Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Great Music - Clara Schumann


We’ve all heard of the great composer Schumann.  But some may not know that there were two great composers Schumann.  In addition to the familiar Robert, there was also his wife, Clara; who was an equally talented composer and a better pianist.


Clara Wieck was born in 1819 in Leipzig.  Her father was a talented musician and piano teacher.  He was Clara’s earliest teacher and she remained with her father after her parents divorced.  At age eight, playing in the salon of one of her father’s friends, she met Robert Schumann (who was nine years her senior).  Schumann was taken with Clara’s playing that he abandoned his law studies and started taking music lessons from Clara’s father.

 
Clara was making concert tours by age eleven and playing in all the major cities of Europe.  Chopin praised her playing to Franz Liszt, who was equally impressed after hearing her.  Her series of piano recitals in Vienna during the 1837-1838 season created a sensation, leading one reviewer to write, “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 color, which only those with the most consummate artistry can give.”  Clara was also composing and her works found favor with the public.  Here’s an example of her early work, 3 Romances for Violin and Piano:

 
Clara was also taken with her father’s former pupil, Robert Schumann.  Clara’s father was definitely not in favor of the match, as he felt Schumann had no prospects (Robert had permanently injured his hand using a mechanical device to try and strengthen his fingers and had ended his career as a pianist – his career as a composer was starting slow too.)  Clara thought otherwise and the two conducted a clandestine romance.  They eloped a day shy of Clara’s twenty-first birthday (had they waited one day, they would not have required her father’s permission – this led, incredibly, to a lengthy court battle that was eventually resolved in Robert and Clara’s favor – probably after they began to have children.)


Robert Schumann was influential not only as a composer, but as a promoter of music.  His Neue Zeitschrift für Musik was one of the leading music journals of the day.  The growing Schumann family, however, was supported by Clara’s concert tours; especially after Robert began showing signs of mental illness.  In the 1850s, Robert began trumpeting the virtues of a young composer named Johannes Brahms.  Much speculation has been raised by Brahms’ passionate attraction to Clara, who was fourteen years his senior.  Whatever feelings were between the two were soon swamped by Robert Schumann’s deteriorating mental condition.  A failed suicide attempt resulted in Robert’s commitment to a mental asylum.  He died in 1865.  For two years following Schumann’s death, Brahms virtually abandoned music to assist Clara and the Schumann children.


Clara Schumann resumed concertizing to support her family (she refused all charity).  She became one of the most renowned pianists of her day, acclaimed throughout Europe.  In the music world, she was most definitely in the more traditionalist camp of her late husband and Brahms, rather than the “New Music” of Liszt and Wagner (Clara loathed Wagner, calling Tristan und Isolde, "the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life".  For fourteen years, she was the teacher of piano at the conservatory in Frankfort, and venerated throughout musical Europe.  Edvard Grieg said of her that she was "One of the most soulful and famous pianists of the day." She played her last concert on March 12, 1891 in Frankfort.  She died five years later.  The last piece she ever played in public was by her friend, Brahms.


Clara’s promise as a composer was stunted by the financial necessity of her concert tours, and her fanatical devotion to the music of her husband, Robert; and her friend, Brahms.  That’s a shame, because her work was excellent and showed great promise.  Because she died before the advent of sound recording, there is no aural record of Clara Schumann as a pianist.  We do, however, have an idea what her pianism was like through her works.  To celebrate Clara Schumann the composer, and to get an idea of what kind of pianist she was, I’d like to share with you the first movement of her Piano Concerto in A Minor.  Enjoy!

                                                                    Movement 1


                                                      





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