For the young Clara Wieck, Berlin lay in a foreign country: Prussia. Musical life there was not considered to be at a high level in the 1830s, but it was where Clara’s biological mother lived. Vienna, however, was a centre of musical life, even after the death of composers such as Mozart and Beethoven. A half-year stay there for concerts in winter 1837/38 proved very successful for young Clara. On 15 March 1838 she was appointed Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuosa – a title that became the basis of her international career for more than the following half century.

The last few decades have seen the publication of a vast trove of primary documents concerning the Schumanns, including diaries, letters, and official documents. Biographers today have access to far more information about the couple than either of their earliest biographers, Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski and Berthold Litzmann, each of whom was constrained in various ways by the limited material available to them and by their biases. Yet because of their associations with the Schumann family, Wasielewski and Litzmann are treated as primary sources and their biographies are regarded as authoritative. While both accounts can be useful to modern-day biographers, they should be read critically, and their assumptions and conclusions should be interrogated.

The context in which Robert and Clara carried out their respective musical experiences as performers, listeners, and organizers of chamber music was richly varied. This chapter illustrates how, at the time, playing together with other musicians was considered of primary importance. Sometimes the Schumanns directly initiated such events, such as the Quartettmorgen (quartet mornings) that Robert had organized starting in 1838 in his own home. From the early nineteenth century onwards, concert series dedicated to chamber music flourished throughout Europe, often founded and run by musicians with whom Robert and Clara were in close contact. Above all, the number of student-populated instrumental ensembles increased, even in schools not specifically dedicated to music (such as military and art academies). The number of orchestras in which amateurs often played alongside professionals grew as well. Sometimes Robert himself conducted such groups.

This chapter examines Clara’s and Robert’s general educations and musical training in the context of schooling in early nineteenth-century Germany, underscoring aspects of the instruction they received that were typical and those that were unusual for individuals of their classes and genders. As relatively privileged children, Clara and Robert both benefited from general educations that far surpassed those available to children of the peasant and working classes; by virtue of his gender, however, Robert’s general schooling was much more robust than Clara’s. Privilege also afforded Clara and Robert access to extensive musical instruction, which intersected in the person of Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father. Friedrich, himself an autodidact, trained his daughter tirelessly from the earliest age, providing her with an extraordinary musical education, one that is all the more astonishing for the era, given her gender.

This chapter examines the evolution of concert programming practices among nineteenth-century musicians, focusing on Robert and Clara Schumanns’ approaches within changing cultural, financial, aesthetic, geographical, and technological contexts. Drawing on concert programmes, personal correspondence, and historical reviews, the chapter identifies shifts from genre-spanning miscellany programmes to more homogeneous recitals emphasizing what would become the classical canon and standardized repertoires. Clara is shown to have used programming strategically to promote her husband’s music and her own artistic identity, while Robert’s programming reflected both his aspirations, as well as his vulnerabilities and limited practical skills. These practices had significant implications for gender roles, artistic autonomy, and the dissemination of music during the period. Overall, the Schumanns’ practices underscore how concert programming shaped musical reception and professional identity, highlighting its enduring influence on modern concert management and programming strategies.

This chapter surveys contemporary responses to the Schumanns across a variety of artistic media: music, dance, theatre, visual arts, and literature. It argues that while these can be opportunities for reflecting historical affinities and differences, artists typically reflect the myths surrounding these musicians, rather than engaging with current research. While Robert Schumann has become a cipher for mental illness, his relationship with Clara Schumann née Wieck, and the couple’s relationship with Johannes Brahms, have also attracted a great deal of attention. Responses to the Schumanns have also reflected broader trends in artistic practice, including the theatricalization of concert music, the mash-up, and ‘composed reception’ (musical responses to stylistic aspects of their works). The Schumanns both represent the past but also provide artists with opportunities for imaginative time travel, to reassess and in some ways reinvent their present.

Although Clara Schumann pursued a career primarily as a concert pianist, she composed some fifty works that, taken together, illustrate a two-pronged interest found also in the output of her husband, Robert Schumann. On the one hand, Clara and Robert adopted compositional styles and genres in vogue during their day. On the other hand, both deeply appreciated the traditions of their largely Germanic forebears, and they paid tribute by grounding their music in historical methods inherited from their predecessors. This chapter considers their output from each perspective and then concludes with examples that illustrate a productive dialogue between the two.

