Who was Clara Schumann? Learn all about her life and contributions to the world of music
Although Clara is often mentioned alongside her husband Robert Schumann or friend Johannes Brahms, her musical skills and her resourceful nature set her apart as a gifted musician in her own right. Clara Schumann’s impressive career in music lasted nearly her whole life and her influence covered the entire European continent. From the time she premiered her first piano concerto when she was only 14 (with Mendelssohn as the conductor) to her last performances in her 70s, she played at least 1300 concerts!
In addition to being a concert pianist and composer, Clara taught piano lessons. She became the first woman on the faculty of Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium in Frankfurt. Clara’s piano playing and teaching influenced many musicians and composers including Brahms. Below, we’ll share details about Clara’s piano teacher and upbringing, along with some of her most famous pieces.
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Who taught Clara Schumann to play piano?
Clara grew up in a musical household. In addition to her father being her piano teacher, her mother, Marianne Wieck, was a singer who taught advanced students piano and voice. Clara’s early childhood was surrounded by music from both parents, but then her mother sought a divorce due to irreconcilable differences when Clara was 6.
Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, taught her to play piano. Mr. Wieck was a famous piano teacher and pedagogue whom students visited from far away to learn to play. In spite of his more progressive methods, which focused on musicality rather than drills, letters from his students also depict Friedrich as an angry teacher.
One such letter about Friedrich’s strict nature as a teacher was written by Robert Schumann. A young man struggling to choose between life as a lawyer or a composer, Robert arrived in the Wieck household seeking piano lessons. Although he may not have thought much of Friederich’s teaching methods, he fell in love with Clara, who was by far the better pianist of the two of them. Clara and Robert ultimately married after a protracted court battle over her father’s objections to his piano prodigy daughter leaving the family.
Clara became a piano prodigy in part because her father was determined to make at least 1 of his children a concert pianist. Friederich’s methods, while controversial, did make excellent pianists, which included several of Clara’s siblings. Along with Clara’s concert success, and Robert’s rise to acclaim as a composer, other members of Wieck’s extended family found success as musicians. Ultimately, Clara’s much younger sister Marie Wieck also toured internationally as a piano performer.
What was unique about Clara Schumann?
Clara was able to find a degree of financial and personal freedom through her musical pursuits, which was doubly unusual for a musician of the time and a woman in the 1800s. Clara played at least 1300 concert programs all over the European continent in order to support her household as the primary breadwinner. The money from her concert performances gave her and her husband Robert the freedom to pursue their composing projects.
The story of Clara’s marriage to Robert Schumann offers another glimpse into her distinctive and resourceful personality. Clara’s father objected to the match on personal and financial grounds. The two lovers resorted to communicating in letters and meeting clandestinely while the battle for Clara’s right to marry who she chose moved to the courts. Friederich was unreasonable – as an example, he sought all of Clara’s concert income from her piano performances for the next 7 years to support her brothers if she married Robert. In the end, Clara and Robert won the right to marry and her father Friederich was forced to repay the young couple.
In addition to her musical talents and persevering nature, Clara was a courageous person. In the May 1849 Uprising in Dresden, she rescued Robert and her children from the revolution. The night before the uprising against King Frederick Augustus began, she snuck Robert and her oldest children outside the walls of the city. The rebels had knocked on her door to recruit him to fight, and she felt his nervous condition would put him at too great a risk in battle. The next day, she walked back into Dresden to collect the rest of her family.
Interestingly, several of the family’s musical acquaintances took part in the revolution. The composer Richard Wagner participated in the uprising, from writing pro-revolutionary pamphlets to making grenades. Clara’s friend, the soprano Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devant, remained at the barricades and was briefly imprisoned.
What was Clara Schumann’s personality like?
