Schumann composer6/23/2023 He was not happy when she went on extended tours to keep the family in the black, but it was unavoidable. She also took on the burden of financially supporting the family. Clara was of course responsible for raising their eight children, keeping house, and cooking. Robert’s composition was the most important thing to him. She followed this idea completely – even going so far as to legally challenge her father for the right to marry Robert in 1840.Īfter her marriage, it became difficult for her to find the time to compose – or even to practice. Instead, Robert insisted that Clara dedicate herself, both emotionally and musically, to him. He never truly believed that she was a “full artistic genius” or that she could succeed as an composer on her own. Although he became a proponent of her composing, her was also her harshest critic. By the time she was 13, they were in love. In 1828, when she was merely 8 years old, Robert Schumann entered her life as a live-in student of her father’s. There is no question that her father’s intense and authoritarian teaching style paved the way for her to balance motherhood, performing, and taking care of Robert. She became an expert at performing through illness, violence, pain, and despair. When her younger half-brother died before a performance, her father forced her to travel to Dresden the next day to perform. Her father controlled every aspect of her life. Clara’s performing career continued under the stern and controlling eye of her father throughout Germany and abroad, with her first performance in Paris at the ripe age of 12. Perhaps because of her father’s incredibly strict and even cruel ways, she debuted at the Leipzig Gewandhaus when she was just 11 years old. She was born in Leipzig in 1819 to a talented musical family and received intensive training in music, languages, composing, and piano from a very early age from her father. She was a composer, a world-renowned concert pianist, a mother of 8, and a wife to the troubled composer Robert Schumann. She also arranged a number of Robert’s works (as well as those of Brahms and William Bennett for piano).Clara Schumann, née Wieck, was a complicated woman. Later in life, she experimented with larger, classical forms, though she quit composing after Robert died. She is also recognized as one of the foremost composers of lieder in the nineteenth century. Most of her compositions are for solo piano and are extremely virtuosic. Following his death, however, Clara began to perform in public again, eventually becoming the principal piano teach at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. While Clara and Robert were artistic partners in many respects (they studied scores together and championed each other’s works), while he was alive, Robert’s career took precedence. She stopped performing to focus on her husband and the eight children they had together. When she was 21, she married Robert Schumann. She was acclaimed as one of the best pianists in Europe, sometimes called the “Queen of the Piano.” She studied piano with her father, all while traveling throughout Germany to study harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration with the best musicians in the area. Clara began her music education at a young age. Her father was well known throughout the city’s illustrious music establishment, where he sold and repaired pianos, as well as taught music lessons. Clara Schumann was born in Leipzig to Marianne and Friedrich Wieck.
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