Notes for: August 3, 2010
Clara Schumann is known today mainly as the wife of composer Robert Schumann and the intimate friend of Johannes Brahms. In her 61-year concert career, however, she was considered one of the most distinguished pianists of her day, and was highly influential in programming new works by contemporary Romantic composers. She was also a prolific composer in her early years, but at a time when women composers were frowned on by the music world.
At the age of eight, young Clara performed at a musical evening in a Leipzig home, and there she met another gifted young pianist, Robert Schumann, nine years older. Schumann admired Clara’s playing so much that he asked permission from his mother to discontinue his studies of the law and take music lessons from Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, a prominent music teacher. In the custom of the day, he took a room in his teacher’s household, and by the time she was 17 they were in love.
On Clara’s 18th birthday, Schumann asked her father for Clara’s hand in marriage, but he refused and took his daughter on a long concert tour to break up the relationship. When the couple persisted, Wieck threatened to cut Clara off financially, and the lovers took him to court to win Clara’s independence. They married after her 21st birthday.
Clara continued to perform publicly even as she raised seven children, extending her own reputation beyond Germany. In these concert tours, she was instrumental in changing the programs of concert pianists, playing from memory and programming works of musical depth as well as bravura pieces designed to show off keyboard technique. She also appeared in chamber music recitals, and vigorously promoted the music of younger composers, particularly Robert and their young friend Brahms.
Clara had less success, however, in winning the skeptical public to her music. She had begun composing as a youngster, writing her first piano concerto at 14 and performing it at 16 in Leipzig with Mendelssohn conducting. As she grew older, however, she lost confidence in herself as a composer, writing “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.” As things turned out, she composed nothing after the age of 34 other than some cadenzas for Beethoven and Mozart piano concertos.
Before that turning point, she had a final burst of creative activity in 1853, producing, between concerts, some variations on a theme by Robert, three romances for the piano, six lieder, and these three romances for the violin and piano. She published these works in the next two years, and then with Robert’s death in 1856, gave up composing to devote herself to the promotion of his music and that of their friend Brahms.
Clara dedicated the three romances for violin and piano to another friend, the great violinist Joseph Joachim, and she performed them with him often on her concert tours. After her death in 1896, the romances were largely forgotten along with the rest of her music. In recent years, however, the growing interest in women composers has revived performances of her music, and the three romances are again heard in the concert hall and on recordings.
“Romance” was a title favored by both Robert and Clara for an instrumental piece that is lyrical in character and tender or even sentimental in mood. In this case, Clara demonstrated a gift for melody and produced true chamber music with the two instruments on an equal footing rather than with the piano in an accompanying role. We can only wonder what she might have achieved if she had lived a century later.