#11 Library Thing

Library Thing Beta enables you add books to the database and share your comments with other users. Here is my list:

Alexander Hamilton America's Forgotten Founder by Joseph, A. Murray
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Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
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The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate by Michael Wallis
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The Unaffordable Nation: Searching for a Decent Life in America by Jeffrey Jones
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Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything E ... by Reporters of the Associated Press
4 other members. Tags: None (edit)

The Martin Book: A Complete History of Martin Guitars by Walter Carter
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Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey--The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the W ... by Holley Bishop
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Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant
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Clapton: The Autobiography by Eric Clapton
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Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician by John Worthen
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So far, I am only one of two members on Library Thing that have started to read the new biography of Robert Schumann by John Worthen (Yale University Press, 8/07, B S3927W), Worthen is not a musicologist but a professor of English literature who has written about the Lake poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. Worthen captures the essence of Schumann's genius: his gift at improvisation and rhapsodic fleets of fancy. My favorite Schumann composition is the Piano Concerto in A minor Op 54, and the best version is performed by Murray Perahia and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davis (CBS Masterworks, 1988).

Book Description:

This candid, intimate, and compellingly written new biography offers a fresh account of Robert Schumann’s life. It confronts the traditional perception of the doom-laden Romantic, forced by depression into a life of helpless, poignant sadness. John Worthen’s scrupulous attention to the original sources reveals Schumann to have been an astute, witty, articulate, and immensely determined individual, who—with little support from his family and friends in provincial Saxony—painstakingly taught himself his craft as a musician, overcame problem after problem in his professional life, and married the woman he loved after a tremendous battle with her father. Schumann was neither manic depressive nor schizophrenic, although he struggled with mental illness. He worked prodigiously hard to develop his range of musical styles and to earn his living, only to be struck down, at the age of forty-four, by a vile and incurable disease.

Worthen’s biography effectively de-mystifies a figure frequently regarded as a Romantic enigma. It frees Schumann from 150 years of mythmaking and unjustified psychological speculation. It reveals him, for the first time, as a brilliant, passionate, resolute musician and a thoroughly creative human being, the composer of arguably the best music of his generation.

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For a musicologist's perspective of Schumann's life and work, turn to John Daverio's Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age" (Oxford University Press, 2/97). Daverio is Associate Professor and Chairman of the Musicology Department at the Boston University School for the Arts.

Book Description:

Forced by a hand injury to abandon a career as a pianist, Robert Schumann went on to become one of the world's great composers. Among many works, his Spring Symphony (1841), Piano Concerto in A Minor (1841/1845), and the Third, or Rhenish, Symphony (1850) exemplify his infusion of classical forms with intense, personal emotion. His musical influence continues today and has inspired many other famous composers in the century since his death. Indeed Brahms, in a letter of January 1873, wrote: "The remembrance of Schumann is sacred to me. I will always take this noble pure artist as my model." Now, in Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age," John Daverio presents the first comprehensive study of the composer's life and works to appear in nearly a century. Long regarded as a quintessentially romantic figure, Schumann also has been portrayed as a profoundly tragic one: a composer who began his career as a genius and ended it as a mere talent. Daverio takes issue with this Schumann myth, arguing instead that the composer's entire creative life was guided by the desire to imbue music with the intellectual substance of literature. A close analysis of the interdependence among Schumann's activities as reader, diarist, critic, and musician reveals the depth of his literary sensibility. Drawing on documents only recently brought to light, the author also provides a fresh outlook on the relationship between Schumann's mental illness--which brought on an extended sanitarium stay and eventual death in 1856--and his musical creativity. Schumann's character as man and artist thus emerges in all its complexity. The book concludes with an analysis of the late works and a postlude on Schumann's influence on successors from Brahms to Berg. This well-researched study of Schumann interprets the composer's creative legacy in the context of his life and times, combining nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual history with a fascinating analysis of the works themselves.