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About
Clara Schumann (13 September 1819 – 20 May 1896) was a German musician and composer, considered one of the most distinguished composers and pianists of the Romantic era. She exerted her influence over a 61-year concert career, changing the format and repertoire of the piano recital, while also having composed a body of work including various piano concertos, chamber works, and choral pieces. She was married to composer Robert Schumann, and together they encouraged and maintained a close relationship with Johannes Brahms. She was the first to perform publicly any work by Brahms, notably the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. She was also an influential piano educator at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt.
Early life
Clara Josephine Wieck was born in Leipzig on 13 September 1819 to Friedrich Wieck and Marianne Wieck (née Tromlitz). Marianne Tromlitz was a famous singer in Leipzig at the time and was singing solos on a weekly basis at the well-known Gewandhaus in Leipzig. The differences between her parents were irreconcilable, in large part due to her father's unyielding nature. After an affair between Clara's mother and Adolph Bargiel, her father's friend, the Wiecks divorced in 1824 and Marianne married Bargiel. Five-year-old Clara remained with her father while Marianne and Bargiel eventually moved to Berlin, limiting contact between Clara and her mother to written letters and an occasional visit.
Child prodigy
From an early age, Clara's career and life were planned down to the smallest detail by her father. She received daily one-hour lessons (in piano, violin, singing, theory, harmony, composition, and counterpoint) and had to practice for two hours, using the teaching methods her father had developed, largely at the expense of her broader general education, although she still studied religion and languages under her father's control. In 1828, at the age of nine, Clara Wieck performed at the Leipzig home of Dr. Ernst Carus, director of the mental hospital at Colditz Castle. There, she met another gifted young pianist who had been invited to the musical evening, Robert Schumann, who was nine years older. Schumann admired Clara's playing so much that he asked permission from his mother to stop studying law, which had never interested him much, and take music lessons with Clara's father. While taking lessons, he rented a room in the Wieck household, staying about a year. He would sometimes dress up as a ghost and scare Clara, and this created a bond.
In 1830, at the age of eleven, Clara left on a concert tour to Paris via other European cities, accompanied by her father. She gave her first solo concert at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. In Weimar, she performed a bravura piece by Henri Herz for Goethe, who presented her with a medal with his portrait and a written note saying: "For the gifted artist Clara Wieck". During that tour, Niccolò Paganini was in Paris, and he offered to appear with her. However, her Paris recital was poorly attended, as many people had fled the city due to an outbreak of cholera.
An anonymous music critic, describing Clara Wieck's 1837–1838 Vienna recitals, said: "The appearance of this artist can be regarded as epoch-making... In her creative hands, the most ordinary passage, the most routine motive acquires a significant meaning, a colour, which only those with the most consummate artistry can give."
From December 1837 to April 1838, Clara Wieck performed a series of recitals in Vienna when she was 18. Franz Grillparzer, Austria's leading dramatic poet, wrote a poem entitled "Clara Wieck and Beethoven" after hearing Wieck perform the Appassionata sonata during one of these recitals. Wieck performed to sell-out crowds and laudatory critical reviews; Benedict Randhartinger, a friend of Franz Schubert, gave Wieck an autographed copy of Schubert's Erlkönig, inscribing it "To the celebrated artist, Clara Wieck." Frédéric Chopin described her playing to Franz Liszt, who came to hear one of Wieck's concerts and subsequently "praised her extravagantly in a letter that was published in the Parisian Revue et Gazette Musicale and later, in translation, in the Leipzig journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik." On 15 March, Wieck was named a Königliche und Kaiserliche Kammervirtuosin ("Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuoso"), Austria's highest musical honor.
Marriage to Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann was a little more than nine years older than Clara. He moved into the Wieck household as a piano student of Friedrich's by the end of 1830 when she was only 11 and he was 20. In 1837 when she was 18, he proposed to her and she accepted. Then Robert asked Friedrich for Clara's hand in marriage. Wieck was strongly opposed to the marriage, as he did not much approve of Robert, and refused his permission. Robert and Clara had to go to court and sue Friedrich. The judge's decision was to allow the marriage, which notably took place on September 12, 1840, the day before Clara's 21st birthday, when she would have attained what would come to be known as majority status. They maintained a joint musical diary. See "Family Life" section for specific detail.
