By Kevin Nance
Contributing Writer and Photographer

By the time they welcomed a 20-year-old Johannes Brahms into their home in 1853, Robert and Clara Schumann were classical music’s leading power couple. Robert, the quintessential German Romanticist, was celebrated for his piano compositions and lieder, many of which shunned the virtuosity and showmanship of Liszt in favor of a shimmeringly intimate personal expression. His wife — the daughter and favorite student of his first piano teacher — was arguably even more famous than he, drawing crowds and rave reviews as one of Europe’s leading concert pianists. (Clara was also a gifted composer but found it difficult to find time for that work given her responsibilities as the mother of their seven children.) Both of the Schumanns mentored their handsome visitor, who first arrived with a sheaf of compositions under his arm, and promoted him, prophetically, as a future star of their field. 

This idyll was quickly disrupted, however, by Robert’s accelerating bouts of mental illness. Painfully shy and frequently unstable, he increasingly heard voices, growing confused and despondent. After a failed suicide attempt in 1854 — he threw himself into the Rhine, only to be rescued by fishermen — he spent his last two years, only occasionally lucid, in an asylum, finally dying at the age of 46. Clara was not allowed to visit, but Johannes was. He acted as an intermediary between the two, and ultimately moved in with Clara, managing the household (including caring for the children) while she became the breadwinner on the concert circuit. He fell deeply in love with Clara, as documented by their letters, although there’s no evidence that they ever became lovers.

The story of this trio of musical giants is now the basis of “Ghost Music,” a new play by Lexington playwright Bo List, receiving its world premiere in a professional production opening Wednesday, May 7 at Transylvania University. Produced by the university with the help of a $28,000 grant from AthensWest Theatre Company (which closed in 2022), “Ghost Music” builds on the foundation of the Schumann/Brahms triangle by framing and contrasting it with a second, parallel story populated by contemporary characters, a device reminiscent of one of List’s favorite plays, Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” 

Taking a cue from those voices Robert Schumann was hearing, List introduces a woman of our own time, Dawn, who is grieving her recently deceased husband, a scholar and musician who had been writing a book about the Schumanns. 

“She lives in a shambling old house and starts hearing and seeing things that may or may not be ghosts from the past,” List (now director of development for Winchester’s Leeds Center for the Arts) says in an interview just before a rehearsal at Transy’s Lucille Little Theatre. “As she deals with the grief of her loss and tries to put her husband’s book back together, Josh, a former student of her husband’s, shows up and offers to help. As in the Schumann/Brahms story, these contemporary characters find themselves going through loss, death, grief and yearning. So, the two stories are echoing, mirroring and occasionally touching each other.”

The mirroring effect is complicated and reinforced by the (all professional) casting. Derrick Ledbetter and Tosha Fowler play the Schumanns and Marianne Miller plays Dawn in their respective chronologies, while Forrest Loeffler plays both Johannes and Josh. Joe Gatton also appears in both timelines and, in the production’s ghostliest touch, Ledbetter provides the voice of Dawn’s dead spouse. Rounding out the cast are Katelynn Humphries, who plays the Schumanns’ maid, and Transylvania piano professor Greg Partain, who performs the play’s music from behind a scrim.

“It’s a dramatic story full of inspirational aspects and heartbreak — full of everything you could ever want for an incredible theatrical experience,” says Partain, who had the original idea for a play about the Schumanns. (Fowler, who chairs Transy’s theater department, commissioned the play from List using the AthensWest grant.) “The romance between Robert and Clara is something out of Hollywood,” Partain continues. “They were soulmates. They were great artistic collaborators. And then Brahms came into the picture when he was 20 years old and bowled over the Schumanns with his musical compositions. They had a sort of love triangle, very supportive of each other professionally and personally. And then Robert experiences a mental breakdown, ends up getting admitted to an asylum and dying a few years later, leaving Clara, at 36 years old, a widow.”

Brahms, who maintained a complicated relationship with Clara for the remainder of their lives, never married.

Partain had been fascinated by the Schumanns for much of his career and accepted the consensus of their biographers that Robert’s insanity was a lifelong condition that suddenly worsened in the 1850s. More recent scholarship, however, suggests a different cause of Schumann’s plunge into madness. “I am convinced that syphilis was the cause of all this,” he says. “He contracted it before he married Clara. He was treated for it, thought he was cured, and then it was latent or dormant for many years. He experienced a lot of very odd physical maladies for years including, finally, the dementia, which could be attributed to syphilis.” (An early draft of the play’s script mentioned syphilis but was dropped in later versions because, as List puts it, “It didn’t sound right.”)

In the end, the play turns not on illness, death and their causes but, rather, on what follows for those who survive. 

“The overarching dramatic action of the play is: How do you get through grief?” Fowler says.  “How do you deal with it, and how do you move on from it? And is it possible to move on from it in a productive way?”