Brahms and Reményi tour in the summer of 1853

Young Brahms (left) went on his first professional tour when he was just twenty years old with the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi in the early summer of 1853.

Reményi (1828-1898), five years older than Brahms, already had a sketchy past, having been banished from Austria in 1848 for his participation in the Hungarian Revolution. He met young Brahms in Hamburg, but with the authorities searching for him, he fled to the United States and concertized for four years. Returning to Germany, he arranged the 1853 concert tour that would change Brahms's life.

While visiting the Court of Weimar, the pair met Franz Liszt, but Reményi took offense when Brahms, exhausted from all the traveling, fell asleep during Liszt's reading of his new Sonata in B minor and failed to praise Liszt adequately. The tour and the friendship with Reményi ended abruptly.

Had Brahms not slighted Liszt, he might not have had the opportunities to enhance his newly-found friendship with the violinist, Joseph Joachim, and to embark on the complicated and misunderstood relationships with Robert and Clara Schumann that changed his life.

These are some of the characters in my new book, Three Movements for Six Hands, an Historical Novel by Terry Row. To subscribe and reserve a copy today, send a check for $20.00 – to cover the book, sales tax, shipping and handling – to Terry Row, PO Box 1121, Los Alamos, CA 93440-1121. I'll send autographed copies of the finished volume to subscribers around the publication date of May 7, 2015, Johannes Brahms's 182^nd birthday.

Violinist Joseph Joachim introduced Brahms to the Schumanns

The Hungarian violinist, Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) is an important supporting character in the drama that is Three Movements for Six Hands, an Historical Novel by Terry Row. The book is scheduled for release on Brahms's birthday next year, May 7, 2015.

Joachim exploded onto the European music scene as a boy, a protege of Felix Mendelssohn, under whose baton he made his debut, playing the Otello Fantasy by Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst. At the age of 12, he performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto in London, with Mendelssohn conducting, establishing the piece in the standard repertoire. After an association with Franz Liszt that lasted only 4 years, he broke with Liszt and the so-called 'New German School' that included Wagner and Berlioz, and returned to a more conservative approach, aligning himself with Robert and Clara Schumann.

The history books tell us that in the late summer of 1853, Joachim provided his new acquaintance, twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms with a letter of introduction to Robert Schumann, and that on the first of October of that year, Brahms showed up on the doorstep of the Schumann home in Düsseldorf and presented that letter. There may have been more to it. Brahms stayed for a very important month in his young life.

At the end of October, Joachim joined them in Düsseldorf, where Schumann and Brahms and a third composer, Albert Dietrich, presented him with the F-A-E Sonata, a collaborative effort.

From Wikipedia: “The sonata was Schumann's idea as a gift and tribute to violinist Joseph Joachim, whom the three composers had recently befriended. Joachim had adopted the Romantic German phrase "Frei aber einsam" ("free but lonely") as his personal motto. The composition's movements are all based on the musical notes F-A-E, the motto's initials, as a musical cryptogram.”

Subscriptions for Three Movements for Six Hands are being offered at $20, allowing readers to assist in the costs of editing and publishing the book. So far, the cost of editing has already been collected and the book is being sent to the editor on June 14, 2014.

Don't delay. Reserve your autographed copy today by mailing a check for $20.00 – to cover the book, sales tax, shipping and handling – to Terry Row, PO Box 1121, Los Alamos, CA 93440-1121.

Robert and Clara Schumann's early days

Three Movements for Six Hands is an historical novel about Robert and Clara Schumann and the young unknown, Johannes Brahms. It is being offered to subscribers, who will receive an autographed copy of the book before the rest of public. The target publication date is May 7, 2015, the birth date of Johannes Brahms.

Robert Schumann (pictured) first met his piano teacher's young daughter Clara when he was 18 and she was only 9. They became secretly engaged when they were 24 and 15, had their first kiss a year later and met secretly in Dresden a few months after that. Robert asked Clara's father for her hand in marriage when she turned 18 and he refused, believing Schumann had no future as a concert pianist. The couple petitioned the Court of Appeals for permission to marry without her father's consent and won, but they did not exercise that privilege until one day before her 21st birthday.

Our story takes place much later in their lives, when Robert was 43 and Clara was 34 and they met Johannes Brahms at the tender age of 20.

By subscribing to the book, you can contribute to the expenses of editing and publishing. Don't wait another day. If you haven't already sent in your check for $20.00, please do it today. Make your check out to Terry Row and mail it to PO Box 1121, Los Alamos, CA 93440-1121. 

Do you want a copy of Terry Row's new book?

Do you want a copy of Terry Row's new book, Three Movements for Six Hands, coming out on May 7, 2015?

Have you sent in your $20 Subscription Fee?

Clifton Edwin Publishing is counting on advance sales through subscription to pay for the editing and production of this historical novel about the relationships among Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann (pictured) and Robert Schumann. It's a tragic story of love, misery and death, not the antiseptic version you learned in Music History class.

You can help by supporting your local author and publisher. Subscribers will receive their autographed copies before the book is available to the public.

Here's the opening paragraph:

At nineteen years, Johannes Brahms was a beautiful youth with delicate hands and slender fingers that belied their strength, a clear tenor singing voice, a smooth, beardless face and a slight build. Women swooned over his rich and beautiful head of golden blond hair that flowed down to his shoulders and framed his pale blue eyes, giving him an aura of innocence. Although he was not a tall boy, he stood straight and upright, and looked people in the eye when he talked, giving him an air of authority.

Don't wait. The sooner the financial targets are met, the sooner the book can go to the editor and then to the printer. Send your check for $20.00 – to cover the book, sales tax, shipping and handling – to Terry Row, PO Box 1121, Los Alamos, CA 93440-1121.

Clifton Edwin Publishing announces new book for 2015

I'm happy to announce today, May 7, the 181st anniversary of the birth of Johannes Brahms, that I have completed the first draft of my new book, Three Movements for Six Hands, an Historical Novel by Terry Row, about the complicated and misunderstood relationships among Brahms, Clara Schumann and Robert Schumann.

When they met in 1853, Brahms was nineteen, a brilliant and handsome young man, an unknown pianist and unpublished composer, just beginning his career with his first concert tour. 

Clara Schumann was thirty four, a star, a former child prodigy, a famous professional touring and concertizing pianist, as well as a composer, at a time when women did not tour and concertize. She played for royalty. She traveled all over Europe. She played from memory, something unheard of at the time, establishing a standard still followed today. She had to interrupt her concert schedule seven times in twelve years to give birth.

Robert Schumann forty three, was a well-known composer, conductor, music critic, publisher and writer, unhappy that his own career as a pianist had failed due to a hand injury and dissatisfied with his current position as a conductor of a minor orchestra.

Their lives would soon collide in ways the Music History texts do not teach.

The Three Movements for Six Hands are: Love, Misery and Death, a structure that parallels Robert Schumann's piece for orchestra, the Introduction, Scherzo and Finale, Op. 52, written a dozen years earlier in 1841.

I'm also happy to announce that I am offering this book through an advance sales subscription. I got the idea from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who launched a subscription series in Vienna, for which he wrote and performed new piano concertos. The proceeds from this subscription will pay for the editing and printing of the book. The release date for the book is one year from today, May 7, 2015.

To reserve a copy today, send a check for $20.00 – to cover the book, sales tax, shipping and handling – to Terry Row, PO Box 1121, Los Alamos, CA 93440-1121.  I'll send autographed copies of the finished volume to subscribers in one year. Additional copies will go on sale without autographs at www.amazon.com and other channels after that.