Clara Schumann

Early years

The Wieck family

Clara Schumann (née Wieck) was born in 1819 in Leipzig, the daughter of two highly musical parents. Her father, Friedrich, sold sheet music and pianos before making his name as a renowned pedagogue. Her mother, Mariane, the first student in Friedrich’s school, was a soprano and pianist. Known as a strict and exacting teacher, Friedrich extended this personality trait to his homelife, leading to a bitter separation. When Mariane left, Friedrich was granted full custody of their children, including Clara.

Early education and performances

Mariane gave Clara her first piano lessons at the age of four. After the separation and just a few days after Clara’s fifth birthday, Friedrich began his own demanding regimen.  With them she learned not only notation-based training but also extensive ear training. Her father also taught her the business and logistical aspects of a career as a musician. With other teachers in Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin, she studied, among other things, music theory, harmony, orchestration, violin, and composition.

Clara gave her first public performance at the age of nine at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. That same year, she met a new student of her father’s, an eager young man named Robert Schumann, who would eventually become her husband. A few years later, she premiered one of his early sets of piano miniatures, Papillons. At the age of eleven she gave her first solo concert, again at the Gewandhaus. By this time she had already begun composing small pieces.

A touring virtuoso

Clara and her father embarked upon her first international tour, a two-month sojourn to Paris, in 1832. The tour was largely a failure: Friedrich lost a great deal of money and a planned recital with famed violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini had to be canceled.. One development, however, proved significant. Friedrich, noticing that audiences expected pianists to have their programs memorized, demanded his daughter do the same. She continued this practice throughout her career; thanks in large part to her example, memorized concert programs have become standard practice.

Early works, early romance

Wieck continued to compose while building her performance career. Some of these compositions, such as piano miniatures and bravura showpieces, were included in her solo recitals, though she also composed songs and larger works. In 1835 she premiered her Piano Concerto in A Minor under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Both child prodigies, the pair became close friends and remained colleagues and chamber music partners until Mendelssohn’s early death. 

As she reached young adulthood, her relationship with Robert Schumann came into full bloom. The pair dedicated works to one another. Robert wrote many of his piano works with her in mind and often incorporated allusions to her in the music itself. She began to program his works in earnest, but while critics praised her playing, they were often unimpressed and confused by Robert’s compositions. “Listen Robert,” she once implored him, “couldn’t you just once compose something brilliant, easily understandable, and without inscriptions…? … Obviously a genius will find this degrading, but politics demand it every now and again.”

The mature artist: a woman’s love and life

Increasing fame

Clara continued to perform in Germany and abroad, including a triumphant visit to Vienna in 1838. Yet as she grew more independent as an artist and a person, her father became increasingly controlling. Her growing relationship with Robert made things worse. Still, despite his stern and at times even cruel manner, Clara looked back fondly on her father’s teaching. “My father had to put up with being called a tyrant," she wrote. “However, I still thank him for it every day; I have him to thank for the freshness that has remained with me in my old age….”

Marriage and mature works

When Robert asked for Clara’s hand in marriage, Friedrich flatly refused. He saw Robert as an unsuccessful composer who would derail his daughter’s career (a not entirely inaccurate assessment). Friedrich even threatened to shoot the man who would become his son-in-law, though he made amends after the births of his first grandchildren. Clara successfully took her father to court, and she and Robert were wed in September 1840, the day before her twenty-first birthday. Robert completed one of his most renowned song cycles, Frauen-Liebe und Leben (A Woman’s Love and Life) during these tumultuous weeks.

Clara’s diaries reveal doubts at how to balance societal expectations of a wife and mother with a career and creative life. After marriage, she composed more songs and fewer character pieces, though she did complete her Piano Sonata in G Minor in early 1842. This work went unperformed in her lifetime and remained unpublished for nearly 150 years.

She bore eight children, seven of whom survived into adulthood, between 1841 and 1854. She also continued to perform, serving as the primary breadwinner for the household; Robert’s compositions, teaching position, and editorial role at the New Journal for Music weren’t enough to pay the bills. During their marriage, Clara focused primarily on teaching and concertizing. Although Robert encouraged his wife’s composition, including contacting publishers on her behalf, his own work took precedent.

