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facing female artists in the nineteenth century, Nancy B. Reich has drawn on previously unexplored primary sources: unpublished diaries, letters, and family papers, as well as concert programs.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 She has also prepared a Catalogue of Works that includes all of Clara Schumann's known published and unpublished compositions and works she edited, as well as descriptions of the autographs, the first editions, the modern editions, and recent literature on each piece.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.

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

Describes the life of the German pianist and composer who made her professional debut at age nine and who devoted her life to music and to her family.

Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband's death. Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music. Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband's music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann's concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband's music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager. By highlighting Schumann's navigation of her musical culture's gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.

Carolrhoda's best-selling Creative Minds Biographies series appeals to a wide range of readers. Written in story format, these biographies also include inviting black-and-white illustrations. Praise for Her Piano Sang:

A young adult biography of German musician and composer Clara Schumann

“A valuable resource for musicologists, theorists, pianists, and aestheticians interested in reading about Schumann’s views on virtuosity.” —Notes Considered one of the greatest composers—and music critics—of the Romantic era, Robert Schumann (1810–1856) played an important role in shaping nineteenth-century German ideas about virtuosity. Forging his career in the decades that saw abundant public fascination with the feats and creations of virtuosos (Liszt, Paganini, and Chopin among others), Schumann engaged with instrumental virtuosity through not only his compositions and performances but also his music reviews and writings about his contemporaries. Ultimately, the discourse of virtuosity influenced the culture of Western “art music” well beyond the nineteenth century and into the present day. By examining previously unexplored archival sources, Alexander Stefaniak looks at the diverse approaches to virtuosity Schumann developed over the course of his career, revealing several distinct currents in nineteenth-century German virtuosity and the enduring flexibility of virtuosity discourse.

The Schumann Marriage diaries provide a vivid portrait of the unique artistic and personal union between two renowned musicians. For the first four years of their marriage, Robert and Clara Schumann kept a joint diary, recording their entries, at least initially, on alternate weeks. Begun on September 13, 1840, the day after their marriage, the diary opens with guidance from Robert: "This little book . . . has a very intimate meaning; it shall be a diary about everything that touches us mutually in our household and marriage." The diaries reflect the harmony as well as the discord in their marriage. Robert and Clara describe in intimate detail their honeymoon period, the births of their children, their busy social lives, travels throughout Europe, financial problems, separations, and reunions. The book also evokes the artistic milieu of nineteenth-century Germany. The Schumanns came in contact with many musicians, including their close friends Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt, and recorded their insightful reactions to the artists and their music. The marriage diaries cover a fertile period in Robert Schumann's life, during which he wrote the Spring Symphony, the Piano Concerto, most of his chamber music, his first oratorio, "Paradise and the Peri, " and numerous songs. They reflect the frenetic pace at which he worked, as well as his growing bouts of depression, his ambivalent response to Clara's decision to return to the concert stage after a prolonged hiatus, and her anxiety in the face of Robert's changing moods. This edition includes the couple's travel book, written during their stressful concert tour of Russia in 1844, which marked the end of the marriage diaries; RobertSchumann's descriptions of Russian customs; and the poems he wrote in Moscow - all of which provide a fascinating and uniquely detailed glimpse at what it was like to travel in Russia at the time.