Robert Schumann (1810-1856) always envisioned a national German opera that presented a complete union of text and music with a plot based upon a supernatural and mythical German legend. As he confessed to a friend in 1842, “Do you know

Solitude….suffering….and the supernatural. Yes, we’re in the middle of Romanticism and when one of the most romantic of composers, Robert Schumann, takes up the romantic tale of Count Manfred as told by the most romantic of poets, Lord Byron, we

When it comes to lawsuits filed by composers, none is more famous than Robert Schumann’s petition for the right to marry his sweetheart Clara Wieck. The lovers had been kept apart for some time, and on 9 April 1839 Clara

The horn has a long history, dating from the first time one of our ancestors took a cow horn and, holding it to his lips, found it could make a sound. Moving on from the simple cow horn to the

In their attempts to get beyond the symphony as defined by Beethoven, composers came up with new one-movement genres such as the concert overture. Sometimes regarded as a work in search of an opera, the concert overture gave composers the

There’s a special poignancy to Schumann’s Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”). Dedicated to his beloved wife Clara, they were written just a few weeks before he was committed to a lunatic asylum at Endenich, and were the last piece of music he

Musical settings of Heinrich Heine’s poetry must number in the thousands! An intricate response to the charged political environment of his day, not to mention his own turbulent life, Heine was able to create distinct emotions in his poetry. As