Clara Schumann was born Clara Wieck in 1819 in Leipzig. Her mother, Marianne Tromlitz, was a singer, and her father Friedrich Wieck a piano teacher and owner of a piano shop. Her parents divorced in 1825. Her father took charge of her training as a professional pianist, a rarity at a time when few women practised this profession. He taught her not only piano, but also procured for her classes in composition, orchestration, singing, violin, English, and French. He helped her develop her abilities as a teacher, and accompanied her to the opera. He limited her study of the piano to three hours per day, and insisted on daily exercise – long walks which Clara would take throughout her life. This possibly explains the endurance she displayed during her career, which began properly (following a few private concerts) in 1828 and made her one of the most famous pianists of the 19th century. As early as 1929, she performed her Polonaise en mi bemol majeur, op. 1, for Paganini. She went on to compose about seventy works between 1828 and 1856, the year of her husband Robert Schumann’s death – she had married him in 1840 over her father’s objections. Most of her works are pieces for piano, alongside thirty-odd lieder and two pieces of chamber music. She took five stabs at symphonic writing with the orchestration of her Waltzes, op. 4 (1835), a Scherzo (1831), and an Overture (1833), which have all been lost, a Concerto, op. 7 (1833-1836) for piano and orchestra, and another, unfinished Concerto (1847). Her husband, like her father, was a great supporter of her talent as a composer. However, between her intense activity as a virtuoso and teacher, the difficulties posed by Robert’s mental deterioration, and her eight childbirths, she was left with little time to compose. And despite the profound joy she felt when creating, she doubted her talent – for instance criticizing the weaknesses of her Trio, op. 17 (1846), which she considered typically feminine – and was all too conscious of the fact that women composers of her time cruelly lacked role models. Her work has been the subject of rediscovery since the 1960s, with multiple publications and recordings, and she has slowly been afforded her rightful place among the major composers of German romanticism – particularly for her lieder, which rank among the greatest examples of the form.

– Florence Launay –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]