Daughter of piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, who started teaching
her when she was only five years old. She impressed her surroundings
by playing difficult piano pieces by head when she was sixteen.
In 1828 she made her public debut at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig.
In the same year Robert Schumann started piano lessons with
Friedrich Wieck.
Clara and her father went on concert
tours to Hamburg, Paris and other cities. Clara and Schumann
started to spend more time together and Wieck tried to keep
them apart by taking her to Dresden. They entered into a secret
engagement on August 14, 1837 and on September 13, 1837 Schumann
asked for her hand. Wieck refused boldly and Clara left for
Vienna where Emperor Francis I called her 'Wundermädchen' (wondergirl).
In
1839 Clara asked for legal permission to marry Schumann and
on September 12, 1840 they were finally married. They travelled
to Russia in 1844 and to Vienna in 1846 for concerts. In 1849
they had to flee dresden for the revolution, Clara being pregnant
of one of their eight children. In 1850 the Schumanns moved
to Düsseldorf.
By 1854 Schumann suffered from a mental
illness and he died in 1856. Clara's contacts to the young Johannes
Brahms, whom she had met in 1853, became closer and he was probably
in love with her (later he had his eye on her daughter Julie
but Brahms was very unlucky in love). Details are unknown because
Clara and Brahms destroyed the letters they wrote to each other
between 1853 and 1858. Certain is that he lived with her in
Düsseldorf for a while.
Clara sent most of her children
to relatives. She moved with her children to her mother in Berlin
in 1857 and Lichtenthal (now part of Baden Baden) in 1863, where
she lived until 1873. Several succesful concert tours followed.
In 1864 she toured Russia once more. Like her husband when he
was still alive, Clara didn't like the music of Richard Wagner.
She called the enthousiasm for his music 'a disease that sweeps
across a country and takes away the best people'. In 1882 she
attended "Das Rheingold" but it bored her.
In 1873
she moved back to Berlin. From 1878 onwards she lived at Frankfurt
am Main, where she became the main piano teacher at the new
conservatory. In Frankfurt she gave her last concert on March
12, 1891. She died in 1896 after suffering two strokes.
Family
• Father: Wieck, Friedrich
• Husband: Schumann, Robert Alexander
Related persons
• was a friend of Brahms, Johannes
• cooperated with Joachim, Joseph
• was painted by Lenbach, Franz von
• cooperated with Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix
• knew Reinecke, Carl
• visited Schadow-Hasenclever, Sophie
• supported Smetana, Bedrich
• disliked the work of Wagner, Richard
|
Sources
• Time Table of History, Xïphias, 1992
• Clara Schumann Chronology, Internet, 1996
• DoveSong.com -- Richard Wagner
|
| |
