This chapter elaborates upon the claims I discussed in the introduction. First, I show what can be gained by taking Clara Schumann’s music on its own terms rather than measuring it against the music of her husband. Second, I argue that the traditional tools of music theory and analysis can reveal an enormous amount about her compositional craft – and, by extension, about the craft of other female composers. I also suggest that those tools themselves can be enriched by being applied to her music (principally in that her songs encourage us to use those tools in search not only of overt complexity and radical ingenuity but also of subtlety and expressive nuance). Finally, I claim that bringing the tools of the “new Formenlehre” to Clara Schumann’s songs allows us to appreciate the sophistication of her text-setting practices, and also to grapple with broader questions about the relationship between form and text in nineteenth-century art song.

This chapter assesses the state of Clara Schumann studies and argues that more attention needs to be devoted to her musical works. It previews three of the book’s main arguments: (1) that Clara Schumann should be viewed as her own song composer, rather than as a composer whose style and success are measured against her husband’s; (2) that detailed musical analysis has a crucial role to play in demonstrating her importance to the history of the nineteenth-century Lied; and (3) that musical form is indelibly linked to poetic form and meaning. The chapter also briefly outlines the content of the chapters to come.

In Chapter 5, ‘Presence of the Other’, the implicit subject / object split reintroduced into the musical subject by the need for its own self-recognition finds a potential solution in the presence of an other in whom the self may see itself mirrored. Indeed, Schumann’s writing and music suggest a blurring of identities and fusion of self and other that resonates strongly with the Romantic mythology of hermaphroditic union, as seen in the 1841 song collection Liebesfrühling jointly written with Clara. Through this mirroring and recognition of self in other, Schumann’s music may in certain cases be claimed to achieve a state of self-conscious awareness, to ‘hear itself singing’. Yet, as pointed to at the chapter’s close, such doubling of self and other always runs the risk of narcissism – the idea that the beloved object is merely a self-image, a fabrication of the subject’s desire.

Clara Schumann frequently deviates in her songs from the declamation that the rhythm of the poetry would suggest. The deviations are never haphazard; they can be understood in relation to the semantic and emotional content of the poetry. This chapter investigates the wide range of Schumann’s strategies of text-expressive declamation in songs from 1840 to 1853, focusing on the three songs from 1840 – ‘Am Strande’, ‘Ich stand in dunklen Träumen’ and ‘Volkslied’; on the Opp. 12 and 13 songs from 1841–43; and on the Rollett settings, Op. 23, from 1853. Schumann’s declamatory decisions in the songs from 1840 – particularly those affecting the elongation of particular syllables – already demonstrate her sensitive reading, profound understanding and effective musical rendering of poetic texts. In her later songs, she frequently crafts expressive declamatory processes that span entire songs, for example by adjusting the degree of unexpected declamation as the song progresses in accordance with the emotional trajectory of the poems. Her imaginative and expressive ‘way with words’ is one of the most distinctive aspects of her contributions to the lied repertoire.

Clara Schumann’s pedagogical significance has long been acknowledged. Her influence transcended her pupils, shaping not only piano performance, but concert culture and, indeed, the understanding of music’s aesthetic role, for over a century. From a music-historiographical perspective, scholars have argued for a more nuanced understanding of Schumann’s overlapping identities as pianist, composer, teacher, wife and mother. This arises from the belief that to understand a musician holistically is to understand all their activities, and the relationships these engender with families, colleagues, friends, teachers, students, audiences and critics (what Beatrix Borchard conceives as ‘constellations’ or networks), while acknowledging that no single account can fill all the gaps. Adopting Borchard’s ‘constellation’ approach to history, which reveals much about the structures of power conveyed by the teacher–pupil relationship, this chapter explores the perception of Schumann’s teaching legacy in the British reception of two famous pupils: Fanny Davies and Leonard Borwick. It examines how these pianists’ reputations overlapped with that of Schumann, according to their gender, nationality, repertoire and image. In doing so, it shows how these teacher–pupil relationships were simultaneously compressed (by the forces of critical writing) and stretched (by the individuality of each musician).

Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17, of 1846 holds a contested place in the nineteenth-century repertory. One of her finest compositional achievements, it was performed regularly throughout the nineteenth century. Yet she herself seems to have led the way for a languishing of its reputation when, upon its publication in 1847, she acknowledged that she ‘did not care for it particularly’ and that, by comparison to Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 63, composed a year later, it now ‘sounded effeminate and sentimental’. This may represent nothing more than an internalization of the widespread belief at this time in women’s inferiority as composers, but her self-doubt cast a long shadow. Clara Schumann’s Trio is usually cited in recent scholarship merely to contextualize Robert Schumann’s Trios (Daverio, 1997; Nemko, 1997), or to exemplify the composer’s capacity for withdrawal into the private musical sphere by way of coping with the emotional and psychological distress with which she was dealing when she composed the piece (Reich, 1985, Rev. 2001; Ferris, 2004).

This chapter considers Schumann’s Trio in relation to a range of contemporaneous piano trios, and through the lens of the New Formenlehre, giving particular emphasis to fugal passages in the opening and closing movements. The striking pianistic virtuosity of this Trio is matched by a compositional virtuosity that significantly enhances our understanding of romantic sonata form. Schumann’s innovations are explored in relation to the Schumannian belief that only through interiority might virtuosity be legitimized and elevated. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Schumann’s Trio as a formal model for later Piano Trios by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Bedřich Smetana.

In recent decades scholars have done much to bring Clara Schumann from the peripheries into a more central position in music studies. Alongside developments in archival research and biographical studies, there have been increasing waves of critical engagement with her activities as performer and teacher, together with a flowering of analytical interest in her music. This chapter takes stock of these developments vis-à-vis the changing landscape of women in music, by way of setting the scene for the essays that follow.

At Clara Schumann’s concerts, Robert Schumann’s sets of piano character pieces met audiences only through her own reshaping and recontextualization. She extracted pieces from some sets for ‘mosaics’ of two or more pieces, potentially from different opuses and by different composers. In other cases, she performed piano sets in abridged or reordered versions. This chapter closely considers several of Schumann’s mosaics, as well as her several versions of Kreisleriana. It argues that Schumann’s reworkings of her husband’s piano sets were acts of compositional agency that reflected her own strategies. In her mosaics, she juxtaposed pieces to create new textural, tonal, motivic or stylistic interrelationships and, in her abridged versions of sets, changed their larger structures in both radical and subtle ways.

Examining this aspect of Clara Schumann’s performances can nuance how we understand her image as her husband’s pianistic champion, reminding us that she cultivated this image while participating in practices that allowed performers to customize works. More broadly, it invites us to recognize a musical work as a building block for a concert, and to recognize that performers’ decisions shape how features seemingly fixed within the score can take on varying significances within this larger context.

If not an idée fixe in scholarship, the notion of musical exchanges among intimates of the Schumanns’ circle probably counts at least as a Leitfaden. Clara Schumann’s wistful instrumental romances – and those composed by Robert Schumann, Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms – encourage a reconsideration of the role that ‘conversations’ played for her within the miniature genre. We begin with a chronology of the romances composed by this circle between 1829 and 1893 – predominantly for solo piano, but also for violin and piano, oboe and piano, string quartet, piano or violin and orchestra, orchestra, and cello and piano – and discuss how these ‘conversations’ could yield subtle allusions, performative physical memories and nostalgic recollections. Focusing on Clara Schumann’s Romances Opp. 21 and 22, this study brings forward aspects of formal and textural ambiguity, and virtuosity, all of which help reveal Clara Schumann’s contribution to the genre, while elucidating how her complex, multifaceted roles in the private and public spheres did not impede her from continuously challenging herself as a composer as she engaged in nuanced musical dialogues inspired by her circle.

