Music in the Round May Festival - Romances and Quartets

A sequence of words and music.

A musical and poetic exchange between Clara and Robert Schumann : Poetry Reading TS Eliot Burnt Norton from The Four Quartets.

There has been much speculation regarding a supposed love-triangle involving Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. This sequence of poetry and music takes the narrative to an earlier, happier age, when Robert and Clara finally overcame the barriers put up by Clara’s father in an attempt to thwart the marriage intentions of the young lovers.

"I have [Beethoven’s] A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die." T S Eliot