Clara Schumann

“ I verily believe that to-day, next to the divine Clara herself, she is the best interpreter of Robert Schumann's works living; and if the love she has obtained for him is not as universal, it is just as fervent. Many silent and holy hours have I sat communing, through her, with him whom the Germans love to call their Tone-Poet; and the music remained to clothe with the full vesture of romance the meagre paragraphs of the journals which hinted his love, his sorrow, and at length his insanity and death. ”

“ Well, it is all over and forgiven now; he is your father, and has brought you up to be everything that is noble; he would like to weigh your future happiness as in a pair of scales, and wishes to see you just as happy and well-protected as you have always been under his fatherly care. I cannot argue with him."
Schumann works with new fury at his compositions, and plans ever larger and larger works; but through all his music there reigns the influence of Clara in a way unequalled, or at least never equally confessed by any other musician. ”

“ I thought the second movement of Schumann's Quartette perhaps as extraordinary as any part of Clara Schumann's performance. It was very rapid, very staccato, and pianissimo all the way through. Not a note escaped her fingers, and she played with so much magnetism that one could scarcely breathe until it was finished. You know nothing can be more difficult than to play staccato so very softly where there is great execution also. Both of the sonatas for violin and piano which were played by Madame Schumann and Joachim, and especially the one in A minor, by Beethoven, were divine. ”

“ In Germany, in the Netherlands, in Austria, even in Russia, constant triumphs awaited them. There were a few exceptions, chief among them being Vienna, the city where Mozart struggled so long in vain, and where Gluck was unable to produce more than a passing impression by his great operatic reforms. But nearly all the places they visited offered admiration and incense to the faithful pair of artists. Through Schumann's genius, that of his wife was influenced, and Clara Schumann became far greater than Clara Wieck had ever been. She became a true priestess of art. ”

“ But while the musician Schumann was not arriving at understanding, the critic Schumann was already famous for the swiftness of his discoveries and the bravery of his proclamations of genius. As for Clara, though already in her eighteenth year, she was one of the most famous pianists in the world, and favourably compared, in many respects, especially in point of poetical interpretation, with Liszt, Thalberg, Chopin, and Europe's brilliantest virtuosos. But Schumann had delighted her heart by writing: "I love you not because you are a great artist; no, I love you because you are so good." ”

“ Clara Schumann, a widow at thirty-seven, with a goodly brood of babies, and no income to speak of, lived one day at a time, did her work as well as she could, and always had a little time and energy over to use for others less fortunate. ”

“ No shadow of artistic rivalry can fall upon their delight, nor darken their pleasure in each other's achievements. Schumann's most impassioned and characteristic productions have been definitely inspired by Clara, ever since the days [Pg 11] when, as a child of nine, she listened to his fantastic fairy-tales, and her exquisite playing thrilled him with a desire to think in music. And Clara, who has never made a mere show of her marvellous executive skill, but has "consecrated it to the service of true art alone,"—is never happier than when interpreting her husband's works. ”

“ Had anyone suggested to Frau Furst that her daughter should be a clerk, even a teacher, she would have flung up hands of horror; but music!—that was a different matter. It was, moreover, the single one of the arts, in which this staunch advocate of womanliness granted her sex a share.
"Ask Franz," she said to Maurice. "Franz knows. He will explain. All women can do is to reproduce what some one else has thought or felt."
As an immortal example of the limits set by sex, she invariably fell back on Clara Schumann, with whom she had more than once come into personal contact. ”

“ You ask me in your letter to write you a comparison—a summing up—between Clara Schumann, Bülow, Tausig and Rubinstein, but I don't find it very easy to do, as they are all so different. Clara Schumann is entirely a classic player. Beethoven's sonatas, and Bach, too, she plays splendidly; but she doesn't seem to me to have any finesse, or much poetry in her playing. There's nothing subtle in her conception. She has a great deal of fire, and her whole style is grand, finished, perfectly rounded off, solid and satisfactory—what the Germans call gediegen. ”

“ Clara Schumann lived forty years after Robert Schumann died. She was the teacher of many students, some of whom traveled from America to study with her. She, too, was a composer and a concert pianist who played in public from the time she was ten years of age. ”

“ His wife, Clara Schumann (1819-1896) , trained from an early age by Wieck, had a brilliant career as a pianist from the age of thirteen up to her marriage. In the various tours on which she accompanied her husband, she extended her own reputation beyond the borders of Germany, and it was thanks to her efforts that his compositions became generally known in Europe. From the time of her husband's death she devoted herself principally to the interpretation of her husband's works, but when in 1856 she first visited England the critics received Schumann's music with a chorus of disapprobation. ”

“ In his trunk he had a mutilated score of the F sharp minor sonata, which he had heard Clara Schumann play at a festival in Leipsic. Though his powers of execution were at such a low ebb, he used to play at this sonata for his pupil and managed to give her some idea of its beauty. When Wunsch was a young man, it was still daring to like Schumann; enthusiasm for his work was considered an expression of youthful waywardness. Perhaps that was why Wunsch remembered him best. ”

“ The terrific Scherzo by Chopin she did splendidly, but she kept the great octave passages in the bass a little too subordinate, I thought, and did not give it quite boldly enough for my taste, though it was extremely artistic. Clara Schumann's playing is very objective. She seems to throw herself into the music, instead of letting the music take possession of her. She gives you the most exquisite pleasure with every note she touches, and has a wonderful conception and variety in playing, but she seldom whirls you off your feet. ”

“ My whole life is one joyous activity."
The annals of art, indeed, hold no more lovely record of a union between natural affinities. That of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning perhaps approximates most closely to that of Robert and Clara Schumann. But whereas in the former case both husband and wife were alike engaged upon the same branch of literature,—poetry,—and a certain sense of sadness was apt to embitter the success of the wife, because of the unpopularity (in those days) of the husband,—Schumann is solely and pre-eminently a composer, and Clara solely and absorbingly a pianist. ”

