Clara Schumann

Their life

One of the most celebrated pianists of the nineteenth century, performing publicly for sixty-one years, and the musician who did more than anyone to establish the modern recital: playing from memory, and programming Bach, Beethoven and Schumann as serious repertoire rather than as a frame for her own showpieces. She sued her father in court to marry Robert Schumann, bore eight children, premiered much of Robert's music and championed Brahms for half a century. After Robert's breakdown and death in an asylum she supported the family by touring for forty more years. She largely stopped composing in her thirties, writing in her diary that a woman must not desire to compose — a judgement about her century that she also, unmistakably, turned on herself.

Known for

• Pioneering the modern piano recital
• Playing from memory in public
• Championing Robert Schumann's music
• Lifelong friendship with Brahms
• Piano Trio in G minor
• Teaching at Hoch Conservatory

The road they walked

Clara Wieck was born in Leipzig in 1819, into a house where music was both a household art and a family trade. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was a piano teacher and instrument dealer. Her mother, Marianne Tromlitz, was a singer and pianist who left the marriage when Clara was five, and the court gave Friedrich custody. He made his daughter into a pianist by design, with daily lessons, walks, and a rigorous training in technique, sight-reading and composition. She played at the Leipzig Gewandhaus as a child and, at twelve, played for Goethe in Weimar. In 1838 Vienna named her Kammervirtuosin, the Austrian court's highest honor for a musician. She was eighteen and Protestant, and the honor was a rare one for a foreigner.

The young man who had come to board in her father's house, the law student turned composer Robert Schumann, was nine years older, and by the late 1830s he and Clara were in love. Wieck fought the match with everything he had, so the couple took him to court. In 1840, after a long and bitter suit, the judges allowed the marriage, and they wed in Leipzig on 12 September, the day before her twenty-first birthday. Over the next fourteen years Clara bore eight children, kept up her concert career, premiered Robert's piano works, and wrote music of her own. Her Piano Trio in G minor of 1846 and her Three Romances for violin and piano of 1853 are the best known of it. In 1853 the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms knocked on their door in Düsseldorf, and a friendship began that lasted the rest of her life.

Early in 1854 Robert tried to drown himself in the Rhine and was taken to a private asylum at Endenich, near Bonn. Clara was kept from him for most of the two years before his death in July 1856, and she saw him only in his last days. Left with seven living children and no income, she took to the road and toured for decades, from Britain and the Netherlands to Russia and across Germany. She stopped composing, and became the century's most trusted interpreter of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Brahms and above all Robert. She played from memory and built programs as arguments for the music. Later she taught at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt and edited Robert's complete works. Her own early remark that a woman must not desire to compose is still quoted, though she kept performing long after she gave up writing.

How their story ended

Clara Schumann suffered a stroke in March 1896 at her home in Frankfurt and died there on 20 May 1896, aged seventy-six. Her last public appearance had been in 1891, and in her final years she was troubled by deafness and rheumatic pain. She had outlived Robert by forty years and four of her children. She was buried beside him in Bonn, and Brahms, who traveled for the funeral, died the following spring.

In their words

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Tables where Clara sits

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