Music

Clara Schumann

1819–1896 · German

Romantic — virtuoso pianist, composer and editor

Clara Schumann, born Clara Wieck, was one of the great pianists of the 19th century, with a concert career of sixty-one years, and a composer whose small output includes a piano concerto written at fourteen and a piano trio that outlasted her own opinion of it. After Robert Schumann's death she became the guardian of his music, editing the complete edition, and the lifelong friend and champion of Brahms.

How to spot them

▸A pianist who played from memory when that was still thought arrogant, and who built recital programmes around whole works rather than showpieces and improvisations
▸Her own compositions are few and mostly early: songs, character pieces, one concerto, one trio; she stopped composing almost entirely after her husband's death
▸Questions circle three names — her father and teacher Friedrich Wieck, her husband Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms, whom she met when he was twenty
▸The German 100-Deutschmark note of 1989 carried her portrait

Key works — listen

A three-movement concerto in A minor begun at thirteen, whose finale her future husband helped orchestrate (1835)

Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7 — she premiered it at the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Mendelssohn, aged sixteen

Her only chamber work with strings, in G minor, which she called 'effeminate and sentimental' after finishing it (1846)

Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17 — now her most performed composition

Three songs of hers were slipped anonymously into a joint 1841 collection with her husband's nine, so readers could not tell whose was whose (1841)

Zwölf Gedichte aus Rückerts Liebesfrühling, published as his Op. 37 and her Op. 12

A four-movement piano sonata in G minor written for her husband and left unpublished until 1991 (1841–42)

Piano Sonata in G minor — one of very few large-scale solo works she completed

Variations for piano on a theme from her husband's Bunte Blätter, given to him for his forty-third birthday (1853)

Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 20 — Brahms wrote his own variations on the same theme that year

Three romances for violin and piano of 1853, written for and toured with Joseph Joachim (1853)

Drei Romanzen für Violine und Klavier, Op. 22

The complete critical edition of her husband's works, which she edited for Breitkopf & Härtel over nearly twenty years (1879–1893)

Robert Schumanns Werke — plus an instructive edition of his piano music

Quick-fire facts

•She was born Clara Josephine Wieck in Leipzig on 13 September 1819 and trained by her father Friedrich Wieck
•She made her Gewandhaus debut at nine and her first full recital at eleven
•She and Robert Schumann had to sue her father for permission to marry, and wed on 12 September 1840, the day before her twenty-first birthday
•They had eight children, of whom four outlived her
•Her concert career spanned sixty-one years; she is credited with helping establish the modern recital, playing from memory and championing Bach, Beethoven and Schumann
•She met Brahms in 1853, when he was twenty and she thirty-four; their friendship lasted until her death, and he died eleven months after her
•Robert attempted suicide in the Rhine in February 1854 and died in the Endenich asylum in 1856; she was allowed to see him only in his final days
•She taught at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt from 1878 to 1892
•She gave up composing almost entirely in her thirties, writing that 'a woman must not desire to compose'
•Her portrait appeared on the German 100-Deutschmark banknote issued in 1989

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources

Nancy B. Reich — Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman
Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press) — Schumann [née Wieck], Clara Josephine
Encyclopaedia Britannica — Clara Schumann