It was Clara who encouraged her husband to write his Piano Concerto, which she premiered and played often.
Robert had first entered her life when he became a student of her father - who eventually waged a losing court battle to oppose their marriage, which went forward in 1840 - and his initial compositions focused on music for solo piano, her instrument. While Robert Schumann was a virtually unknown and deeply insecure composer, Clara commanded an international reputation her advocacy helped his work circulate. Reich wrote in her milestone 1985 biography “ Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman.” In her youth, she “astonished audiences as much by her compositions as by her playing,” Nancy B. (She died, at 76, in 1896.)Ĭlara also began composing early. Born in 1819, she became one of the 19th century’s foremost piano virtuosos - in the same league as her contemporary Franz Liszt, and over a much longer stretch, remaining active for more than six decades.
#Robert schumann compositions code#
Downes points out that in other pieces, Robert explicitly incorporated phrases of Clara’s music as a private code they shared.Ī child prodigy trained and strictly supervised by her father, Friedrich Wieck, Clara had already debuted at the Gewandhaus in her native Leipzig, Germany, and toured to Paris before her teens. In her account of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto (also in A minor), a staple of the concert hall, on “For Love of You,” she said she wanted to elicit a sense of Clara’s “presence as a pianist, as the embodiment of his work.” Ms. Downes is intrigued by the reciprocity of Clara and Robert’s work. Life and Music Schumann's early musical progress was unremarkable. Although Schumann was no child prodigy, he went on to become one of the most important composers of the 19th century and is recognised as such 200 years after his birth. Kanneh-Mason said, adding that she finds, even in Schumann’s early pieces, “an underlying sense of sadness - of grief from early on in her childhood - that becomes harmonically more complex as she gets older.”įor her part, Ms. Robert Schumann (18101856) was a German romantic composer and influential music critic. She was a great virtuoso and also a very passionate person,” Ms. “I was inspired by Clara’s music itself to read more about her as a woman and pianist. Robert Schumann, German composer and music critic of the Romantic Era, battled with bouts of depression throughout his life. 18, played by the young pianist Mariam Batsashvili. After a review of literature, biographies, compositions, analysis of composition, medical literature, and a review of the DSM-IV, I graphed a time line of his life correlated with his music compositions and illness (Fig. That work also made a belated debut at the BBC Proms festival on Aug. Downes played - which Clara wrote as a teenager. “Romance” offers an engaging overview of her style as an instrumental composer, starting with a warmly personal account of her Piano Concerto - the one Ms.
Since Schumann more or less stopped composing after Robert’s early death in 1856, when he was 46 and she was only 37, her oeuvre is relatively small - just 23 published works - and comprises almost exclusively solo piano pieces, chamber music and lieder.
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