The year is 1856, a year when female composers are almost unheard of. German composer Robert Schumann has just died, leaving his pregnant wife with six children to care for — any way she knows how.

She wonders if a career as a piano composer will be enough to support her growing family. And she comes to a decision: The only thing she can do is go on tour, and be separated from her children for nine months out of the year.

This is where the musical “Clara Schumann: Liebe and Leben” begins. Professor of music Jane Cox was inspired to write the play after she read a biography about Clara.

She wrote the play from numerous diary entries and letters Clara had written.

“I began to select sentences or phrases that I really liked and wrote them down,” Cox says. “Anything that seemed to strike me as something that greatly changed or altered her life I also wrote down and then I began to organize [these selections] in a coherent manner.”

In Cox’s creation, the part of Clara is played by two people, one representing her through the piano and one through dialogue. Cox stars as the voice of Clara and Sue Haug, professor of music and chair of the music department, plays the role of Clara’s pianist-self.

Haug says this representation is a way to express the tensions in many women’s lives, both then and now.

“What she was doing then is now what we are doing today, a balancing act … juggling all these things and taking lots of criticism for it,” Haug says.

Cox’s work is rare, Haug says, and is an important addition to learning about history.

“So often history is about war and who the king was and it often leaves out women’s voices,” Haug says. “This is a social history, a view of history that is meaningful to people and puts music into context.”

Cox took a year-and-a-half to write the play, in the middle of teaching, directing other plays and producing a one-woman show.

In 1996, “Clara Schumann: Liebe and Leben,” made its debut on the ISU campus. Since then, a total of three different versions have been created to fit certain venues and time slots, Cox says. The production has toured all over the United States including Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Florida, Arizona and many different parts of Iowa.

“Even if you don’t know a lot of classical music, you’ll enjoy it,” Haug says. “It’s just little snippets of music here and there and it’s not hard listening. The music is interspersed in a drama about a great artist, with great classical music, set in historical context.”

The play is underscored by musical compositions written by Clara and her husband, Robert. Whenever dialogue is layered on top of music, Robert composed the piece. Whenever a musical selection is featured, Clara composed the piece.

Cox says like her, Clara enjoyed the creation of art above the performance aspect of it.

“I am not a genius, so I don’t relate to Clara on that level,” Cox says. “I don’t have a great gift as a pianist or a composer, but I do have an impulse that wants to create, to make the audience feel something, just like Clara did.”