Clara Schumann was born on September 13, 1819. In the first half of her life, she wrote a small amount of music, mostly songs and piano music. During her life, she was better known as a concert pianist, a child prodigy whose career lasted for more than 60 years.
In order to avoid confusion between Clara and her composer husband, Robert Schumann, we’re going to stick with first names for both of the Schumanns throughout this post.
She was born Clara Wieck in Leipzig, Germany, and her parents were both musicians. Friedrich Wieck was a noted piano teacher, and Marianne Wieck was a voice teacher and singer who performed regularly at the finest concert halls in Leipzig. Her parents’ marriage was a difficult one, and they were divorced when Clara was five.
She was raised by her father, who gave her a strict musical education. Clara had hour-long lessons each day, learning piano, violin, voice, harmony, and composition, and was expected to practice for at least two hours a day. Friedrich largely ignored Clara’s broader education, determined to raise a prodigy who would enhance his own reputation as a teacher.
The discipline was effective, and at the age of nine, Clara was performing as part of concerts given in the homes of Friedrich’s friends. In attendance at one of Clara’s earliest home concerts was 18-year-old Robert Schumann, who was so impressed by her talent that he dropped his law studies in order to study piano with Clara’s father. For about a year, he lived with the Wieck family, renting a room in their home.
In 1830, Friedrich took the 11-year-old Clara on her first concert tour of Europe. Critics were impressed, as were her fellow musicians. Her recital in Paris, which had been planned as the climax of the tour, was poorly attended because many people had fled the city during a cholera outbreak.
Clara had already begun composing by the time of this tour, and included some of her own pieces in her concert repertoire, as was expected of pianists in this era. The rest of her programs—again, typical for the era—were generally made up of flashy showpieces and “greatest hits”-style medleys of tunes from popular operas. In 1836, she gave the first performance of her own piano concerto. In 1837-38, she gave a four-month series of recitals in Vienna, winning many new fans, composers Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt among them.
In 1837, 27-year-old Robert Schumann proposed to 18-year-old Clara. Her father disapproved of the engagement, and the couple went to court for permission to marry over Friedrich’s objections. They were granted permission by the judge, and they pointedly married on the day before Clara’s 21st birthday, at which point Friedrich’s permission would no longer have been necessary.
The Schumanns had, by all accounts, a happy marriage. They kept a joint diary of the personal and musical lives together. Clara was the primary breadwinner, and her income as a concert pianist supported the family.
About 1,300 programs from her 60-year concert career survive, so we have a very good idea of how her career evolved. Her repertoire began to change once she was free of her father’s influence, with fewer audience-dazzling showpieces and a greater focus on serious music by her contemporaries. She frequently played music by Brahms, Chopin, Mendelssohn, and her husband. She played Liszt’s music early in her career, but eventually Clara became very hostile to him and his music; she refused to attend a festival in honor of Beethoven’s centennial because Liszt would be performing.
Throughout the Schumanns’ marriage, Robert suffered from depression and other mental health issues. He attempted suicide in February 1854 and asked to be committed to an asylum, where he lived until his death on July 29, 1856. Clara was not allowed to visit him until a few days before his death. He seemed to recognize her, but at that point was only able to speak a few words.
Clara was left with a large family to support; she had eight children between 1841 and 1854, one of whom died in infancy. In addition, she took on the responsibility of raising some of her grandchildren after the death of her youngest son in 1879. Her concert tours provided ample income, and she was able to hire a housekeeper and a cook to care for the children when she was away for long periods of time.
The responsibilities of managing a large household and maintaining a concert schedule left little time for Clara to compose, and she largely gave it up. Her small body of music was almost all written before her mid-30s. She also felt that her primary responsibility was to support Robert in his creative endeavors; she prioritized making sure that he had the resources he needed to compose over finding time to create her own music. Robert was aware of this, writing to a friend, “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.”
Clara made her first concert tour to England in 1856 and enjoyed the country, though she didn’t think much of the conductors, or of the amount of rehearsal time, she was given with English orchestras. “They call it a rehearsal here if a piece is played through once,” she complained. On later visits to England, she was often accompanied by her frequent concert partner, violinist Joseph Joachim, giving chamber music recitals in order to avoid English orchestras.
She made a concert tour of the United States in 1874, after which her performance schedule slowed somewhat. She was appointed the head piano instructor at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt in 1878, a position she held for fifteen years. She gave her last public performance in Frankfurt in 1891 and died of a stroke on March 26, 1896. Between 1989 and 2002, when the Euro was adopted in Germany, Clara’s picture was on the German 100-mark bill.
Among the highlights of Clara’s compositions are a piano concerto, a set of three romances for piano and violin, a set of piano variations on a theme by Robert Schumann, and a piano trio. Joanne Polk and Korlis Uecker offer a selection of her art songs; Isata Kanneh-Mason plays a program of her short piano works. More of her music is available for streaming at Hoopla and Freegal.
Nancy B. Reich’s biography is Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (e-book | print); Her Piano Sang (e-book | print) is Barbara Allman’s picture-book biography; and Los Angeles Theatre Works performs Lucy Parham’s Beloved Clara (e-audio), a dramatic reading of excerpts from the Schumanns’ joint diary.