Clara Schumann

Clara Schumann, née Wieck, made her mark on the music world as a child prodigy. By the time she was in her teens, she had become an in-demand piano soloist throughout Europe and had also begun composing, performing some of her own works in concert. Her influential performing career spanned six decades, but her compositional activity largely came to a halt after her marriage to fellow composer Robert Schumann. She became her husband’s musical confidante and muse, acting as a sounding board for his compositions and playing them in concert.

After Robert’s death in 1856 at age 46, Clara devoted her life to preserving his legacy, promoting and performing his music and publishing his works. She also became a respected music educator and a trusted source of musical insight for composers, such as her close friend Johannes Brahms. Unfortunately, Clara Schumann’s own skill as a composer of works mainly in the chamber genre was overlooked for more than 100 years. Only in the last decades of the 20th century did she gain recognition as artists and audiences began to recognize that more than one noted composer named Schumann had emerged from the Romantic era.

EARLY LIFE AND PERFORMANCE CAREER

Clara Wieck was born on September 13, 1819, in Leipzig, then part of the Kingdom of Saxony in the German Confederation. Her musical skills seemed preordained: both her parents were pianists, and her mother was a well-known soprano. Clara began piano lessons at age four—first with her mother, then, as her talent became apparent, with her father, who planned out a serious training regimen for her with an eye toward a performing career. Clara came fully under the influence of her father at age five, when her parents divorced after an affair involving her mother and a family friend. Clara remained with her father, who had legal custody, and studied piano, music theory, and composition under his tutelage.

In 1828, at the age of nine, she made her public performance debut at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig and was soon touring Europe. The acclaim she generated drew the attention of such prominent names as Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, and Niccolò Paganini, with whom she performed. Her music was also being heard: she premiered her Piano Concerto in A minor in 1835 with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, conducted by Felix Mendelssohn.

Marriage to Robert Schumann

The relationship between Clara and Robert Schumann, with its entwined romantic and artistic bonds, is one of the most legendary in music. They first met at one of Clara’s concerts when she was a child of about ten. Robert, who was nine years older, subsequently sought piano instruction from her father and even rented a room in the Wieck household for a time.

A romance blossomed as Clara entered her midteens—one that her father sought to quell, both due to her youth and to avoid disrupting her prosperous performing career. He also questioned Robert’s potential as a husband and provider. Friedrich Wieck refused to grant permission for the couple’s engagement when she turned 18 and still required parental approval. They sued him for the right to wed and triumphed. Clara married Robert Schumann the day before her 21st birthday.

The marriage was a love match as well as a meeting of musical minds. The couple kept a joint diary featuring both personal and musical entries, and Clara was able to counsel Robert on his compositions as well as perform many of them in concert. Her own composing career waned with the demands of touring and raising a family that grew to include eight children (seven of whom reached adulthood). Robert also displayed increasingly erratic behavior, which contemporary scholars believe may have been due to untreated bipolar disorder. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1854 after he attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine in Düsseldorf, and remained institutionalized until his death two years later.

Throughout her marriage, Clara’s compositions were mainly chamber works and solo piano pieces representative of the Romantic genre—music that could be performed in salon settings instead of the concert hall. Public performances were considered acceptable for a woman, but she was never greatly encouraged in her compositional efforts. She wrote in her diary: “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose—there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?”

A last burst of writing in late 1853 came to a halt with Robert’s suicide attempt early in the next year. Her last pieces were two sets of Romances: Op. 21 for piano (1855) and Op. 22 for violin and piano (1853).

Clara Schumann: Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22

Later Life and Activities

Left a widow with seven children at 36, Clara Schumann returned to touring, often with star violinist Joseph Joachim, who had been a friend since the musician was a teenager. Joachim had provided the consequential introduction to a young Johannes Brahms, who had turned up at the Schumann household in 1853 seeking mentorship. Robert was immediately taken by the 20-year-old composer’s talent. Brahms stayed with the family and became a close musical partner and companion to Clara during Robert’s illness and afterward. Just how close a companion has been the subject of much discussion ever since.

Clara also championed other composers of the time, particularly Mendelssohn and Chopin, but the care of Robert’s musical legacy was utmost. She concentrated on publishing his works, editing an authoritative set issued by Breitkopf & Härtel.

She also turned to teaching, becoming the first instructor, and only woman, at Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium in Frankfurt, where she became an influential voice in piano pedagogy. She emphasized subtle interpretation of works that focused on the composers’ intentions instead of the virtuosic fireworks typical of soloists of the time.

Clara Schumann’s own performing career eventually spanned more than six decades. She played her last recital in 1891 and died of a stroke at age 76.

Legacy

Perhaps without ever truly realizing her influence, Clara Schumann played multiple roles over the course of her long life: as a performer who championed contemporary composers and premiered new works, as a teacher who left a lasting mark on the style of piano performance, as a music editor and keeper of her husband’s works, and as a composer in her own right.

Watching and Listening

Clara Schumann’s compositions, while not numerous, represent significant periods of her personal and artistic life. She began writing her first major work, the Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7 (1833–35), at age 13. It displays a youthful exuberance and virtuosity in the opening Allegro maestoso, prefigures her future chamber works in the elegant second movement Romanze (scored for piano and cello only), and offers a sense of confident compositional promise in the Finale.

A decade later, her Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17 (1846), brought that early promise to fruition. Her only piano trio, it displays a maturity both of attitude and technical ability in the depth of textures, colors, and balance between instruments. It also influenced Robert to write his Trio No. 1 in D minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1847). The two works have often been paired on the same program.

In between, Schumann turned largely to solo piano, piano duo, and vocal works.  A foray into lieder came soon after her marriage. Her Sechs Lieder (Six Songs), Op. 13 (1842–43), ruminations on love with texts by Heinrich Heine, Emanuel Giebel, and Friedrich Rückert, were written mostly during her first year of married life and her first pregnancy. She and Robert also enjoyed collaborating on songs, such as the collection Liebesfrühling (Love’s Spring), published in 1841 and setting poems by Rückert.

Romances—small pieces designed to capture a mood—were a favorite instrumental genre. Two sets of Three Romances, one for solo piano, Op. 21, and another for violin and piano, represent her last compositions. Written in the fall of 1853, shortly before Robert was institutionalized, Three Romances for Piano and Violin, Op. 22, is infused with a sense of longing.

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