Music: Holy Trust

Passionate, moody, poetic from his youth, Composer Robert Schumann in his 44th year was eccentric, on the verge of mental collapse. Living in Düsseldorf, he had for 13 years been the devoted husband of Pianist Clara Wieck, the friendly colleague of Joseph Joachim, greatest violinist of his time, and the admirer of young Composer Johannes Brahms. The works which were to make Schumann famed among Germans—songs, symphonies, piano works, pure, refined and free in form —he had written in the decade prior. In the early 1850s handsome Robert Schumann began fancying that he continually heard the musical note A, the note...

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