Simon Heffer

Lechery, Libel and Lieder

Robert Schumann

By

Yale University Press 384pp £25 order from our bookshop

This is an odd book. Not a bad one: but odd. It isn’t really about Schumann’s music, which is the first oddity, since his life without it is rather tiresome and not really the stuff of a serious biography. Odder still, it isn’t really about Schumann’s life either, though all the key facts of that short and not always glorious career are contained within its pages. It is most concerned with his decline, and his death, and concerned about them to one particular end: to prove that Schumann, long portrayed as the ultimate Romantic who died after a mental collapse brought on by melancholia, in fact died of tertiary syphilis.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The breadth of Clarke’s knowledge and experience, coupled to a conspicuous absence of pomposity, makes for easy an… ,
    • In this month's Silenced Voices, Lucy Popescu shines a light on Myanmar's persecution of writers and journalists, p… ,
    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    Follow Us