It’s official!

I’m writing a new Clara Schumann biography for Pegasus Books entitled MADAME COMPOSER, to be published in 2026. I’m so grateful to Pegasus Books, to publisher Jessica Case, and my literary agent, Elias Altman at MMQA, for signing onto #TeamClara and for believing in my work.  

I am overjoyed at the privilege—thoroughly daunted by the responsibility—and so grateful to everyone who’s supported this project up to this point. Without #TeamClara, this would not have happened.

Why a new biography of Clara Schumann?

If you want to know what’s going to be in the book, the best summary is basically this Clara Schumann Channel blog post—except WAY more detailed and comprehensive with MUCH better writing, editing, packaging, citations etc.!

I have many lofty goals for this book, most relating to two objectives. I want…

1. A book which is for the public—not just for musicians but for music lovers and history enthusiasts, for general bookstores and public libraries.
2. A book which asserts Clara Schumann as first and foremost—from the title itself—as a COMPOSER.

Clara Schumann started as a composer and loved composing more than anything. She resisted defining herself as a composer primarily because it would be “arrogant” to call herself by a man’s profession. Without her works, the classical canon is incomplete.

I know many people agree with me whole-heartedly on this. If you’re skeptical, I ask the opportunity to prove it to you with my book.

What’s in a new biography of Clara Schumann?

I’ll be sharing more details about the book on its road to publication over the next 2 years. (You can signup for the newsletter to get regular updates in your email.) I know the wait is long, but I promise it’ll be worth it.

Here are some hints to tide you over. . .

1)    I will be giving as much credit as possible to the researchers whose coattails I am riding. This book would not be possible without the decades of work which has been done before—the work of countless scholars which I admire so highly. The primary contributors will be in my book’s epilogue, which delves into the transformation of Clara’s legacy in the 20^th century.

2)    I will include other women composers in every chapter: Clara’s women predecessors, contemporaries, and those who came after her. Women composers were all over the place in 19^th-century Germany, as they always have been in every place and era.

3)    This book will be a study in a culture and an artform. To understand what a powerful cultural figure Clara was, to appreciate the change she affected and the obstacles she encountered, will require ample 19^th-century context. There’ll be lots on German Romanticism, the status of music as an artform, and the philosophies of misogyny and feminism at the time.

4)    I will do my very best not to put Clara on a pedestal. My hope is to humanize both her and the canon composer men in her life. I admire Clara deeply, but she was also a very flawed person who made many mistakes — i.e. a relatable human.

Moving forward

It’ll take all of 2025 for me to write it, and most of 2026 for my publisher and I to edit and prepare it for publication. You’ll be hearing from me much less often in 2025 on social media etc. Filtering down Clara’s enormous life into 400 pages will be a monumental task.

But come 2026, I will be back online with a vengeance. I will send brief occasional updates to the newsletter. If you’d like to get them in your inbox, signup is here.