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Hopeless Romantics
St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble performs the music of Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, and Johannes Brahms
St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble (Photo: Carol Cohen)
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The complex and passionate relationship between Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, and Johannes Brahms is one of the most well documented in classical music. They were friends, colleagues, collaborators and partners, three of the most famous musicians in 19th-century Germany. The storied relationship between Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, long pored over by historians and music critics alike, is the stuff of intrigue, including missing diary pages and “did they or didn’t they” conjecture. Over the course of 43 years their close friendship became one of the most prominent of the 19th century and, yes, even a movie was made of this relationship in 1947, Song of Love, starring Katherine Hepburn.
To conclude its 2008–2009 series, the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble performs Hopeless Romantics, a program featuring Clara Schumann’s Three Romances for violin and piano, Op. 22; Robert Schumann’s Fantasiestücke for piano, violin, and cello, Op. 88; and Brahms’s Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in B minor, Op. 115. These seminal chamber works of each composer illuminate the effect each had on the others’ musical language, which together helped fuel and define the boundaries of musical Romanticism.
Wednesday and Friday, May 6 & 8, 2009, at 7:30 PM at Gilder Lehrman Hall of The Morgan Library & Museum, where the series is titled the Richard Gilder Chamber Music Series; and Saturday, May 9, 2009, at 2:00 PM at the Brooklyn Museum.