(back to list ) April 2010

I am excited to tell you about the scenes from the new opera-in-progress “Clara: Images from the Life of Clara Schumann” which will be presented on April 26th. I have written the music and Barbara Zinn Krieger the libretto. The great Metropolitan Opera star Martina Arroyo will direct singers from the Martina Arroyo Foundation. This month’s composer article is about that work. For the Health section of the newsletter, David Claman gives us the second part of his interview with his father, Dr. Henry Claman

Health: Interview with a Physician

David Claman: Last time we spoke we discussed stress hormones being reduced by playing music for patients in intensive care and brain scans done with FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) on people listening to music. You also discussed patients with Alzheimer’s. Is there anything you would like to add?

Henry Claman: One of the situations which has been very fascinating is in Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s patients frequently lose the ability to talk spontaneously, and many of them become silent. If you ask them to repeat a phrase, like Twinkle, twinkle, little star, they can’t do it. If you ask them to sing Twinkle, twinkle, little star with the words, they do it just fine. This tells you that there are several pathways for processing language in the brain. In fact, there are so many, that when sophisticated neurologists study brain function in people who have lost a lot of brain function due to stroke, Alzheimer’s, or trauma, they discover that the musical abilities are among the last to go. Oliver Sacks tells a very interesting story about a patient of his who had trouble taking care of himself, including the ordinary needs of the day. And he could not organize or remember, or do anything. If the activities were organized in song, he could do them. He had songs for dressing, songs for eating, songs for bathing, songs for everything. And I have had people come up to me after I give my talk on music and the brain and tell me, “My aunt has Alzheimer’s, and she can’t say things, but she can sing them.”

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Music

Clara Schumann interested me for many reasons. Her life reminded me of that of my own mother, who had been taught and groomed by her father to be a piano virtuoso. My mother soloed with the Chicago Symphony when she was 10 years old. She traveled to Europe and concertized in many of the major capitals when she was just a teenager, winning the Liszt Competition and studying in Hungary with Bartok and Dohnanyi. She led a glamorous and exciting life, and the stories of her youth dazzled me. I also learned of the great conflicts that took place between her and her father. She was headstrong and independent, just like Clara Schumann, who fought and won a court case in which her father tried to prevent her from marrying Robert. Although my grandfather never stood in the way when my mother decided to marry my father, there were enough similarities for me to gain a great understanding of the struggles that Clara had to endure.

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