Explores the distinctive musical and poetic features of Clara Schumann's songwriting and her central contribution to the art song genre.

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

At the age of nine, Clara Wieck gave her first public performance as a concert pianist. She played beautifully. When the concert was over, she felt as if she were dancing on a cloud. As she grew older, Clara's concerts took her all over Europe. Audiences adored her, and she became friends with other famous musicians—including her father's student, Robert Schumann. Robert and Clara fell in love and eventually married. Robert took some of Clara's melodies and shaped them into compositions, and Clara performed his pieces, introducing them to new audiences. Throughout her life, Clara Schumann's performances set the standard for piano music. The greatest composers of her time—impressed with the power and beauty of her playing—wrote music for her. Clara was a pianist, composer, and mentor, as well as an inspiration to the romantic movement that was her life. She made the piano sing.

One spring day in 1824, four-year-old Clara Wieck sat in the nursery with her three younger brothers, Alwin, Gustav, and baby Victor. Alwin and Gustav babbled in baby-talk, Victor wailed, but Clara was perfectly silent. Clara was always quiet-mute. She had not yet spoken a word. Nearly five years old and not a single word out of her! The child must be simple. Maybe she was deaf. How tragic for Music Master Wieck to have such a daughter! But Clara was not deaf. The piano music of her father's students rang out. Clara heard the glorious strains of music wafting through the house all day long. From the moment four-year-old Clara Wieck Schumann heard music coming from her father's piano store, she wanted to play the piano. She became a child prodigy and made her debut at nine and went on to have the longest concert career of any woman in the nineteenth century. At the age of eighteen, she was named Royal and Imperial Virtuosa-the highest musical honor in Austria. Clara wanted to do more than entertain. She wanted the audience to feel love, sorrow, joy, and beauty. She achieved this with a new style of playing the piano. She managed to have a sixty-year concert career, marry Robert Schumann and oversee his estate, plus raise their eight children. As a celebrated composer, she wrote a piano concerto, chamber music, songs, pieces for piano, and her most well-known work, the Piano Trio in G Minor.

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.

Clara Schumann (née Wieck) was undoubtedly the most important female pianist of the 19th century. As a young child she toured Europe as a prodigy: her entire career as a celebrated piano virtuoso spanned more than 60 years. Equally important, but less well known, is the composer Clara Schumann, who published her Opus 1 at the age of eleven. Despite the domestic duties expected of a woman at that time, she created numerous outstanding piano works and songs that are at least the equal of those of her male contemporaries. However, society at that time did not allow women to be regarded as fully-fledged composers or for their works to be appreciated adequately. To help give this important composer the recognition she deserves, Edition Peters, in collaboration with the Schumann-Haus Leipzig, is now, on the occasion of her 200th birthday, publishing this Anniversary Songbook for High Voice. The 14 songs, representing the pinnacle of Clara's art, were composed mainly in the period after her marriage in Leipzig to Robert Schumann - who was her greatest champion. This volume includes: new practical editions of 14 of Clara Schumann's greatest songs introductions to each song, written by Frances Falling, Schumann-Haus Leipzig new English translations of the song lyrics a CD containing recordings of the piano accompaniments

Original compilation of the composer's most popular works, including Witches Dance, Op. 5, No. 1; Four Fleeting Pieces, Op. 15; Three Preludes and Fugues, Op. 16; and Three Romances, Op. 21; more.

Arguably no other 19th-century German composer was as literate or as finely attuned to setting verse as Robert Schumann. Finson challenges assumptions about Schumann’s Lieder, engaging traditionally held interpretations. Arranged in part thematically, rather than by strict compositional chronology, this book speaks to the heart of Schumann’s music.