Clara Schumann (1819 – 1896): Piano Trio in G Minor
“I once believed that I had creative talent, but I have given up on the idea; a woman must not wish to compose – there never was one able to do it. Am I intended to be the one? It would be arrogant to believe that. That was something with which only my father tempted me with in my former days. But I soon gave up believing this. May Robert always create; that must always make me happy.”
CLARA SCHUMANN 1839
There were three distinct phases to Clara Schumann’s long and eventful life, each one shaped by an intense relationship with a talented but complicated man. Over her childhood and youth loomed the overbearing figure of her father, Friedrich Wieck, a strict pedagogue who would work his daughter like a galley slave at the vocation he had chosen for her. He would eventually be replaced by the warm but fragile genius of her husband, Robert Schumann, a composer and critic who would open up so many new worlds to her. Finally came the gruff, fiercely self-reliant Johannes Brahms, a man who would love and support Clara across the last four decades of her life, if always from a slight distance.
Given the many trials and traumas of her life, it’s sometimes a wonder that Clara Schumann could turn out to be so relatively well-adjusted. Not that she was ever a shrinking violet: a tough, steely determination always lurked just beneath her soft-featured good looks. Eminently practical and often unsentimental, she suffered few fools and had little time for small-talk or for flattering egos. “One could hardly describe her as a gracious or sympathetic woman” wrote one (otherwise impressed) Russian count after meeting her at an official reception. And she would prove herself the equal of any adversity, even when her own life might be at risk. During the civil uprisings in Dresden in 1849, a heavily pregnant Clara would escort her sick husband and eldest daughter out of the city to safety, before returning – and in the process defying an armed entourage of rebels in the street – to rescue her three remaining children, whom she had left in the care of friends.
Born in the Saxon city of Leipzig (now in eastern Germany), few creative artists can have had their careers so thoroughly mapped out from the beginning as Clara did. Her father – a former theology student, piano shop owner, entrepreneur, teacher and borderline sociopath – was determined to make her into a virtuosic concert pianist from the moment she first set eyes on the world.
Clara thus became Friedrich’s all-encompassing project for the next twenty years – “the whole education from the earliest youth must be planned accordingly” he later explained, and at times Clara was treated more like a laboratory experiment than human being, as her father painstakingly monitored and controlled every aspect of her childhood and youth. In the process, he would neglect not only his other work but also relations with his other family members – including two younger sons and his wife Mariane (the latter having fled into the arms of a more sympathetic suitor when Clara was five years old).
Rather than send Clara to school, Friedrich enlisted the help of a few private tutors to give her a basic education in what he deemed useful to her future career (reading and writing, learning to speak French and English etc) while missing out a good deal else. On the other hand, he showed a measure of imagination in keeping her school-day relatively short while exhorting her to take plenty of outdoor exercise instead. Each day would include a long walk, a habit Clara happily kept up for the rest of her life.
Friedrich also took care not to turn his daughter into a mere piano-playing machine. From a young age, he encouraged her to improvise, and from her early teens to write her own music, some of which he then managed to publish. But he would show annoyance if she ever allowed her creative endeavours to slacken, as Clara herself reported a few years later. “It is really sinful that I have not composed anything for such a long time”, she wrote to a friend. “Father is bedside himself and I too am often unhappy about it, and in general more dissatisfied with myself than I can say.”
Feeling generally dissatisfied with herself, whether as a performer, creative artist or even as a human being, was one of the less happy legacies of Friedrich’s influence. Having instructed Clara to keep a diary of all her musical activities from the age of eight onwards, he then vetted the journal so rigorously that it largely became a record of his own thoughts and opinions rather than hers.
By way of example, he would make Clara inscribe in her diary that she was habitually “lazy, careless, disorderly, stubborn, disobedient etc” – to the point where Clara would still be writing such things about herself in adult life, even when her (often very hectic) schedule demonstrated she was anything but. Friedrich would exert his authority in more abusive ways, whether tearing up Clara’s music in a fit of rage after she had casually missed out some repeats, or else banning her from playing the piano for several days if her progress was not up to scratch.
When once challenged by the wife of a Weimar government official over his harsh methods, Friedrich characteristically responded: “I have thought about education for twenty-five years and put my theories into practice. For the last seven years I have lived only for the education of my daughter…. I must tell you [therefore] that I would rather not accept advice and pedagogical precepts, especially from a woman, until I ask for it.” It is perhaps not surprising that one witness would describe the teenage Clara as having a “look of unhappiness and of suffering.” Later Clara herself would recall the innately stressful nature of her father: “this frightful agitation, this restlessness of mind and body doesn’t permit him – or anyone around him – to secure any kind of tranquil enjoyment of life.”