“ Clara Schumann still lives, though becoming fast an old woman in years, if still young in heart, and still able to win the admiration of the musical world by her splendid playing. Berlioz, who heard her in her youth, pronounced her the greatest virtuoso in Germany, in one of his letters to Heine; and while she was little more than a child she had gained the heartiest admiration in England, France, and Germany. Henry Chorley heard her at Leipzig in 1839, and speaks of "the organ-playing on the piano of Mme. ”

“ His unscrupulous treatment of Schumann and his own daughter has made him the object of much historical obloquy, in the main abundantly justified. Yet he was a good teacher, for all his irascible, disputatious ways and his devotion to the artistic causes he believed in could be very genuine. From the first he appreciated Schumann’s creative talent and never concealed the fact, outrageously as he came to demean himself to the composer and Clara alike. Clara was, of course, her father’s most famous pupil. Yet he had others, notably his daughter by his second marriage, Marie, and Hans von Bülow. ”

“ He lives entirely in music, and has a class of girls whom he instructs every evening for nothing. Five of these young girls were there. He is very deaf, but strange to say, he is as sensitive as ever to every musical sound, and the same is the case with Clara Schumann. ”

“ Thus the "Davidsbündlertänze" are by no means "dances," but the Davidites' knightly fights against the Philistines, nor are the "Kreisleriana" a portrayal of the eccentric Capellmeister in E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale, but the expression of Schumann's own enthusiastic, romantic, many-sided nature and of the ever-varying moods of his soul. In the Novelettes he tells us, in a most pleasing and spirited language, the story of his struggle for Clara's heart. The Phantasiestücke contain veritable gems among modern pianoforte music, such as "Evenings," "Why," "Traumeswirren" and "Aufschwung." ”

“ She had shown herself a woman worth fighting for, even as Schumann fought for her, and she had given him not only the greatest ambition and the greatest solace his life had known, but she had been also the perfect helpmeet to his art.
Schumann's music was not an easy music for the world to learn, and it is to Clara Wieck's eternal honour, that she not only inspired Schumann to write this music, and gave him her support under the long discouragement of its neglect and the temptations to be untrue to his best ideals ”

“ At last a girl, wandering by the strand and watching their vain efforts, simply dipped her white fingers into the sea and drew forth the key, with which she opened the shrine and released the charms. And now the freed spirits rise and fall at the bidding of their lovely, innocent mistress, who guides them with her white fingers as she plays. The imagery of this tribute to Clara's playing is readily understood. In Paris she heard Chopin and Mendelssohn. All these experiences tended to her early development, and there is little wonder if Schumann saw her older than she really was. ”

“ There can surely be no dispute that Robert Schumann was one of the most original and individual of composers, and one of the broadest and deepest-minded musicians in the history of the art. Nor can there be any doubt that Clara Wieck was one of the richest dowered musicians who ever shed glory upon her sex. Henry T. Finck was, perhaps, right, when he called her "the most gifted woman that has ever chosen music as a profession." ”

“ Much of his music shows his high regard for that writer of fairy stories.
6. Schumann was twenty-one years old when he injured his hand and learned that therefore he could not hope to be a pianist. It was then that he made up his mind to be a composer.
7. Schumann had enough means to live in comfort. He was not poor, as were Mozart, Schubert, and some others.
8. Robert and Clara Schumann had eight children, and some of Schumann's best music was written to interest his children. ”

“ Schumann says that nearly all the works composed at this time were written under Clara's inspiration solely. Blest with the continual companionship of a woman of genius, as amiable as she was gifted, who placed herself as a gentle mediator between Schumann's intellectual life and the outer world, he composed many of his finest vocal and instrumental compositions during the years immediately succeeding his marriage; among them the cantata "Paradise and the Peri," and the "Faust" music. ”

“ What should concern us now is the courtship of Clara by Robert which, though it ended happily, was actually a long martyrdom for both and in the best traditions of romantic melodrama. To be sure it left a deep imprint on Schumann’s creative fancy and for this, if for no other reason, the soul struggle was a cloud lined with shining silver. Almost all the piano works of the composer’s early period—in some ways the most yeasty and influential music he gave the world—are in one way or another the fruits of his love. ”

“ Meanwhile Schumann had sunk into another awesome abyss of melancholia. The humiliation of having to go to law for his wife, and airing the family scandal in public, crushed him to the dust. He wrote his friend Becker: "I hardly think I shall live to hear the decision of the court." As soon as Clara left Paris he hastened toward her and met her at Altenburg. It was a blissful reunion after a year of separation, and they went together to Berlin, where they knew the bliss of sitting once more at the piano together, playing Bach fugues. ”

“ But in the volumes and volumes of musicians' letters, which it has been my fortune to read, I have never found any others which were so ardent and yet so earnest, so throbbing with longing and yet so full of honesty, so eloquent and so dramatic with the very highest forms of eloquence and romance as those of Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck.
The woes of the two lovers were as different as possible, though equally balanced; and the honourableness of their undertaking was equally high. ”

“ From Wieck and the Wieck family, Clara had received while in Paris not one penny of money and not a single trinket. They always wrote her: "You have your own money." This grieved her deeply, and her father's sending her to Paris without a chaperon of any kind and writing her never a word of tenderness but only and always reproaches, had orphaned her indeed. Her heart was doubly ripe for a little mothering, and Frau Bargiel seized the moment. She wrote letters of greatest warmth and sweetness to her child in Paris, and to Schumann she wrote an invitation to come to Berlin. ”