Notes for: August 6, 2019
Like her good friend Joseph Joachim, Clara Wieck Schumann’s reputation rested on her brilliance as a performer. Both were also gifted composers, but both eventually gave up composing to focus on performing. In Clara’s case, the reason was practical rather than artistic: During her marriage and especially after Robert’s death, concert tours were the way she was able to support her large family, and they left her little time for anything else. There was another reason, too. Charles Rosen has called Clara “perhaps the chief disaster of the 19th century’s prejudice against female composers.” Just as Fanny Mendelssohn let her music be published under her brother Felix’s name because few would believe a woman capable of such achievement, so did Clara allow songs she wrote to be published under the name of her husband, Robert. She did so in part because in both Clara’s and Robert’s eyes, Robert took priority.
Clara Wieck’s father began training her from an early age for a great musical career as both a pianist and a composer. She made her piano debut at 11 and began her Piano Concerto in A Minor when she was 14. Clara was already well known as a piano virtuoso when she married Robert. Theirs was a passionate relationship, with music at the center of their lives. She was devoted to him and ardently promoted his work. But putting Robert first, caring for their growing family (eventually they would have eight children), and concert tours left little time for composing. “Not one little hour in the whole day is left for me!” she wrote in 1841.
Most of Clara’s 23 published works were songs and short character pieces. A major exception was this Piano Trio in G Minor, a complex and beautifully written chamber work that shows her mastery both of counterpoint and of the long melodic line. The sonata-form first movement is filled with Romantic ardor, from its urgent lyrical themes tinged with longing, to its vigorous contrapuntal development section, to its brief, driving coda. The Scherzo – “in the tempo of a minuet” – is a surprisingly gentle movement, marked by playful dotted rhythms and a more lyrical trio. If Schumann’s influence is apparent in the first movement, Mendelssohn’s can be heard in the melodious Andante, a Romantic Song without Words with an agitated middle section and some lovely writing for all three instruments. Clara puts her study of counterpoint to impressive use in the animated last movement, which opens quietly, develops dramatically in a fugal central section, and ends elegantly on an uplifting major chord. A wonderful work, the Trio demonstrates that while Clara shared Robert’s musical sensibility, she was very much her own immense talent.