Having made her performing debut at the age of nine at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, Friedrich soon felt confident enough to unleash his daughter on the rest of Germany. From 1831 onwards, he and Clara began to burn up the stage-coach miles, travelling from one distant city to another, before eventually crossing the French border en route to Paris. Very little was planned ahead: at each destination, Friedrich would introduce himself to all the important musical figures and perhaps the odd influential patron, book halls, hire pianos, fetch a piano tuner, find auxiliary musicians, organize all publicity and even personally collect admission money at the doors to each venue.
Although Clara was undoubtedly the golden goose, Friedrich very much saw the concerts (and the handsome income he made from them) as his success and his alone. Even after Clara had achieved international fame in her late teens, Friedrich refused for many years to share any of the profits with her, regarding them as his own money. Whenever she asked, he would churlishly demand that she in turn remunerate him for the countless piano lessons he had given her.
Friedrich was undoubtedly Clara’s world for much of her childhood, for better and for worse. But from 1831 onwards he would gradually acquire a rival for Clara’s affection, when he took on a bored law student named Robert Schumann for intensive piano tuition. The young man would lodge with the Wieck family for a year or so afterwards.
Despite their nine-year age gap, Clara immediately found a connection with Robert, at least on a musical level, something which Friedrich initially did little to discourage. Robert was just beginning to compose his innovative piano works of the early 1830s while Clara was writing her teenage caprices, polonaises, romances and rondos, with the two young composers frequently quoting musical ideas or motifs from one another. Clara’s early surge of creativity would culminate in her Piano Concerto in A Minor (with Robert pitching in with some of the orchestration), completed at the precocious age of 14. Clara would premiere the work in Leipzig, with Felix Mendelssohn conducting.
Over time, the handsome and ebullient Robert Schumann would begin to offer Clara an alternate world to that of her father – he was emotionally much warmer, with a broader intellectual range and a depth of talent her father could only dream of. Above all, he was simply fun to be around – he would crawl about the floor with Clara’s two younger brothers, creating imaginary games with them and frequently making them laugh (in a household generally short on laughter).
In turn, Robert was soon falling head over heels in love with the beautiful young woman who already played the piano better than he would ever, while at the same time appearing to have the soul of an artist and to understand him and his music more astutely than anyone he had ever met.
The two finally confessed their love for each other 1835, when Robert was 25 and Clara 16. Clara never forgot the moment, later telling her new beloved, “when you gave me that first kiss, I thought I would faint; everything went blank and I could hardly hold the lamp that was lighting your way out.”
Even as they did not immediately inform Clara’s father of their change in relationship status, they somehow convinced themselves that he would take it well. In fact, his reaction could hardly have been more dire. Having initially threatened to shoot Robert if he ever came near their house again, Friedrich’s strenuous attempts to keep the two lovebirds apart over the next four years would bring out a near-unhinged malice that surprised even Clara.
Still officially under his jurisdiction, Friedrich felt that he had sacrificed so much for Clara, that she wasn’t yet ready to choose a suitor, and that when she was, he would make absolutely sure it was someone with a more steady and lucrative career than Robert Schumann’s. As Nancy Reich has put it in her biography of Clara, Friedrich still regarded his daughter as something between a possession and an alter ego: it was tremendously difficult for him to let her go.
The young couple tried everything they could to talk Friedrich around, but in vain. He continued to keep them apart, sometimes for many months on end. Eventually Clara and Robert managed to communicate with covert letters, smuggled in and out of Clara’s house by a mutual friend. Despite the considerable emotional stress to both, their love only seemed to strengthen over this trying period. “You are the ideal of a man”, Clara told Robert, “an ideal I have always carried in my heart.” In 1837, she agreed to be his wife.
Friedrich repeatedly did what he could to shake his daughter’s faith in Robert – the latter would be “derogated, ridiculed, insulted” by her father according to Clara. But his various schemes became so vindictive that they eventually and inevitably blew up in his own face. When Clara went off on a concert tour of northern Germany by herself in 1840, Friedrich circulated letters among the musical grandees of Hamburg and Berlin, describing his daughter as a “demoralized, shameless girl who has opposed her father in the most unnatural and shocking manner”, before warning that other girls could be “poisoned” by her influence.
Friedrich then sank even lower when he tried to then persuade a Leipzig court of law that Robert was entirely unfit to be anywhere near his daughter, His eleven-page dossier was a spiteful evisceration of his former pupil, pulling apart his personality in almost every way. Although Robert was able to successfully refute all of Friedrich’s claims with a dossier of his own, he never entirely forgave his future father-in-law for this unsolicited character reference. He even managed to countersue him for defamation, again successfully.