Even though she never traversed the Atlantic to tour or visit the New World, Clara Schumann was a regular subject of the American press in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, her widespread celebrity meant that daily newspapers, trade journals and leisure periodicals fashioned Schumann in many different – and sometimes competing – ways. On the one hand, factual reports informed readers of her professional activities, personal life and European reception. On the other hand, such information could be used by editors like John Sullivan Dwight, critics like George Upton, writers like Aubertine Woodward, and publishers like John Church, to advance their own agendas. As a result, the Schumann depicted in the American press in the aggregate during her lifetime might more accurately be characterized as ‘Schumann’ – a symbolic figure who not only appealed to America’s nascent celebrity culture, but who could also be invoked to shape important aesthetic, social and artistic issues.

In the nineteenth century, letters functioned as bridges between people. Brahms as a correspondent was part of many interconnected social webs; thus, his letters offer a view into this world. The vicissitudes of lifelong friendships, such as that with Joseph Joachim, can be traced seismographically through his greetings: from the romantic, rapturous letters of the twenty-year-old (‘Dear Friend of my heart!’, ‘Beloved Friend!’) to the ‘Dearest’ he used until 1863, the reserved ‘Dear Joachim’ after the crisis in the Joachims’ marriage (1883) or ‘Most honoured one’ (1886), until the restored intimacy of ‘Dear Friend’ (1894). Many of the composer’s letters, beyond the lifelong, established correspondents like Joachim or Clara Schumann, also trace the Brahms network. They are interwoven into a synchronous toing and froing of letters, for example in the early correspondence between all the Schumann friends: Brahms, Joachim, Grimm, Dietrich and so forth, which can be read in parallel.

Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.

‘Today, my dear wife, née Nissen, successfully delivered a healthy boy. 7th May 1833. J. J. Brahms.’ Thus, on 8 May 1833Johann Jakob Brahms announced the birth of his first son Johannes in the local paper, the Privileged Weekly General News of and for Hamburg (Privilegirte wöchentliche gemeinnützige Nachrichten von und für Hamburg). At a time when such announcements were the exception, this was a clear sign of pride. Johann Jakob Brahms or Brahmst, as he also spelled it, was born on 1 June 1806 in Heide in Holstein, the second son of the innkeeper and trader Johann Brahms, who had moved to Heide from Brunsbüttel via Meldorf. His ancestors were from Lower Saxony. Johann Jakob completed a five-year apprenticeship as a city wait in Heide and Wesselburen, during which he learned the flugelhorn, flute, violin, viola and cello, then standard instruments. In early 1826, the young journeyman began his travels with his certificate of apprenticeship, received in December 1825.

Robert Schumann’s 1853 essay ‘New Paths’ is famous for its prophetic introduction of the young Johannes Brahms to the wider German musical community. In this, his last piece of published criticism, Schumann presented Brahms, then a virtually unknown young composer, as a Messiah-like figure for a nascent musical era, one who would be called to ‘give the highest expression to the times in an ideal manner’ The final sentence of Schumann’s essay has often been overlooked, but it is significant for the glimpse that it offers of the place that he envisioned for Brahms in the future: ‘In every era there presides a secret league of kindred spirits. Draw the circle tighter, you who belong together, that the truth of art may shine ever more clearly, spreading joy and blessings everywhere!’ [see Ch. 31 ‘Germany’].

Although Brahms was a fine pianist and the composer of major repertory for the instrument, he is not normally regarded as having established a ‘school’ of performance as such; certainly not like his pianist-composer contemporaries Liszt and Anton Rubinstein whose numerous students promoted their teaching through technical features of performance. Although Brahms wrote an extensive set of exercises – the 51 Exercises WoO 6 (published in 1893, but apparently dating from the 1850s and 1860s) – which clearly address the technical requirements of his own works, he often showed little interest in public performance and did not especially promote his piano works apart from the concertos (at least on the inconsistent evidence of documented first performances). By comparison, he premiered virtually all his piano chamber music: only one work, the First Piano Quartet Op. 25 was definitely not given by him [see Ch. 9 ‘As Pianist’].