Clara Schumann

This absorbing and award-winning biography tells the story of the tragedies and triumphs of Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–1896), a musician of remarkable achievements. At once artist, composer, editor, teacher, wife, and mother of eight children, she was an important force in the musical world of her time. To show how Schumann surmounted the obstacles facing female artists in the nineteenth century, Nancy B. Reich has drawn on previously unexplored primary sources: unpublished diaries, letters, and family papers, as well as concert programs. Going beyond the familiar legends of the Schumann literature, she applies the tools of musicological scholarship and the insights of psychology to provide a new, full-scale portrait.The book is divided into two parts. In Part One, Reich follows Clara Schumann's life from her early years as a child prodigy through her marriage to Robert Schumann and into the forty years after his death, when she established and maintained an extraordinary European career while supporting and supervising a household and seven children. Part Two covers four major themes in Schumann's life: her relationship with Johannes Brahms and other friends and contemporaries; her creative work; her life on the concert stage; and her success as a teacher.Throughout, excerpts from diaries and letters in Reich's own translations clear up misconceptions about her life and achievements and her partnership with Robert Schumann. Highlighting aspects of Clara Schumann's personality and character that have been neglected by earlier biographers, this candid and eminently readable account adds appreciably to our understanding of a fascinating artist and woman.For this revised edition, Reich has added several photographs and updated the text to include recent discoveries. She has also prepared a Catalogue of Works that includes all of Clara Schumann's known published and unpublished compositions and works she edited, as well as descriptions of the autographs, the first editions, the modern editions, and recent literature on each piece. The Catalogue also notes Schumann's performances of her own music and provides pertinent quotations from letters, diaries, and contemporary reviews.

Develops a holistic and gender-aware understanding of Clara Schumann as pianist, composer and teacher in nineteenth-century Germany.

Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband's death. Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music. Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband's music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann's concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband's music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager. By highlighting Schumann's navigation of her musical culture's gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.

Describes the life of the German pianist and composer who made her professional debut at age nine and who devoted her life to music and to her family.

Tells the story of the German pianist and composer who made her professional debut at age nine and who devoted her life to music and to her husband.

The national bestselling "Clara" finds prize-winning novelist Galloway exploring the fertile conflux of love and music in the partnership of Robert and Clara Schumann.

CLARA SCHUMANN AN ARTIST'S LIFE BASED ON MATERIAL FOUND IN DIARIES AND LETTERS by BY BERTHOLD LITZMANN. Originally published in 1913. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE: The task of translation can never be a light one, since every language has not only its own peculiar shades of meaning, but also its own peculiar charm a fragrance which evaporates as soon as the national frontier is crossed. This is especially true of the German of Robert Schumann. His delicate, poetic imagination found perfect expression in the language of his hero, Jean Paul, and the endeavour to render his love letters, and still more his poems, in another tongue is foredoomed to failure; the original words alone fitly express the poet's thought In the following pages an attempt has been made to give as far as possible the spirit of the German, but only a poet could hope for success in such an enterprise, and I am conscious of many shortcomings. It is with great pleasure and the warmest gratitude that I acknowledge my indebtedness to Miss BL C. Deneke and to Miss Eugenie Schumann, both of whom read through the manuscript and gave me much valuable advice and criticism. Miss Schumann went through the translation word by word, and to her never wearying patience and consideration is due whatever in it there may be of good. It was unfortunately found necessary to turn the original three volumes into two in the English edition, and by so doing the balance of the whole had necessarily to be re adjusted. Prof. Litzmann in his prefaces explains the principle which underlies the whole work. I have endeavoured to interfere as little as possible with his method, though some Translator's Preface. slight changes were necessary in order to avoid any abrupt break between the volumes, vol. ii of the German edition being divided between the two volumes of the English edition. It is with sincere apologies and deep regret that I have ventured to make what omissions were called for by reason of space, and I have to tender my thanks to Prof. Litzmann for his courtesy in permitting such changes. Cirencester 1912. Grace E. Hadow, PREFACE: The reproach is commonly brought against musical bio graphies that they are monotonous: and indeed the life of the musician has not often afforded much scope for incident or variety. If he be a composer he treads the accustomed course of early struggles, hard-earned victories and posthumous fame: if he be a virtuoso his career is one triumphal progress which leaves little to record except the successive trophies that he has planted and the successive laurels that he has won. The concentration required by his art removes him in some degree from the stir and stress of public events: for the most part he dwells in an ideal city of his own and breathes the more freely when he has shut its gates upon the world. To this it may be added that the biographers of our great musicians have too often tended to merge the historian in the advocate. They are full of a generous enthusiasm for their subject; they are anxious above all things to present it in an attractive light; but they sometimes neglect Cromwell's advice to Sir Peter Lely and spoil their portrait by giving it a classic regularity of feature. No doubt every biographer is something of a partisan; it is no use writing a man's life unless you think well of him: but the worst of all ways to arouse interest in your hero is to represent him on a faultless pala din and to treat as a paynim and a miscreant everyone who ever offered him the least opposition. No man can build the monument of departed greatness if he is using up all the stones to pelt his adversaries. ...

The Schumann Marriage diaries provide a vivid portrait of the unique artistic and personal union between two renowned musicians. For the first four years of their marriage, Robert and Clara Schumann kept a joint diary, recording their entries, at least initially, on alternate weeks. Begun on September 13, 1840, the day after their marriage, the diary opens with guidance from Robert: "This little book . . . has a very intimate meaning; it shall be a diary about everything that touches us mutually in our household and marriage." The diaries reflect the harmony as well as the discord in their marriage. Robert and Clara describe in intimate detail their honeymoon period, the births of their children, their busy social lives, travels throughout Europe, financial problems, separations, and reunions. The book also evokes the artistic milieu of nineteenth-century Germany. The Schumanns came in contact with many musicians, including their close friends Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt, and recorded their insightful reactions to the artists and their music. The marriage diaries cover a fertile period in Robert Schumann's life, during which he wrote the Spring Symphony, the Piano Concerto, most of his chamber music, his first oratorio, "Paradise and the Peri, " and numerous songs. They reflect the frenetic pace at which he worked, as well as his growing bouts of depression, his ambivalent response to Clara's decision to return to the concert stage after a prolonged hiatus, and her anxiety in the face of Robert's changing moods. This edition includes the couple's travel book, written during their stressful concert tour of Russia in 1844, which marked the end of the marriage diaries; RobertSchumann's descriptions of Russian customs; and the poems he wrote in Moscow - all of which provide a fascinating and uniquely detailed glimpse at what it was like to travel in Russia at the time.