CLARA SCHUMANN: COMPOSER AND PERFORMING PIANIST PAR EXCELLENCE

Clara Josephine Schumann (née Wieck)

Clara was born in 1819 in Leipzig, at that time a major centre in Europe of learning and culture in music and publishing.  A child musical genius, she had as role models her father Friedrich, a gifted pianist if disciplinarian, as well as her mother, a pianist and soprano at the famous Leipzig Gewandhaus, housing one of the oldest symphony orchestras in the world today.  Clara’s mother, Mariane, had been a pupil of Friedrich, that exacting and difficult individual whom she divorced about five years after Clara was born, although the child remained with her father.

Fortunately, he nurtured Clara’s talent:  she studied music theory and composition with some of the main teachers in Germany at that time.  Regarding performance, she made her musical debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus at the age of eleven and toured Europe with her father when in her  teens.  Her talent as pianist was much admired and recognized by Paganini, Felix Mendelssohn, Liszt, Louis Spohr and Chopin.

When Clara was young, Robert Schumann came to live with the Wiecks as Friedrich’s pupil and in her teens, Clara and Robert fell in love, though her father was against the marriage and refused his consent.  Eventually, just before Clara turned twenty-one, she and Robert married.  Clara then had eight children over a period of thirteen years, of whom seven survived.  During this time, she continued to teach, perform and compose, following a harsh schedule.

All the while, her composition was given second place to Robert’s creative output:  he insisted the house be quiet while he composed.  Coming as she did from a predominantly male household within a conservative 19^th Century German society, she convinced herself, eventually, that women were unable to create musically and that the task best be left to the men.  It was in this respect that she became restricted and regrettably composed very little.

As for Robert, he firmly believed she should dedicate herself to him, both as spouse and in music, having convinced himself that performance in which Clara excelled was secondary to composition.  And yet, he included in his work phrases of Clara’s as a sort of secret code they shared.  In the main, however, Clara as woman was sidelined and discounted in her composing.

As for Friedrich, it was ironic that Clara’s exacting father fostered in her an ability to deal with the demands of her many children, the rigours of performing for which she was highly accomplished but needed to earn income for the large household.  She also had to address Robert’s depression and insanity:  eventually he was committed to an asylum where he died in 1856.  After this landmark event, Clara stopped composing altogether.

She may have felt, mistakenly, that she needed Robert’s support and input for her creativity.  After his death, she continued to teach and to follow a busy schedule of performing in order to support her large family and to promote Robert’s work.

More than twenty years after his death, she was appointed as piano teacher at Frankfurt Conservatory, a post she held for fourteen years, during which time she contributed to and improved modern piano-playing techniques.  She continued to perform right up to the age of seventy-two and died five years later of a stroke.

In her lifetime, she was recognized internationally for her performances, which she pursued for sixty-one years.  In effect, she was lauded as a superb performer, albeit a woman and acknowledged by Liszt and Anton Rubinstein and by Brahms who befriended her from when he was twenty years old until her death in 1896.

Her creative output, though small, was neglected during her lifetime, namely the Romantic era of the 19^th Century when twenty-three of her works were published.  She only came to the fore in the 20^th Century, partly through the modern-day teenage and virtuoso performer, Laura Downes.  British pianist, Isata Kannah-Mason devoted an entire album to Clara’s music on the Decca label.

As a further mark of acknowledgment and recognition in the 20^th Century, Clara Schumann’s face appeared on the one hundred Deutschemark bill introduced in 1989.