If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know that much is being gleaned from the wonderful book Women in Music: An Anthology of Source Readings from the Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Carol Neuls-Yates. This entry is no different. In reading this book I (^AG) discovered for myself the admirable Clara Schumann (13 September 1819 – 20 May 1896), German composer and touring concert pianist and all-around powerhouse.
I wanted to introduce Clara here because I greatly admire the ability she had in maintaining her identity as an artist and love for music despite the many hardships that faced her in her personal life and for women in the period she lived in.*
Stuff I like about Clara:
- She loved touring.
- She managed her own concert performances and finances.
- She taught music in a university later in life when she had to slow down a bit due to her advancing age.
- She was one of the first pianists to perform from memory, making that the standard for concertizing. Trained by her father to play by ear and to memorize, she gave public performances from memory as early as age thirteen, a fact noted as something exceptional by her reviewers.
- She considered herself an artist first and a mother and wife second .
A bit about Clara, from Wikipedia:
- Clara Schumann (née Clara Josephine Wieck…) was (…) considered one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era. She exerted her influence over a 61-year concert career, changing the format and repertoire of the piano recital and the tastes of the listening public. Her husband was the composer Robert Schumann. She and her husband encouraged Johannes Brahms, and she was the first pianist to give public performances of some of Brahms’ works, notably the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel.
- Clara Schumann was a woman of great character. She was the main breadwinner for her family through giving concerts and teaching, and she did most of the work of organizing her own concert tours. She refused to accept charity when a group of musicians offered to put on a benefit concert for her. In addition to raising her own large family, when one of her children became incapacitated, she took on responsibility for raising her grandchildren. During the May Uprising in Dresden in 1849, she famously walked into the city through the front lines, defying a pack of armed men who confronted her, rescued her children, then walked back out of the city through the dangerous areas again.
- Her family life was punctuated by tragedy. Four of her eight children and her husband predeceased her, and her husband and one of her sons ended their lives in insane asylums. Her first son Emil died in 1847, aged only one. Her husband Robert had a mental collapse, attempted suicide in 1854, and was committed to an insane asylum for the last two years of his life. In 1872 her daughter Julie died, leaving two small children. In 1879, her son Felix, aged 25, died. Her son Ludwig suffered from mental illness, like his father, and, in her words, had to be “buried alive” in an institution. Her son Ferdinand died at the age of 43 and she was required to raise his children. She herself became deaf in later life and she often needed a wheelchair.
Some quotes from the book and Wikiped’:
“Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out.”
—Robert Schumann in the joint diary of Robert and Clara Schumann.
“Composing gives me great pleasure…there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.”
—Clara Schumann.“Where does one…find the strength? I found it in my children and in art- they have sustained me by their love and art too has never played me false.”
—Clara Schumann.* I recognize (as does the book this post was inspired by) that many of the women who succeeded as artists back then were educated and came from wealthy backgrounds and were almost always white folk.
Leave a comment