A Famous Love Triangle Takes Center Stage
A long-awaited World Premiere emerges from the operatic pandemic landscape, with an innovative film format sharing the intimate family drama of one of classical music’s most famous couples.
The love triangle between composers Clara Schumann, her husband Robert and Johannes Brahms is one of classical music’s more, well, operatic episodes.
But the story music buffs learned in school through program books or in countless film adaptations is one mostly told in silhouette. The details get particularly shady when it comes to Clara — a projector screen for endless speculation, especially in her relationship with the younger Brahms — and Robert’s mental illness, nearly as misunderstood now as it was when he was sent to a Bonn sanitarium in 1854.
“Ghost Variations,” a chamber opera streaming in three pay-what-you-can screenings June 4 through 6 under the auspices of Thompson Street Opera, resists more than 150 years of tropes. Here, Robert Schumann’s struggle with mental illness isn’t shunted out of sight or caricatured into something malevolent; his hallucinations are sometimes frightening, sometimes darkly humorous, but always humanizing. Nor is this a Brahms-saviorism story: After Robert is institutionalized, Clara makes it clear to the younger man that, as a virtuoso pianist and the Schumann family’s main breadwinner, she’s going to steer her own future with a determined if shaky grip. (In fact, you might find yourself more than a little miffed at the flirtatious Johannes during “Ghost Variations.”)