We can learn a lot about Clara’s personality from her surviving letters and diaries. Together, she and Robert kept a comprehensive diary of their life together prior to his hospitalization. This correspondence tells a story of a musician with a rich inner life and a sense of sarcasm and humor. The shared diary includes detailed accounts of tours of Europe and Clara’s concerts and the revolution in 1848 alongside more mundane family events.
Clara’s personal tenacity also emerges as a trademark of her career. It was highly unusual for a woman to gain the degree of cultural and financial influence Clara held over music publishers and other composers. She served as an editor on her husband Robert’s new music journals and communicated with Mendelssohn, Wagner, Liszt, and others about music. From her compositions and career as a concert pianist, we can tell that Clara held herself to high standards of performance, too. The virtuosic Clara was one of the first pianists to adopt Liszt’s new practice of memorizing an entire concert program instead of playing from sheet music.
What was Clara Schumann’s most famous piece?
One of Clara’s early pieces that gained fame was the piano concerto she finished at age 15 and premiered at age 16. The nontraditional form of this concerto predates Liszt and Robert Schumann’s similar compositional efforts that came later. In fact, in his second piano concerto, Robert actually played homage to the melodies in Clara’s first piano concerto, using the same sequence of notes backwards! Listen to a performance of Clara’s Piano Concerto in A minor on YouTube:
Composed in 1846, Clara’s Trio in G minor is another piece that inspired Robert. Quotes and melodic elements from Clara’s composition appear in his first piano trio which he composed the next year.
Clara Schumann’s musical compositions
Clara composed 66 pieces of music in her life. In addition to her famed piano concerto and trio, Clara composed a number of pieces to play at her concerts. Often, these showcased her musical virtuosity. Some of these pieces, like Hoffman Academy’s arrangement of the Waltz-Caprice in A-flat Major, Op. 2, No. 7, offer beautiful introductions to Clara’s work for intermediate pianists.
Following Clara’s marriage to Robert, her compositions expanded to include lieder, or German art songs. The two married composers influenced one another greatly, editing one another’s works and sharing ideas. They also occasionally published pieces that they co-wrote. One joint composition, Liebesfrühling (Spring of Love), highlights their unusual close connection. One can hear in the excerpt below two brilliant minds.
Clara found she had less and less time to compose as she aged. She had to continue playing concerts as the primary earner of the family. She had children to manage in addition to managing her own performance career and Robert’s publications. As her husband Robert’s mental health worsened, Clara turned away from composition entirely in 1848.
Clara did not compose again until the family met Brahms in 1853, when she published 7 songs, 16 sketches, and a few more quartets and trios. After Robert’s confinement to a mental institution, Clara only published transcriptions and adaptations of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms music. However she felt about Robert’s passing, the loss of someone she loved so deeply clearly affected her musical creativity. Here is one of her lovely tributes to Robert Schumann, her variations on a musical theme he had created:
Additional facts about Clara Schumann
Clara Schumann and “The War of the Romantics”
Clara did not like Richard Wagner’s music – or many of Liszt’s pieces! She was in the Traditional school, along with her husband Robert and their friend Johannes Brahms. The traditionalists favored absolute music, which was music for music’s sake, and more restrained approaches to structure and harmony. In contrast, Wagner and Liszt and others pioneered new chords and combinations of sounds.
Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms
Clara and Robert Schumann became fast friends with Johannes Brahms. When Robert’s mental illness worsened, Brahms grew closer to Clara and helped her with her children and household duties, even rearranging the music library for the family. Brahms had fallen in love with Robert and Clara’s daughter, Julie, who ultimately chose to marry a different man and died in childbirth. After Robert Schumann died, Johannes Brahms and Clara Schuman remained close friends. You can learn more about Brahms here: https://www.hoffmanacademy.com/blog/who-was-johannes-brahms/
Clara Schumann made an impact on music composers that continues today. Her influence on Brahms, Robert Schumann, and Mendelssohn – not to mention the thousands of concerts she performed, and her accomplishments as a piano prodigy and composer, make her one of the great musicians of the 1800s.