Meeting Brahms

In 1853 the Schumanns made the acquaintance of the violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim. He introduced them to an unknown young composer he had recently befriended, Johannes Brahms. Brahms called upon the Schumanns at their home, staying with them for weeks and performing his early compositions for them. Robert praised this “young eagle” in his journal, exalting him as one “called to give expression to his times in ideal fashion: a musician who would reveal his mastery not in gradual stages but like Minerva would spring fully armed from Kronos’s head.” Their meeting became one of the most significant in the Romantic era. Clara helped advance Brahms’s career by performing his music. In later years she would continue to offer musical and personal guidance, and the pair remained lifelong friends and confidants. The relationship between Brahms and the Schumanns has been described as a “musical love triangle.” Though both Clara’s and Brahms’s diaries reveal deep, possibly even romantic feelings, their relationship seems to have remained platonic.

Robert’s decline and death

Robert Schumann battled mental illness for much of his adult life. In addition to extreme mood swings—likely caused by undiagnosed bipolar disorder—he suffered from a litany of phobias as well as auditory hallucinations (for a time, the concert tuning note A rang constantly in his head). An extended tour of Russia with Clara left him physically and emotionally spent, after which he resolved never to leave Germany. His shyness and mental instability kept him from securing long-term employment. 

Robert’s struggles reached a fever pitch in early 1854 when he attempted suicide by throwing himself into the River Rhine. Following his rescue, he was institutionalized for the remainder of his life. Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms became pillars of support for Clara during these trying years, visiting Robert in the asylum when Clara was forbidden. Two days before Robert’s death, she was at last permitted to see him.

Life after love

Touring

Following Robert’s death in 1856, Clara still needed to provide for her family. For the next thirty-five years she continued to concertize prolifically, giving performances across Europe. The violinist Joseph Joachim became her greatest recital partner. They gave hundreds of performances together; their interpretations of Ludwig van Beethoven’s violin sonatas were particularly acclaimed. Though she continued to program her own works, she rarely composed new ones. After Robert’s death she completed only one new piece, an unpublished wedding march for a friend; her other compositional endeavors were arrangements of works by other composers, especially Robert.

Over the course of her performance career, Schumann played a crucial role in establishing modern concert practice. She came of age when soloists were largely expected to play their own flashy showpieces and works by living composers. Clara, by contrast, programmed more serious, intellectual pieces, including works by J. S. Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, and Beethoven.

Memorializing Robert

In addition to arranging her husband’s works, Clara frequently programmed his music on her concerts. She also transcribed his unpublished pieces and prepared performance editions of his work. To her many piano students she introduced and taught Robert’s miniatures, chamber works, and Piano Concerto in A Minor. Without Clara Schumann, the music of her husband might never have reached the level of recognition it enjoys today.

Teaching

Like her father, Schumann was a gifted teacher. She taught hundreds of students over her lifetime, both privately and at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. She was appointed principal teacher of piano at the Conservatory in 1878. A tremendous number of her students went on to have significant careers as both performers and teachers. One of these, Carl Friedberg, taught at the Juilliard School; there his students included such luminaries as the African American musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

Schumann retired from the stage in 1891, ending an illustrious sixty-year concert career. Though she soon retired from the conservatory as well, she continued to teach for the rest of her life. She died of a stroke at the age of seventy-six and was buried next to Robert in Bonn.

Schumann’s Works

Like Maria Anna Mozart and Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Clara Schumann has been overlooked by posterity in favor of a male relative. During her life, she pushed against societal expectations and the demands of taking care of her children and ailing husband. “I once believed that I possessed creative talent,” she wrote at the age of twenty, “but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose—there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?” Though Robert’s compositions came first in their relationship, he too acknowledged that Clara’s inability to compose was a tragic loss: “But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out.”

Still, Clara Schumann completed numerous compositions in the first half of her life. In recent decades scholars, performers, and listeners have turned increasing attention to these previously ignored works.

Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 7

Schumann completed her sole piano concerto at the age of fifteen. This virtuosic, three-movement work reflects the conventions of the Romantic piano concerto in the wake of Beethoven. Though Robert revised the orchestration, she later undid his edits and premiered the complete concerto on her own terms. Clara premiered the concerto at the Leipzig Gewandhaus with Felix Mendelssohn conducting.

