1819–1896 · Romantic
Clara Schumann (1819–1896) was a German pianist, composer and teacher, among the leading pianists of the Romantic age, with a concert career spanning more than sixty years. The wife of Robert Schumann and a close friend of Johannes Brahms, she gave the first public performances of many of their works. From 1878 she taught at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. The site holds her songs for voice and piano.
Clara Josephine Wieck was born on 13 September 1819 in Leipzig. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, had trained as a theologian and from 1814 lived in Leipzig, where he taught piano and dealt in and repaired instruments. Clara's mother, Marianne (née Tromlitz), was a singer and pianist who performed weekly at the Gewandhaus.
When Clara was five, her parents divorced and she stayed with her father. Her mother soon married Adolph Bargiel and moved to Berlin, and contact with her daughter was reduced to letters and occasional visits. Her father later remarried, to Clementine Fechner; that marriage produced a half-sister, Marie, whom he also taught to play the piano.
From early childhood her father planned Clara's life and career down to the smallest detail. He personally gave her daily lessons: piano and violin, singing, theory and harmony, composition, counterpoint, followed by two hours of practice using his own methods; apart from religion and languages, her general education took second place.
In autumn 1828, at the age of nine, Clara first performed in public at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, playing four-hand variations on a march from Kalkbrenner's Moses together with another pupil. Her official solo debut took place at the same hall when she was eleven.
In the early 1830s a major concert tour through Paris and other European cities followed, with her father accompanying her. In Weimar Clara played a piece by Herz for Goethe, who gave her a medal bearing his portrait and a note praising her talent. In Paris, Niccolò Paganini offered to appear on stage with her, though her own recital drew few listeners, as many people had left the city because of a cholera outbreak. There she also met Chopin, who came to hear her play, and later attended his own Paris debut.
In March 1828, at a musical evening hosted by the man who ran the mental hospital in Colditz Castle, Clara met Robert Schumann, who was nine years older than her. The young pianist's playing so impressed Robert that he asked his mother's permission to give up his unwanted law studies and take lessons from Clara's father; while studying, he lived in the Wieck household for about a year.
In 1837, when Clara was 18, Robert proposed to her and she accepted. But her father was strongly opposed to the marriage: Robert had no money and no profession, and a hand ailment had already ended any hope of a career as a pianist. Wieck forbade the couple to meet or write to each other and sent Clara on long concert tours to keep them apart.
In September 1839 Robert and Clara filed a suit in the Leipzig court, asking for either her father's consent to the marriage or a court ruling in its place. The case dragged on, not least because of Wieck's own actions, but on 1 August 1840 the court granted its consent. Robert and Clara married on 12 September 1840, the day before her twenty-first birthday, in the village church at Schönefeld near Leipzig; for the first years the couple lived in Schumann's house in Leipzig, and in 1843 her father and the couple reconciled, with Wieck himself taking the first step.
On their wedding day Robert gave Clara a diary they were to keep together as a shared record of family life, writing in it in turn. Between 1841 and 1854 the Schumanns had eight children: Marie, Elise, Julie, Emil, Ludwig, Ferdinand, Eugenie and Felix; as was customary in bourgeois families, the care of the infants fell to wet nurses and nannies.
At first Robert was not particularly enthusiastic about his wife's concert career and asked her to practise the piano less, so that it would not disturb his composing; this changed once the family moved to a larger flat in Dresden, where Clara had a separate room to play in. He also wanted her to compose more, though he tried to steer her music toward his own style: when their joint song cycle came out in 1841, reviewers could not tell which songs he had written and which she had.
Clara went on touring, and her concerts brought the family substantial income, especially once Robert's hand trouble kept him from performing himself; she played his works and made his music known across Europe, and at times secretly slipped him money. In 1844 she performed with great success in St Petersburg and Moscow, where the imperial family received her, with Robert accompanying her on the trip; it is known that Robert was not pleased by Clara's success on that tour.
Clara Schumann wrote across several genres: solo pieces for piano, a piano concerto, chamber works, choral pieces, and songs for voice and piano. She worked at composition from childhood into middle age, studying first with the cantor Christian Theodor Weinlig and later with the Kapellmeister Heinrich Dorn, and from the age of eleven she produced between one and eight compositions a year. Her early piano pieces were written for her own recitals: among them the Four Polonaises, Op. 1, which came out when she was 10 or 11, and the Four Characteristic Pieces, Op. 5 (1836). She began writing her Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7, as a teenager; it was first performed in 1835 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, conducted by Mendelssohn. Clara herself said that composing gave her great pleasure and let her forget everyday cares, living for a while in a world of sound.
The year 1853, when she met Johannes Brahms, was an especially productive one for Clara: she wrote 16 pieces that year, among them piano variations on a theme by Robert, eight Romances and seven songs. Her other works include a piano trio in G minor, written in 1846 and published as Op. 17, and a set of three romances for violin and piano, written in 1853 as Op. 22 and dedicated to Joseph Joachim. After Robert's death in 1856 she wrote almost no new music: for the following decades she mostly made piano transcriptions of his works and of Brahms's. Interest in her own compositions revived in the 1970s, when the first recordings of them began to appear. Her song cycle on poems by Heinrich Heine, Emanuel Geibel and Friedrich Rückert, Op. 13, was praised by Robert, who noted its musicality and delicacy.
The site holds her songs for voice and piano — 17 scores at different levels, from intermediate to advanced. A good place to start is “Auf einem grünen Hügel”, marked intermediate; next come pieces at upper intermediate level, such as “Ich stand in dunklen Träumen” and “Liebeszauber”, and more demanding, advanced-level pieces, including “Liebst du um Schönheit” and “Er ist gekommen in Sturm und Regen”.