the duty of the artist." That is both a very beautiful and egotistical thing to say and yet, if the purpose of art is not to enlighten and enliven us then what purpose does it serve? Whether or not you attend the upcoming Greenwich Symphony concert I hope your New Year will be filled with beautiful music... Schumann may have been a genius for music but we all have the genius gene for life, so I wish you all a Happy New Year without working to make things happen but just allowing life, like genius, to create itself!

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