Meeting Joseph Joachim
She and Robert first met violinist Joseph Joachim in November 1844, when he was just 14 years old. A year later she wrote in her diary that in a concert on November 11, 1845 "little Joachim was very much liked. He played a new violin concerto of Mendelssohn's, which is said to be wonderful". In May 1853 they heard Joachim play the solo part in Beethoven's violin concerto. Clara wrote that he played "with a finish, a depth of poetic feeling, his whole soul in every note, so ideally, that I have never heard violin-playing like it, and I can truly say that I have never received so indelible an impression from any virtuoso." From that time there was a friendship between Clara and Joachim, which "for more than forty years never failed Clara in things great or small, never wavered in its loyalty."
Over her career, Clara gave "over 238" concerts with Joachim in Germany and Britain, "more than with any other artist."The two were particularly noted for their playing of Beethoven's sonatas for violin and piano."
Brahms coming on the scene
Also in the spring of 1853, the then unknown 20-year-old Brahms met Joachim (only a few years older, but by then an acknowledged virtuoso) in Hanover, made a very favorable impression on him, and got from him a letter of introduction to Robert Schumann. Brahms went and presented himself at the Schumanns' home in Düsseldorf. He played some of his own piano solo compositions. Both Schumanns were deeply impressed. Robert published an article highly lauding Brahms. Clara wrote in the diary that Brahms "seemed as if sent straight from God." During Robert's last years of life confined to an asylum (see below), Brahms was a strong presence in Clara's life, and a series of letters were shared between the two, known to contain Brahms' strong feelings for Clara. Their relationship has been interpreted as bordering between friendship and love.
Robert's confinement and death
Robert attempted suicide in February 1854 and then was committed to an asylum for the last two years of his life. In March 1854, Brahms, Joachim, Albert Dietrich, and Julius Otto Grimm spent time with Clara, playing music for or with her to divert her mind from the tragedy. Robert died July 29, 1856.
Tours, often to Britain, often with Joachim
Clara first went to England in April 1856, while Robert was still living (but unable to travel). She was invited to play in a London Philharmonic Society] concert by conductor William Sterndale Bennett, a good friend of Robert's. Clara was displeased with the little time spent on rehearsals: "They call it a rehearsal here, if a piece is played through once." She wrote that musical "artists" in England "allow themselves to be treated as inferiors." She was happy, though, to hear the cellist Alfredo Piatti play with "a tone, a bravura, a certainty, such as I never heard before." In May 1856 she played Robert's Piano Concerto in A minor with the New Philharmonic Society conducted by a Dr. Wylde, who Clara said had "led a dreadful rehearsal" and "could not grasp the rhythm of the last movement." Still, she returned to London the following year and performed in Britain in over 15 years of her career.
In October–November 1857 Clara and Joachim took a recital tour together to Dresden and Leipzig. St. James's Hall, London, which opened in 1858, hosted a series of "Popular Concerts" of chamber music, of which programs from 1867 through 1904 are preserved. Joachim visited London annually beginning in 1866. Clara also spent a few months of many years in London and participated in Popular Concerts with Joachim and Piatti. Most often on the same concert programmes would be second violinist Joseph Ries and violist J. B. Zerbini. George Bernard Shaw, the leading playwright and also a music critic, wrote that the Popular Concerts helped greatly to spread and enlighten musical taste in England. Playing chamber music bypassed the issues Clara had with English orchestra conductors.
In January 1867 Clara and Joachim took a tour to Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland, along with Piatti, Ries, and Zerbini, two English sisters named Pyne, one a singer, and a Mr. Saunders who managed all the arrangements. Clara was accompanied by her oldest daughter Marie, who wrote from Manchester to her friend Rosalie Leser that in Edinburgh Clara "was received with tempestuous applause and had to give an encore, so had Joachim. Piatti, too, is always tremendously liked." Marie also wrote that "For the longer journeys we had a saloon, comfortably furnished with arm-chairs and sofas... the journey ... was very comfortable." On this occasion, the musicians were not "treated as inferiors"!