Three Movements for Six Hands: The Cover

I'm getting ready to upload the files to the printer for Three Movements for Six Hands on Monday! The text is done, the photo inserts are done and the cover is the last piece to be tweaked! Here is a mock-up. It may look a little different when the book comes out because I'm still working on it today.

If you haven't ordered your subscription copy, it's not too late. Send a check for $20.00 to:

Terry Row
PO Box 1121
Los Alamos, CA
93440-1121

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.

Clara Schumann's hazel eyes shined brightly in direct opposition to the dark circles below them. Her wide mouth radiated an air of sensuality and her high cheekbones gave her confidence and competence Brahms had never seen in a woman before, and yet he was reminded of his mother, a younger version, as he remembered her from his youth. It seemed clear somehow that this woman had borne children, although he could not say why he thought that. Perhaps a fullness of the hips or her supreme confidence. At the same time, because of her directness, she reminded him of the women he had known by the docks of Hamburg.

Only One Month

Only One Month

to the

Printer's Deadline:

Three Movements for Six Hands

Have you ordered your pre-publication autographed copy of Three Movements for Six Hands?

This is the time to do it! The files (and half the printing costs) go to the printer on February 27.

To reserve yours, send a check for $20.00 to:

Terry Row

PO Box 1121

Los Alamos, CA 93440-1121

This is a test image for the cover of Three Movements for Six Hands.

This is a test image for the cover of Three Movements for Six Hands. 

Now is the time for all interested readers to come to the aid of their publisher: send a check for $20.00 to Terry Row, PO Box 1121, Los Alamos, CA 93440-1121 to reserve your copy of the limited autographed first edition, shipped in time for Brahms's birthday. 

You'll be contributing to the printing costs up front. Do it today!

Three Movements for Six Hands An Historical Novel by Terry Row

Three Movements for Six Hands

An Historical Novel

by

Terry Row

Look at that innocent face.

When I think of Johannes Brahms, I think of the old man with the enormous beard, not this sweet-looking boy, trying his best to look worldly and sophisticated. At this point in his life, when he was about 20, he was an unknown, who stumbled into the company of some of the best-known composers and performers of his day: Franz Liszt, Joseph Joachim, Clara Schumann and Robert Schumann. Within a month, his name was being splashed all over Europe as the new Beethoven and he was talking to one the top music publishers of the day.

Three Movements for Six Hands, an Historical Novel, by Terry Row, covers the two-year period that launched the career of one of the most famous and beloved composers of the 19th century and today.

Scheduled for release on Brahms's 182nd anniversary, May 7, 2015, the book is being offered on a subscription basis. Your subscription will help cover the upfront printing costs. Send a $20 check for your autographed limited edition copy to the following:

Terry Row

273 Bell St.

PO Box 1121

Los Alamos, CA 93440-1121

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.