Clara’s fantastic dream

Clara Wieck Schumann met Hans Christian Andersen in Copenhagen in 1841. One can well imagine the fabulous conversations that must have taken place between the famous pianist, born Clara Wieck, wife of the great Robert Schumann, and the marvellous story-teller, appreciated in his native land but not yet internationally recognized; he was best known for his poetry at that time.

Clara gives a brief description of him in her diary: “Andersen has the soul of a poet and a child; he’s still quite young, not very handsome either, and moreover, he is vain and selfish to a degree – yet I like him and getting to know him has been an interesting and important experience for me. Whatever people say, his virtues largely outweigh his vices.”

But for Clara the fantastic dream had begun just a year earlier when she married Robert. And Mara Dobresco’s record invites us into the very heart of this fantastic dream of German Romantic music.
Over the last few years there have already been signs of a growing interest in heroines of romantic music such as Clara Wieck, Robert Schumann’s wife, or Fanny, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s sister, both sacrificed on the family altar by unbending and self-willed men. Now a talented young Romanian pianist brings Clara and Robert together in a single recital, and the listener can hear for himself how much each of them owes to the other.

Before she came to make this record, Mara Dobresco had already covered a lot of ground in her intense personal itinerary. She was born in Bucharest on 8 June 1976 (the same day as Robert Schumann !), and took her first musical steps, so to speak, by studying at the George Enescu Conservatory in Bucharest in the piano class of Gabriela Stepan, whose teaching was to leave a lasting imprint on her pupil’s playing. Then, after studying under Gérard Fremy at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, where she was awarded her diploma with special mention for excellence, the pianist went on to win several important international competitions in Europe and Australia. She has regularly been invited to record for Romanian national radio and television, as well as for Radio France. Her musical horizons have been enlarged by her encounters with personalities such as Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Jeff Cohen, Hans Leygraf, Patrick Cohen and Dominique Merlet, and her growing interest as an accompanist for songs and the Lied was gradually confirmed. In her native country singing has always been the living part of musical expression anyway.