Andante Tenemarente
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is a musical term Brahms used late in life, direction for the piano music he composed for his beloved Clara Schumann. It was after her muscles had failed to such an extent that she couldn’t perform the strenuous pieces that had made her reputation. He too was older, in his late sixties, and had used up much of the bravura of the earlier symphonies. Now he wrote with an extended easy line more like intimate conversation: Andante tenemarente, that is, walk with care. [End Page 321]
Toi Derricotte is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and author of five books of poems, including The Undertaker’s Daughter, Tender, and Captivity. She is also co-editor (with Cornelius Eady) of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, and author of a literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, winner of the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction. Derricotte is currently a member of the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.
