An unacknowledged life

Virtuosa
Directed by Anna McCrossin-Owen and Merfyn Owen
September 25 to October 6
Theatreworks, St Kilda
Reviewed by Nedjeljka Viduka

Virtuosa chronicles the life of Clara Schumann, a great pianist and composer, whose life and work in music history has been largely unacknowledged.

She was born to a demanding father who groomed her from age four to become the reigning European female piano prodigy, rivalling Liszt and Thalberg. She was playing before royalty by age nine and had already met her future husband Robert Schumann, a young student of her father.

Clara struggles with life, the financially and emotionally troubled Schumann, her increasingly cruel father, the demands of her own artistic career, motherhood, the attentions of a young Johannes Brahms, 14 years her junior, and the Dresden Revolution of 1849.

Virtuosa is a one person play in two acts. Dianna Nixon plays both Clara and her father. The production is charged with tenderness, eroticism and sexual tension as it journeys through the complex relationship between Clara and Robert and after Robert's death, her relationship with Brahms.

From GLW issue 249