Three Romances for Piano, Op. 21

Schumann composed and revised the Three Romances for Piano during Robert’s tumultuous final years. She dedicated the trio to Johannes Brahms, who moved in with the Schumanns to support them while Robert was institutionalized. These pieces reflect Clara’s maturation as a composer as well as her abiding love for her husband and his music; the final movement quotes a miniature from his Carnaval.

Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22

Schumann completed the Three Romances for Violin and Piano in 1853, the year she met violinist Joseph Joachim. She dedicated the set to him, and after her husband’s death the pair took the pieces on tour. These highly-regarded pieces were even played before royalty, with King George V of Hanover praising them as a “marvelous, heavenly pleasure.”

Lieder from Op. 12

German composers of the Romantic era had a deep well of poetry from which to draw. Like Robert, Clara composed numerous songs. The couple even wrote a work together, a set of a dozen songs from Liebesfrühling by the poet Friedrich Rückert.

Schumann’s influence on classical music

Clara Schumann’s musical legacy endures from the conservatory to the concert hall. Legions of students around the world have been taught by her students and their students, continuing hers and her father’s pedagogical excellence. Thanks in large part to Schumann, it has become the default for solo performers to memorize their pieces. Her daring programming choices, which prioritized the profoundest works of posterity over flash-in-the-pan virtuosity, continue to inform modern concert repertoire. By championing the music of her husband and of Johannes Brahms, she ensured that they would rise to the upper echelons of Romantic composers. Though her own compositions have long been ignored, the future looks ripe for a reevaluation of Schumann’s small but significant oeuvre.

Clara Schumann: timeline of key dates

• 1819: Clara Josephine Schumann (née Wieck) is born in Leipzig.
• 1821: Napoleon Bonaparte dies on the island of Saint Helena.
• 1824: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor premieres in Vienna.
• 1826: Carl Maria von Weber, best known for his operas including Der Freischütz, dies.
• 1827: Beethoven dies. Nearly 10,000 mourners attend his funeral.
• 1828: Schumann gives her first public performance at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Later that year she meets her future husband Robert, who abandons his career in law to study with her father.
• 1830: Schumann gives her first solo concert at the Leipzig Gewandhaus.
• 1831: Schumann’s Four Polonaises, Op. 1, is published.
• 1832: Schumann and her father embark upon a series of concerts in Paris, her first international tour.
• 1833: Johannes Brahms is born.
• 1835: Schumann premieres her Piano Concerto in A minor; the performance is conducted by Felix Mendelssohn. 
• 1836: Robert asks Friedrich Wieck for Clara’s hand in marriage but is rejected.
• 1840: Clara and Robert are wed on 12 September, the day before her twenty-first birthday. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is born.
• 1843: The Schumanns embark on a concert tour of Russia.
• 1846: Schumann completes her Piano Trio in G Minor.
• 1847: Felix Mendelssohn dies.
• 1848: Revolutions spread across Europe, but these collective Revolutions of 1848 are quashed within two years. When fighting erupts in Dresden in 1849, the Schumanns flee to avoid Robert being drafted. Karl Marx publishes the first edition of The Communist Manifesto.
• 1853: Violinist Joseph Joachim introduces Brahms to the Schumanns. Brahms plays some of his early piano sonatas for them.
• 1854: Robert throws himself into the River Rhine in a failed suicide attempt. Afterward he commits himself to a sanatorium.
• 1855: Schumann publishes the Three Romances for Violin and Piano and the Three Romances for Piano.
• 1856: Schumann gives her first concert tour of England. Later that year, Robert dies in a private sanatorium near Bonn at the age of 46.
• 1865: Richard Wagner’s groundbreaking opera Tristan und Isolde premieres.
• 1873: Clara’s father Friedrich dies.
• 1878: Schumann is appointed principal teacher of piano at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt.
• 1883: Richard Wagner dies.
• 1886: Franz Liszt dies.
• 1891: Schumann gives her last public concert. 
• 1892: Schumann retires from her post at the Hoch Conservatory.
• 1896: Clara Schumann dies of a stroke at the age of 76. She is buried next to Robert in Bonn.