Robert Schumann’s father August ran a publishing company; Robert grew up surrounded by books. As a teenager, he founded a literary society; as an adult, he made annotated reading lists filled with strong opinions. His early years belonged to the Age of Goethe, whose works he loved throughout his life, and he was captivated by the radical novelty that was Heinrich Heine. Other Romantic and contemporary poets, from Eichendorff to Adelbert von Chamisso, Rückert, and Robert Reinick, provided him with texts for songs, as did Robert Burns. He and Clara lived through the Revolution of 1848, and their liberal political convictions are inscribed in selected lieder. Later in his life, Robert discovered the poems of Nikolaus Lenau and Eduard Mörike, Emanuel Geibel, Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, and Elisabeth Kulmann. Both composers’ engagements with the literature of their day had massive impacts on their musical imaginations throughout their lives.

This chapter traces musical dialogues between Clara and Robert Schumann – conversations that are ripe with hermeneutic implications. It situates these references on a continuum: from indisputable quotations with clear links to external stimulants, through allusions to works by other composers that are distanced from their sources, to more ambiguous examples that are implied though not openly stated. The chapter shows how dialogues could move in both directions between Clara and Robert, as well as how they each conversed with the music of their contemporaries and predecessors. Collectively, the examples discussed demonstrate the vitality of conversations – both personal and creative – to the music of the Schumanns and their wider circle.

Exploring the middle ground between the much-debated public and private spheres of nineteenth-century music making, this chapter discusses Clara and Robert Schumann’s private musical gatherings in their own as well as in their friends’ homes in Leipzig of the early 1840s, in light of the gatherings’ dual purpose as musical and social interaction. The chapter traces the Schumanns’ contact with their closest circle in Leipzig through diary entries and letters to contemporaries such as Felix Mendelssohn and Ferdinand David. It examines how the private interactions with these friends and their mutual chamber music making mirror the Schumanns’ wider importance for Leipzig’s society and musical life. The chapter concludes that the distinction between the public and private spheres was blurred in the Schumann household in the couple’s final and most active years in Leipzig.

Both Paris and London had a well-established musical culture that developed during Clara and Robert Schumann’s lifetimes in response to changing artistic and entrepreneurial activities. Robert considered both Paris and London when seeking a new outlet for the publication of his journal, the NZfM, in 1838. While Clara’s first concert tour to Paris in 1831 was under her father’s close guidance, her second in 1839 was marked by her independence from his control, together with the stress caused by his opposition to her marrying Robert. Her third visit to Paris in 1862, mid-career, was the most successful. Her nineteen concert tours of England from 1856 onwards, with London as base, included chamber music performances with Joachim and Piatti, opportunities that Clara particularly valued. The hectic concert schedules she endured, covering a wide stretch enabled by train travel, nevertheless left space for cultivating social contacts and music-making in a domestic setting.

This chapter explores the centrality of performance and virtuosity within the Schumanns’ engagement with their broader musical world, emphasizing ways in which they navigated cultural currents that, from our vantage point, may seem to be in tension with one another but that in the Schumanns’ day were intertwined. First, I consider how they simultaneously embraced a widespread fascination with cutting-edge approaches to the sound and spectacle of virtuosity and an aesthetics of interiority. Second, I consider how they contributed to the historical idealisation of the musical work and composer even as Clara exemplified performance practices that offered a wide range of ways to tailor and reshape compositions.

Up until the age of thirty-four, Robert spent his life in Zwickau and Leipzig, proximate municipalities in Saxony with utterly different commercial and cultural offerings in the first half of the nineteenth century. This chapter outlines the development of Zwickau and Leipzig up to ca. 1850 and Robert’s life and work in them. Born in Zwickau in 1810, Robert spent his childhood and youth here; he also received his first musical training in this town. After graduating from high school in 1828, he went to Leipzig to study law. From the confines of provincial Zwickau, he had come to a major city. While he initially looked forward to living there, he soon felt uncomfortable. Despite the significance of Leipzig and the opportunities it offered, Robert’s aversion to the city endured for a long time. Later, however, he viewed it as his ‘home’, the centre of his life.

This chapter focuses on the Schumann home and its inhabitants, drawing on documentary evidence to highlight Robert’s relationships with the family members who shaped his formative years. Diaries and letters paint the picture of a close-knit family that fostered Robert’s talents – encouraging his lifelong loves of literature and music – and in which he was a devoted son, brother, and brother-in-law. Yet while these sources depict a warm and loving home, they also reveal a succession of family deaths that took a serious toll on Robert’s mental health as a young man. Attending to the close relationships he shared with his parents, brothers, and sisters-in-law, as well as the emotional suffering he experienced at their deaths, offers illuminating context for understanding Robert’s artistic and intellectual principles as well as the mental health challenges with which he struggled as an adult.