How Good Was Clara Schumann?

 So how good was Clara Schumann?

Obviously she was one of the greatest pianists of her day, and in many ways had a much more satisfying, meaningful piano career than Franz Liszt. Liszt only played a full-time recital schedule for 11 years, from which we derive his entire reputation as a pianist. When the complete piano works of Liszt were recorded, they fit on 101 CDs, there is no way Liszt could have written anything like that much piano music and kept up a full time concert schedule. Perhaps considering the music's variable quality, the world might have been better served if he gave a few more concerts... but even listeners like me who are Liszt skeptics have derived hours and hours of joy from his music.

Clara Schumann on the other hand, had a 61 year solo career, most of it full-time. There are still programs from 1300 concerts she gave. For her time, Liszt was like Horowitz, Argerich, Richter, who only emerged ever so seldom and whose every appearance was an event. But Clara was the true workhorse: of her era, she was the Arrau, Rubinstein, Barenboim, who year in and year out, appeared before a public of whole family trees who were born and died part of a public grateful for her every concert. Only artist of iron will and deepest seriousness could manage a concert schedule and perform with consistent excellence.

Was she as great a composer as some people suddenly allege? Well, yes... and no... and yes... and...

• Tonight we in Baltimore heard the Clara Schumann Piano Concerto. It is by no means a masterpiece. Most of it is quite a bit less than that. But then again, neither frankly are the piano concertos of either Chopin or Liszt. Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto does, however, have a middle slow section as stunning as any music written by any composer in the generation of the Schumanns.
• On the other hand, Clara Schumann wrote it when she was sixteen. SIXTEEN! When she was on the verge of an unlimited future in music and seemed as though her talent could go in a hundred different directions.
• On the other hand, at sixteen, Mendelssohn had written his Midsummer Night's Dream Overture and a number of String Symphonies more interesting than this. Schubert had written his Household Quartet and first symphony, both of which are very nearly masterpieces. And Mozart?... well he'd already completed Lucio Silla and Ascanio in Alba, which for most composers would be of a quality to consider the crowning achievement of their careers. Since most of C. Schumann's output comes from the beginning of her career, that's what we have to judge her by. Was she a Schubert or Mendelssohn? Well, certainly not...
• On the other hand, most great composers do not show the extent of their capability until adulthood, and sometimes, well into middle age. If Clara Schumann wrote music every day of her life the way her husband or Brahms did, I suppose it's entirely possible she'd have been as great a composer as they. No one can possibly say that she did not have some sort of divine musical gift.
• On the other hand, there is another category of composer. The child prodigy composer who then became legendary performers: Jascha Heifetz, Vladimir Horowitz, Fritz Kreisler, Igor Markevitch, George Szell, Andre Previn, these were all legendary performers who showed extreme early promise as composers, but found their vocation on the concert stage.

So therefore, I would argue that Clara Schumann was one of the very few women throughout music history who got all the opportunities to reach her full potential she could possibly wish for. She was one of the very greatest performers in the history of the piano and was, in addition, a very fine composer. That's enough, and compared not only to most women but to 99.99% of her peers, that is a life full of the most spectacular achievement.

The confluence of factors which created Clara Schumann is both fascinating and easy to draw specious conclusions. On the one hand, she clearly lost creative opportunities by choosing motherhood, by choosing to support her husband's career and champion his music rather than create her own, and let's not forget, garden variety sexism would have made acceptance of her music colossally harder than it had to be - regardless of how great.

...On the other hand, Clara Schumann only got to develop her talent to the extent of her abilities because her father Friedrich Wieck worked her just as hard as Leopold Mozart worked Wolfgang and Nannerl. The demands of a male created Clara Schumann, and many fathers more sympathetic to women did not make that level of demands on their daughters, and as a result, we have no idea of their talents. When Wieck tried to stop the Schumann marriage in court and spread all kinds of rumors about Robert, it was partially because he felt his daughter was throwing it all away on a mentally unstable man whose talent was inferior to his daughter's, but it was also because Friedrich Wieck saw that his daughter was throwing her independence away - and he worried that she would become little more than a footstool to another musician rather than an immortally great musician in her own right.

Obviously, C. Schumann's career as a composer was set back by choosing to have a family life for which she bore eight children. On the other hand, child-rearing among the 19th century bourgeois was a rather different thing: much of which was done, post-pregnancy anyway, by wet-nurses, governesses, and maidservants. Clara Schumann could not have resumed a spectacular solo career after her children grew up and Robert died unless she put in hours of daily practice to maintain her abilities during her years of motherhood. Even in the 19th century, you didn't return to professional pianism after maintaining a casual relationship to the piano for twenty years. Clara decided to be the keeper of Robert's legacy through many performances of his work, but if she really and truly had evidence of compositional talent that exceeded her extraordinary pianism, she literally had forty years after Robert's death to pursue it. And if her music ran into trouble with critics, such critics could not possibly have given her more trouble than her own musical cliques gave to Bruckner, occasionally at her own encouragement.

Considering how little I have to lose, I'll just say flat out that the effort to promote women composers from history, to me, seems like a deeply misguided effort - effort that could be spent in pursuit of promoting great women composers today, or sifting through 800 years of unheard masterpieces which have to collect dust for yet another generation because the only concert real estate permitted for anything but the newest music is music from underrepresented demographics whose music was, by definition, not properly developed. Lilli Boulanger is a grand exception - a properly trained talent by her father whom, had she survived even as long as Mozart would be, I believe, considered the greatest composer France has produced in literally hundreds of years. But to promote musicians like Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn to fully canonical status, let alone mediocrities like Amy Beach and Ethyl Smyth, is to erase the existence of the problem - if we were to pretend that there were more than half a dozen female composers in the era of common practice tonality making music the equal of the greatest of the great (and, for the record, there weren't), how would that not be erasing the extent of classical music's gender problem?

'Art music' was a career barely available throughout history to any but the haute bourgeois, gentry, and aristocracy, and at least we hear Clara Schumann's explosive talent speak through a few dozen works that don't necessarily put her talent to the best use, but truly lower class musicians of all genders and races were utterly confined to ephemeral bands of folk musicians whose talent can never be transmitted to posterity in the slightest, and those are only the musically talented people permitted to pursue music as a career, 99% of whom were men. So who then is really and truly erased? Clara Schumann, who was the Arthur Rubinstein of her era, or the millions of artistically gifted women in every generation who had to spend their lives away from everything which could have enlivened both them and us? Which of them deserves to have their narrative of frustrated creativity less than Clara Schumann does?

The past is the past, and we can't do anything about how male-or-race-or-class-centric it was. Talent is not achievement, it needs the space to be properly developed, and tragically, woman composers were not allowed to develop their abilities to the best of their extent - just as 99% of lower-class men were. What we can do is chip away every day for the future at making that lack of opportunity a thing of the past, and give the great talents we see today every opportunity to express their full potential.

...will I be writing my obituary if I post a link to this to twitter?