After the court rulings, Clara and Robert were finally allowed to marry in September 1840, at Schönefeld church just outside Leipzig. Clara would rejoice in their “quiet and peaceful life”, while adding that she was the “happiest wife on earth”: their domestic bliss perhaps all the sweeter for having been so hard earned.
Robert immediately embarked on a new and prolific phase of composition, appearing to equate the whole business of becoming a responsible husband (and soon-to-be father) with writing symphonies, composing not one but two over the following six months. At the same time, he showered his new wife with gifts and specially composed songs (a compliment she would frequently return).
The couple also took to keeping a joint journal which they called their Ehetagebuch (Marriage Diary). Aside from being a record of events, the diary served as an important means of communication, not least when it came to discussing a delicate matter or resolving a disagreement. As Robert would put it, “it should also be a little book of requests that we direct toward one another whenever words are insufficient, also one of mediation and reconciliation whenever we’ve had a misunderstanding.”
Before they were later swamped with children, Clara and Robert entertained frequently during these early years, with many distinguished friends and guests from Leipzig and further afield coming to visit. When alone, they would read aloud Shakespeare or Goethe to one another or else study a musical score, such as a Haydn quartet or a Bach fugue. Sometimes Robert gave his young wife extra “tuition” in understanding great pieces of music.
He did not or probably could not involve her in his compositional process, preferring to shut himself up, sometimes for days on end. When he emerged he could seem distracted, and Clara would reach for the Ehetagebuch to complain of his coldness. Robert would then apologize while expressing his gratitude for his wife’s help and tender support.
The one major issue they never adequately worked out was to how to accommodate Clara’s creative activities into the day-to-day running of their marriage. The problem was Robert’s needs often taking a natural precedence over Clara’s. When he was engrossed in composing a major new work, it would be impossible for Clara (who cursed the “evil of thin walls”) to practice the piano, let alone write any of her own music.
It was harder still to accommodate Clara the talented young composer, and on this matter Robert would remain eternally conflicted. It’s not that he didn’t take her composing seriously. He often encouraged her efforts, contradicted her doubts that women “weren’t born to compose”, while at the same time he collected up and catalogued her various manuscripts, taking care to ensure that none of her music was ever lost. On the other hand, he still basically expected her to behave like a conventional nineteenth century wife.
As Clara naturally had much less time for composition, she was always nervous about letting any of her creations see light of day. She would feel “ashamed” to show Robert her latest creation, often presenting a new piece with “extreme modesty” while describing the product itself as “feeble” or “very weak.” Like almost every artist who has ever lived, Clara would ask Robert to be brutally honest in appraising her latest work, but then raise objections if he came back with even the smallest criticism or suggestion – “you are not angry with me, are you?” she would ask him anxiously.
Sometimes she would dismiss her efforts as “effeminate and sentimental” (they were not). Yet she never stopped loving the creative process itself: “there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creative activity, even if only for those hours of self-forgetfulness in which one breathes solely in the world of tones,” she once said.
Matters were equally complicated when it came to reviving her old career as a concert pianist, but at least on this Clara had more innate confidence in herself. Again, they had not successfully resolved the issue before their marriage. Robert sometimes did not appear to understand that his bride-to-be was already more famous across Europe than he would ever be in his lifetime. He largely regarded her career as a hobby that Clara could pursue part-time once she became his wife, leaving him to do all the heavy duty creative stuff.
Performing on the piano had been Clara’s life for over a decade and it was extremely difficult for her to suddenly abandon it. After just two months of married life she was already expressing her eagerness to tour again, and not least her fear of falling into “oblivion”. But there were also very sound practical reasons for her to be considering such a thing – that she could still earn more from a three-week tour than Robert managed in a year. But when Robert eventually gave way on the issue, it would put an unexpected strain on their marriage and also his health.
At the end of 1842, Clara was invited to tour Denmark for two months and she went by herself, happy to stretch her wings again and feel her old power. Now free of her father’s shadow, Clara’s playing continued to develop, and not least the music she now programmed – gone was the flashily brilliant music of 1830s virtuoso-composers like Friedrich Kalkbrenner or Sigismond Thalberg, and in their place a more cerebral, subtle repertoire including Frédéric Chopin and Felix Mendelssohn along with her husband, as well as eighteenth century masters such as JS Bach and Domenico Scarlatti.
But even as Clara was being feted around Denmark (meeting among others, the composer Niels Gade and fairytale writer HC Andersen), back in Leipzig Robert was a picture of misery, peppering his wife with letters and complaining that he couldn’t function in her absence. It did not help that Clara’s father, having got to hear of the tour, had started to spread rumours around than the couple had separated.
