Clara and Robert Schumann in Context

Illuminating the shared world of Clara and Robert Schumann, this volume takes a renewed look at the Schumanns and reconsiders them both as individual artists and as a couple who each charted their trajectories with the other in mind. It focuses on key aspects of their artistic and cultural environments amid the creative and political ferment of nineteenth-century Germany and traces their critical reception from their own time to the present day. The topics range from personal and professional relationships to their socio-cultural environment and their influence on subsequent generations of musicians, giving fresh perspectives on established themes and introducing new material and sources particularly in relation to Clara. The book broadens and re-evaluates existing understandings of the Schumanns and makes scholarship currently better known in the German-speaking sphere accessible to English-language readers.

Author Biography

Joe Davies is a faculty member in the Arts and Humanities Division at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is author of The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert (2024), editor of Clara Schumann Studies (2021), and co-editor of Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert (2019). Roe-Min Kok is Professor of Music at McGill University. She is editor of Schumann in The Early Romantic Composers Series (2019), Neue Robert Schumann Ausgabe III/1/4: Klavierwerke 4 (2016) and Rethinking Schumann (2011), and has published widely on the Schumanns, nineteenth-century German culture, and music colonialism in global history.