Extensive source materials allow for a close look at the familial, artistic, and social networks that Clara Schumann built up over the course of her career, and by which she was supported. In this chapter, her mother, Mariane Bargiel (1797–1872), and her father, Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873), are discussed as representing separate branches of the family, as the parents divorced when Clara was not yet five years old. Both remarried and formed new families, from which Clara acquired half-siblings. With her marriage to Robert Schumann (1810–1856) in 1840, Clara added her husband’s birth family to her familial networks. Throughout her life, Clara strove to continue and develop these networks through her letters and visits, and above all, through her teaching activities with various family members.

This chapter examines the complex artistic and social interactions between Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn on the one hand and Robert and Clara Schumann on the other, situating these interactions within the broader social and professional contexts of nineteenth-century German Romanticism. It foregrounds the asymmetries between Felix’s close and mutually affirming partnership with Clara, marked by repeated collaborations and reciprocal admiration, and his more ambivalent relationship with Robert, in which collegial respect was tempered by scepticism towards music journalism and contrasting character and social status. Drawing on correspondence, diaries, and contemporary reception, the analysis highlights how differences in social background, privilege, and institutional position structured these relationships and conditioned perceptions of authority and artistry. Particular attention is paid to Clara’s evolving professional identity, her rapport with Fanny Hensel, and Robert’s persistent negotiation of Felix’s approval. The chapter thus illuminates both the cooperative and competitive dynamics underpinning nineteenth-century German musical culture and the intersection of gender, class, and religion in shaping artistic exchange.

The Schumann’s eight children are presented, their health and longevity documented, especially the fact that girls entered this household before boys. All four females and four males are considered in light of the family’s growth, Clara’s concert career, and Robert’s development as father, husband, and composer. Clara’s faith in her children is assessed for its resonance. Servants are contextualised, historically, economically, and socially, and Clara’s concertising viewed in light of eight children. Clara’s pregnancies and image of herself as a mother, particularly the way she mentored the children not to pursue musical careers, is treated. The whole household unit is assessed in relation to its size, health, and diverse psychology. Clara’s long widowhood and old-age are viewed in the contexts of late nineteenth-century Germany and, more pointedly, her surviving children. The ‘politics of the Schumann family’ is discussed in terms of its long evolution over many decades.

This chapter considers the cultural and musical life of the Schumanns in Dresden (1844–50) and Düsseldorf (1850–56). In imperial Dresden, they interacted with many writers and artists connected to the Art Museum, and with musicians at the court; and in commercial Düsseldorf, they engaged with the artistic circle around the City Orchestra, which Robert directed. In both cities music was a unifying social factor. Their friend, widely connected musician-composer Ferdinand Hiller paved the way for them in Dresden, where Clara was celebrated as a performer, while Robert wrote a large number of varied works. In Düsseldorf their roles differed, with Clara supporting Robert (he was a temperamental conductor, while still responsive to new creative opportunities). In both cases, the status of Robert and Clara as independent and individual artists throws light on the social and political conventions of these two very different societies.

This chapter on important singers in the Schumanns’ orbit considers the careers of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, Jenny Lind, Julius Stockhausen, and Pauline Viardot-García. It explores their work as a window into the general conditions of the singing profession during the nineteenth century. It also highlights their individual aesthetic and professional profiles with respect to operatic, concert, and salon performances, as well as, in the cases of Stockhausen and Viardot-García, their additional work as pedagogues and Viardot-García’s activities as a composer. The chapter also looks at the mutually influential and beneficial relationships between the Schumanns and these figures from both personal and artistic standpoints.

This chapter addresses the significance of Clara Schumann as a composer, focusing specifically on analytical studies of her music that embrace the multiple perspectives of the composer, performer, and listener. I emphasise modes of analysis that are concerned with matters of structure and form. Yet I also cast the analytical net more widely to include studies that explore such parameters as text–music relations, cultural analysis, and hermeneutic analysis. Although Clara’s pianism and interpretations of other composers is a closely related topic, it lies beyond the scope of this chapter, except when the music she performed left a marked imprint on her compositional output. Acknowledging the gendered opposition between performance and composition that Clara herself endorsed, I concentrate on the works she created, as those she recreated receive ample attention elsewhere.

Patrons and Patronage explains the various types of professional support and prestige that both Robert and Clara earned throughout their careers, including: payment from royalty (for Clara’s performances at court); status by association (such as Robert’s pre-approved dedication to Oscar I of Sweden); and backing from fellow musicians (such as Ferdinand Hiller’s job referrals for Robert). Clara and Robert further established themselves and supported their family by balancing payment from these sources alongside public performances (for Clara) and publishing (mostly for Robert). The chapter also presents biographical evidence that neither musician boasted the kind of sustained professional relationships with royal and wealthy benefactors that supported some of their contemporaries and generations of previous artists – a fact that surely affected the genres in which Clara did and did not compose.