When Clara was invited to make an extensive tour of Russia a year or so later, Robert came with her this time, but with even more disastrous consequences. The problem was that while Robert hated touring (not least when it involved travelling hundreds of miles across Russia on primitive transport) for Clara it was still an exciting adventure. And while Frau Schumann again dazzled with her playing (if not always with her personal charm), her husband cut a morose figure, often standing by himself and mumbling semi-audibly whenever someone tried to speak to him. He was not a well man at the time, with overwork slowly driving him towards a major breakdown. Finding himself out of his element, as well as completely overshadowed by his wife, doubtless did little to help his mood.
The Schumanns eventually returned from Russia with enough money to ease their economic worries for a year or two. But while Clara’s reputation had been enhanced, Robert’s health was in trouble and it would take him a long time to properly recover. Having worsened matters further by pushing himself to breaking point with a major new composition, he spent much of the next twelve months or so in and out of bed, suffering various ailments.
Robert’s illness would be a major factor behind the couple deciding to move to nearby Dresden, a smaller, less industrialized town in comparison to Leipzig, and with “better air” that would be deemed beneficial for Robert’s recovery. But for all its prettiness, Dresden would also prove to be a cultural backwater and largely unappreciative of the couple, even as they remained creatively productive during their five years there.
Despite now being weighed down by various domestic duties – aside from looking after her sick husband, Clara was now a mother to three children and pregnant with a fourth – something about her recent concert-touring seemed to have inspired her anew. Still describing herself as “lazy”, she somehow made the time to write one of her very finest compositions, a Piano Trio in G Minor, one of only three large-scale works she wrote in her lifetime.
Classically structured but with a romantic sensibility, painstakingly crafted but full of invention and with hardly a superfluous note, the Trio represents a high point in Clara’s creative development. Though stylistically owing something to the music of Felix Mendelssohn (whom Clara adored) or even to Niels Gade, there is a new individuality in the work’s conception, and not least in some of its subtly innovative rhythms and harmonies. Above all, it is a very technically assured work – Clara handles the three instruments with great skill throughout, giving each a fully equal role to play.
The fine craftsmanship is evident from the first movement (Allegro Moderato), as the expressive opening theme forms the basis for much of the ensuing sonata-form narrative, particularly in the way the theme is split into antiphonal fragments across the majestic development section.
The second movement, the lightest of the four, is less Scherzo (despite its title) than playful minuet (a popular eighteenth century form then largely out of fashion). But even here are unusual elements, and not least the ingenious syncopation in a contrasting (middle) Trio section.
The stately third movement (Andante) also follows a ternary structure, again creating an effective contrast. While the outer sections (in G Major) take the form of a lilting barcarolle, the middle section (in E minor) is full of drama and jagged rhythms.
The fourth movement (Allegretto) is perhaps the finest – while Clara takes the brakes off with the piano part in places, yet the counterpoint remains masterful throughout, once more creating a genuine equality between the three instruments. The young virtuosic violinist Joseph Joachim was so impressed when he first heard this movement that he questioned the music’s authorship, admitting: “I recollect a fugato in the last movement and recall that Mendelssohn once had a big laugh because I would not have believed that a woman could have composed something so sound and serious.”
Joachim’s admission, for all its good intention, was sadly only too typical of its time. Not long after the Trio’s premiere in 1846, a review for the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung would write: “women rarely attempt the more mature forms because such works assume a certain abstract strength that is overwhelmingly given to men… Clara Schumann, however, is truly one of the few woman composers who has mastered this strength,”
As for Clara herself, she seems to have enjoyed writing the Trio more than she did performing it later. When her husband responded with a Piano Trio of his own a year later, she quickly found herself neglecting her own work in favour of his.
Still only 26 when she completed this piece, Clara would never again attain the summit that the Trio represented for her. While much of that was down to her other duties and the pervading feeling that she should not be seriously composing at all, some of it was also down to her husband’s own early death a decade later. So much of her creativity was bound up with Robert’s (as indeed it had been the other way around). Writing something without him might simply have been too painful to contemplate.
Before Robert’s tragic end, a move to Düsseldorf still awaited the couple and a final surge of composition from both. After that, Clara would enter the long autumn of her life – continuing to pack out concert halls across Europe with her playing while raising a large family as a single mother, devoting herself to supporting the career of her close friend Johannes Brahms and, until the very end of her days, tirelessly championing, performing and editing the works of her beloved late husband.
Suggestions for further listening
A complete recording of Clara Schumann’s piano music can be found here.