Clara Schumann

Clara Wieck was born in Leipzig on 13 September 1819. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was an ambitious, authoritarian piano teacher and piano dealer who resolved to make her a great virtuoso. Her mother, Marianne Tromlitz, an excellent pianist and singer, left the household when Clara was five. The little girl hardly spoke before the age of four but learned piano, composition, singing, violin and theory with extreme rigour under her father’s direction; he kept a diary of her progress.

On 20 October 1828, aged nine, she made her debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. In 1831 she toured to Paris, where she met Paganini and Chopin, and played for Goethe in Weimar, who gave her a medal. She also composed very early: polonaises, variations and, between thirteen and fifteen, a Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7, which she premiered in 1835 at the Gewandhaus under Felix Mendelssohn. In 1838, aged eighteen, she triumphed in Vienna and received the title of Imperial “Chamber Virtuoso”.

Robert Schumann, nine years her senior, was her father’s pupil and had lodged with them since 1830. A deep friendship grew between them, turning into love around 1835. Friedrich Wieck violently opposed their union: he forbade Clara to see Robert, took her on tour to separate them and slandered the young composer. The lovers wrote to each other in secret for years. In the end they took the matter to court and were able to marry on 12 September 1840, the day before Clara turned twenty-one.

Clara had eight children, seven of whom survived infancy. While raising her family she continued her career as a pianist and introduced audiences to her husband’s works, notably his Piano Concerto, which she premiered in 1845. She continued composing: songs, a Piano Trio in G minor Op. 17 (1846) of great beauty, and in 1853 the Three Romances for violin and piano Op. 22, dedicated to the violinist Joseph Joachim, and the Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann Op. 20. That same year the couple welcomed a twenty-year-old composer: Johannes Brahms.

In 1854 Robert fell seriously ill and entered a clinic at Endenich, where he died in 1856. Clara, at thirty-six, found herself alone with seven children. She decided to live from her concerts. Brahms, now her closest friend, helped and supported her; their friendship lasted more than forty years. She almost stopped composing, probably believing, as she wrote in her diary, that a woman could not be a composer, and devoted herself to performance.

For more than sixty years Clara Schumann was one of the greatest pianists in Europe. She gave some 1,300 concerts in Germany, in England, which she visited nearly twenty times, in Russia and elsewhere. She was one of the first to play from memory in concert and championed a demanding repertoire: Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Brahms, many of whose works she premiered. She also published the complete edition of her husband’s works.

In 1878 she became professor of piano at the new Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, where she trained many pupils from all over the world. She gave her last concert in 1891, after more than sixty years on stage. She died in Frankfurt on 20 May 1896, aged seventy-six, and Brahms followed her to the grave less than a year later. She is buried in Bonn beside Robert. Her portrait appeared on German 100-mark banknotes from 1989 to 2001.