The acceptance of the teaching position offered by the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main in 1878 marked a significant turning point in Clara Schumann’s artistic career. For the institution itself, it was no less a momentous decision: this step brought the Conservatory nationwide attention and a significant enhancement of its reputation. Both at the Conservatory and in her private teaching, Clara’s name stood for a tradition of piano playing that was widely acknowledged in the contemporary press as representing the ‘best traditions of an important era in pianoforte playing’ (Musical News 1891) or simply the ‘Schumann tradition’ (Davies 1925). Drawing on a corpus of sources including institutional records, letters, (auto)biographies, diaries, and other ‘ego-’documents, this chapter provides an overview of Clara’s teaching at the Hoch Conservatory, performance techniques, repertoire, modes of interpretation and reception, as well as institutional hierarchies of power.

This chapter addresses Clara Schumann’s engagement with the musical and cultural life of Baden-Baden and Frankfurt, situating her activities and relationships in the context of the institutions, historical events, and atmospheres of these two locations. From 1863 to 1873, Clara spent summers in the spa town of Baden-Baden and nearby Lichtenthal. The area boasted a lively cultural scene and a picturesque countryside, and Clara relished these features in the company of family and friends, including Brahms and Viardot-García. Frankfurt, on the other hand, was a major commercial city with a reputation for musical conservatism and was home to Clara during her final decades. The city was important for Clara’s late career as a pedagogue and pianist: she was a highly respected professor of piano at the Dr Hoch Conservatory from 1878 to 1892, and, aside from London, Frankfurt was where she most often performed after 1875.

Brahms’ first visit to the Schumanns in 1853 marked the beginning of rich friendships with both Robert and Clara. Though Robert’s life would be cut short, Clara and Brahms enjoyed a close personal and professional relationship for over 40 years, one rooted in mutual admiration and in aesthetic convictions they also had shared with Robert. The two pianists studied music and presented concerts together. Clara modelled the life of an artist and assisted in practical and artistic matters, introducing Brahms to her extensive network of professional contacts and offering feedback on new works. She programmed most of the solo pieces and chamber music with piano that Brahms created during the years she was performing publicly, thereby helping to establish these works. The partnership, vital to both artists’ growth, also furthered Robert’s legacy, as it gave Clara an additional, prominent platform from which to promote his music and ideas.

For much of his career, Robert Schumann was better known as a music critic than as a composer. At the age of twenty-one, he began writing for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung with a encomium to the young, unknown Chopin – ‘Hats off, gentlemen – a genius!’ Robert’s final essay ‘Neue Bahnen’ (‘New Paths’), published in 1853, similarly heralded the arrival of the young Brahms. This appeared in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the music journal Robert had established almost single-handedly in 1833–4 and edited (and managed) from 1835 to 1844. Under his decade-long control, the pages of this journal included dozens of his own essays, editorials, concert reviews, and, most abundantly, reviews of recently published music. ‘Neue Bahnen’ capped the most significant corpus of writing about music from the first half of the nineteenth century.

The musical foundations of the Bohemian Catholic Reformation were laid during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). Successive Habsburg emperors spent enormous sums on sacred music, which refashioned their image as protective fathers of their citizens, in a distinctive pietas austriaca, emulated competitively by aristocrats to demonstrate piety and loyalty.

Religious orders, especially Jesuits, prioritized education, combining Italian musical influences with older Bohemian traditions, such as those of “literary brotherhoods”: their vernacular strophic solo song followed Italian models while raising the status of the German and Czech languages. The balanced phrases of Italian canzonettas encouraged clear musical forms and cadence-oriented tonality, as in the hymns of Adam Michna.

Recreational music for aristocrats encouraged meraviglia, “marveling,” especially in the virtuosity of Heinrich Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (c. 1674), depending on scordatura (“mistuning” of the strings). Some such music imitates natural sounds ingeniously.

Czech-language music criticism first became prominent in the 1860s, and its authors often used their musical discussions to explore then-emerging political conversations, especially ethnocentric concepts of identity. Still, they drew their models from earlier, predominantly Germanophone music critics, historiographers, and aestheticians – writers who did not yet subscribe to such ethnocentric views. This chapter focuses on Germanophone writers, specifically Franz Xaver Niemetschek, Anton Müller, and August Wilhelm Ambros examining their perspectives on canonic composers of the past – particularly Mozart and Gluck – to illustrate the ideological underpinnings of Bohemian music criticism. Compounding the complexity of these critics’ ideas, twentieth-century scholars like Mirko Očadlík and Tomislav Volek reinterpreted both their writings and identities once again to reflect still new political goals.

Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory developed since the 1990s for the study of socialist and post-socialist East Central Europe, this chapter approaches opera as a crucial cultural site for (re)negotiating the relationship with “the West,” Soviet hegemony, and the Global South after 1948. It focuses on the ambivalence in representations of the racialized Other in Czech opera, which highlights the specific, lateral relationship between what was formally known as the Second and Third worlds. The chapter offers a close reading of the opera Jezero Ukereve (“Lake Ukerewe”) by Otmar Mácha, premiered in 1966. Featuring Black and mixed-race characters, the opera generally expresses empathy for and solidarity with the colonized populations, informed by the Czechs’ experience with German oppression, yet it unavoidably reproduces the colonial ideology of a civilizational mission. The opera is interpreted in relation to Czechoslovakia’s official Africa policy and the aesthetic debates about Czech New Music.