Trio 2: A Novel About the Schumanns and Brahms

Trio 2 continues the story of Trio, Book One. Johannes Brahms was twenty when he fell deeply in love with Clara Schumann, wife of Robert, mother of eight, and the greatest woman pianist of the age. He was just as deeply indebted to Robert who got his work published within weeks of their meeting. Robert was then within months of committing himself to an insane asylum where he was to die two and a half years later. Clara was forbidden to see him during this time because the doctors imagined she would excite him too much for his own good. Brahms became a go-between for the couple, ferrying messages to and fro. His love blossomed to its fullest and Clara welcomed his affection, but both loved Robert too well to abuse his trust. Brahms compared himself with the protagonist of the hopeless lover of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther and learned instead to associate love with renunciation - and, coupling this experience with early experiences of playing dance music for sailors and prostitutes in Hamburg's dockside bars, he fell victim to the Freudian conundrum: Where he loves he feels no passion, and where he feels passion he cannot love. Trio 2 takes the story from 1857 (the year after the death of Robert) to 1897 (the year of Brahms's death). Clara died the year before. Germany grows in the hinterland of the story, from 400+ principalities to one nation under Bismarck. Like Trio, its predecessor, it is firmly grounded in fact, but unfolds like a novel, not a biography, a great read for the beach, the summer, the winter, a holiday - a holiday in itself, a book in which to live for a while, a narrative of love, insanity, suicide, revolution, politics, war - and, of course, music.