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.

This chapter explores the creative and personal fellowship between and among Robert and Clara Schumann and Joseph and Amalie Joachim, a circle regarded in their time as a ‘priesthood of art’. United by ideals that fused intellect, probity, and aesthetics, they helped redefine the nineteenth-century virtuoso as an interpretive artist guided by spiritual conviction rather than mere technical display. Robert Schumann’s early recognition of Joseph fostered an intense relationship of mentorship and inspiration, shaping Robert’s late compositional output and supporting Joseph’s own artistic growth. For Clara, Joseph became her most frequent concert partner and a principal adviser on professional and personal matters. Amalie also collaborated with Clara, appearing with her as valued colleague and equal. Together, the Schumanns played a decisive role in steering Joseph away from the New German School, while he in turn gave steadfast support to the Schumann family during and after Robert’s illness and decline.

This chapter examines a commemorative album created by Clara and Robert Schumann for their student Emilie Steffens in 1850. The album’s contents – including manuscripts from prominent composers, Robert’s complex collage of musical fragments and poetry, and concert programs documenting Steffens’ performances – functioned as more than mere keepsakes. Indeed, they served as deliberate means to construct Steffens’ musical identity and validate her status in the world of serious art music. Robert’s inscription, featuring excerpts from his major works linked to specific performances Steffens attended, demonstrates how he and Clara embedded lived musical experiences within material objects. Their inclusion of concert programs from Steffens’s brief public career further reinforced her privileged position as Clara’s student and an emerging pianist. Through their careful selection and arrangement of these materials, the Schumanns created a tangible monument that both commemorated their relationship with Steffens and constructed her lasting musical legacy.

This chapter explores the support networks surrounding Robert and Clara Schumann, emphasizing how these relationships shaped their identities and careers. Through both friendships and professional ties, they cultivated a rich web of connections that influenced their personal and artistic development. Beyond renowned figures like Mendelssohn and Brahms, the chapter highlights three key individuals: Emilie List, Clara’s lifelong friend who provided emotional and logistical support during pivotal moments; Eduard Krüger, a colleague whose intellectual exchanges with Robert deepened their shared understanding of music, particularly Bach; and Theodor Kirchner, Robert’s student and later Clara’s companion, who benefited from the couple’s support but ultimately did not meet their expectations. These relationships underscore the Schumanns’ reliance on personal and professional networks not only for artistic collaboration but also for emotional resilience. Ultimately, the chapter illustrates the transformative power of community and the couple’s commitment to fostering connections with like-minded artists and intellectuals.

During the nineteenth century sight became the primary means for discerning realities, and the (musical) body on visual display created intricate maps and modes of understanding. For viewers already steeped in then- theories of physiognomy and phrenology, iconographic materials revealed not only aspects of likeness, but also components of the inner, psychological self. When coupled with the era’s growing awareness of and excitement for celebrity, iconographic interpretations became even more formidable – and increasingly accessible. While modest in quantity, the Schumanns’ iconography played a crucial role in projecting and achieving their musical goals, revealing their careful engagement with the century’s social mores, musical ideals, and celebrity culture. Their visual artifacts spread across all kinds of mediums, especially those that were easily reproducible and readily available. Undeniably, their iconography secured and substantiated their reputation as a couple who had an ideal musical and marital partnership.

How did women concert artistes assess other women performers? This chapter focuses on Clara Schumann’s private writings about piano virtuosas between the 1830s and 1842. Schumann’s commentaries offer many fresh insights. She identifies an unexpectedly large number of women concert pianists active in German-speaking Europe and names those who helped younger female colleagues; she also shows that most virtuosas composed, and performed their works in public. Perhaps most strikingly, Schumann exposes a professional environment fraught with intrasexual pressures. Often invited to play at the same soirées, and compared to each other by hosts, promoters, and reviewers, women artistes regularly navigated gendered workplaces. These circumstances explain why Schumann portrayed most virtuosas as challengers. This chapter argues that the intrasexual negativity and internalized sexism that coloured Schumann’s writings reflect the gender imbalance in her working environment, as women tend to compete against each other when pursuing career advancement in male-dominated professions.