"Carol", says Sarah, "who was that composer whose work you were interpreting today? It sounds like a woman composer."
"Why, darling, because Clara Shuman, is a female composer. She was of the Romantic era, mid nineteenth century. She was the wife of Robert Schumann, who, being a man, basically eclipsed his wife with his shadow, though the superiority of his wife's compositions could be very safely argued. And she was indeed an accomplished woman. Taking care of her husband, who was mentally ill and later confined to an asylum, as well as raising her eight children, while playing concerts, composing, teaching..."
"Wasn't she also lovers with Johannes Brahms?" asks George.
"Pure hogwash. Oh, it is undeniable that Brahms had feelings for Clara, and it is possible that those feelings were not entirely unrequited, but Mrs. Schumann was definitely a woman of her era, a respectable bourgeois who wasn't about to sully her family's reputation, nor wound her husband nor completely jeopardize her own social position and standing by slipping between the sheets, not with Herr Brahms, nor with any other man to whom she was not lawfully wedded. An incredibly brilliant composer. In many ways a woman ahead of her time. But purely and essentially and in all that really mattered to her, Clara Schumann still remained very much a woman of her time.
I ask "Are there other woman composers that you like?"
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