Becoming Clara Schumann

Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon

Alexander Stefaniak

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253058270
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband's death.Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music.

Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband's music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann's concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1, 300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband's music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager.

By highlighting Schumann's navigation of her musical culture's gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.

1

SCHUMANN’S EARLY-CAREER CONCERT VEHICLES

Transcendent Interiority and the Cutting Edge of Popular Pianism

AS I STRESSED IN THE INTRODUCTION, CLARA SCHUMANN made the canonic tradition an important part of her concerts from early in her career. This chapter, however, considers a different repertoire that Schumann performed during the 1830s and early 1840s, the decade and a half after her concert debut: popularly styled piano showpieces, including opera fantasies and variations. Analyzing this facet of Schumann’s performances not only provides insight into her strategies during this formative period but also sheds light on her changing engagement with the canonic tradition.

Schumann’s 1830s and early 1840s programs exemplified a standard performance practice of the time: even concerts that featured music from the canonic tradition routinely mixed the venerable and the fashionable, often giving a prominent role to music from the operatic stage. This was particularly true of concerts given by orchestras and by virtuoso soloists. At an orchestral concert, for example, a Beethoven or Haydn symphony might follow numbers from a hit opera or a touring virtuoso playing their own latest showpiece.¹ Schumann, at her 1830 solo debut, performed Kalkbrenner’s Introduction and Rondo Brillant for piano and orchestra op. 101, Henri Herz’s variations on a theme from Meyerbeer’s Il Crociato in Egitto, and Czerny’s Quartet Concertant op. 230 “on several beloved themes” for four pianos.² Table 1.1 provides two of her programs from the late 1830s and early 1840s, when she had been performing Beethoven and Bach for several years. Here, audiences also experienced her virtuosity in Henselt’s best-selling etudes and in expansive opera variations and fantasies, here Sigismund Thalberg’s Fantaisie sur des thèmes de “Moïse,” op. 33 (based on a Rossini opera), and her own Variations de concert sur la Cavatine du “Pirate,” de Bellini, op. 8.

Table 1.1. Two Clara Wieck programs from the mid-1830s and early 1840s. Some sets of short solo pieces listed as single numbers to reflect the organization of the printed program.

March 1, 1837. Berlin (Programmsammlung 110). Wieck’s solos shown in bold.

1.Kücken: [unspecified] Lied 2.Beethoven: Sonata op. 57, “Appassionata” (auf Verlangen, all three movements) 3.Spohr: [unspecified] Duet from Jessonda 4.Bach: Fugue in D major [probably no. 5 from the Well-Tempered book 1]; Mendelssohn: Lied ohne Worte (from manuscript); Chopin: Mazurka op. 6, no. 1 and Etude op. 10, no. 11 1.Henselt: Andante and Allegro op. 3 (from manuscript, Auf Verlangen) 2.[Unspecified] Declamation 3.Taubert and Curschmann: [unspecified] Lieder 4.Wieck: “Pirate” Variations op. 8

March 4, 1840: Hamburg (Programmsammlung 172).

1.Onslow: Allegro from String Quintet in A minor [op. 34 or 58] 2.Beethoven: “Appassionata” 3.Schubert: Ständchen 4.R. Schumann: Novelette from op. 21; Chopin: Nocturne op. 9, no. 3; Schubert-Liszt, “Erlkönig” 1.Beethoven: Piano Trio op. 97, “Archduke” 2.Curschmann: “An Rose” 3.Thalberg: “Moïse” Fantasy op. 33

Schumann ultimately dropped such music from her repertoire and intensified her investment in the canonic tradition. After the mid-1840s, opera fantasies and Henselt etudes never played a significant role in her concerts.³ In an 1841 diary entry, she suggested that her own aesthetics had changed. She had just performed Beethoven sonatas for two of Robert’s colleagues and, in the entry, drew a distinction between the “true music” of Beethoven and Bach and what she was coming to regard as the merely “mechanical” virtuosity of Henselt, Thalberg, and Liszt: “[The guests’] cultivation is directed more at virtuosity than at true music. A Bach fugue, for example, bores them. . . . I pity the musician who lacks a sense of this splendid art. The less I play in public now, the more hateful mechanical virtuosity becomes for me! Concert pieces such as Henselt’s etudes, fantasies by Thalberg, Liszt, etc. have become completely repugnant to me. . . . I will not play these things again unless I need them for a concert tour.”⁴

When scholars have considered how these fashionable showpieces figured into Schumann’s performances, they have emphasized strategies of audience appeal. Janina Klassen writes that Schumann gave her “Pirate” Variations “the merits of a hit meant to sweep the listener away,” and Nancy Reich’s account of Schumann’s 1830’s programming stresses her and her father’s savvy understanding of audiences’ tastes.⁵ Such analyses rest on solid ground. They accord with broader studies of how such works offered pleasurable, accessible listening.⁶ Indeed, as table 1.1 illustrates, Schumann used opera-based variation sets as rousing finales, and, as we will see, played them as encores.

At the same time, I would like to argue that there was another important dimension to Clara Schumann’s performances of popular piano showpieces during the 1830s and early 1840s. A few such works represented one way in which she sought to embody contemporary aspirations about virtuosity’s potential cultural and aesthetic significance. Schumann programmed several cutting-edge showpieces that, in her contemporaries’ imaginations, transcended a primarily mechanical, sensuous approach to virtuosity. These included Chopin’s Variations sur “Là ci darem la mano,” op. 2; Henselt’s Variations de concert sur le motif de “L’elisir d’amore” de Donizetti, op. 1, Etudes op. 2, and Andante and Concert Allegro op. 3; and fantasies by Thalberg. Schumann programmed this music frequently and gave it prominent positions in her concerts, and she became known as a proponent of Chopin and Henselt. Moreover, she emulated features of Chopin’s and Henselt’s music in her own Romance variée op. 3, Piano Concerto op. 7, and “Pirate” Variations.

Nineteenth-century discourse about elevating virtuosity intertwined many aesthetic categories, but the writers I consider here specifically couched their claims in terms of interiority. Scholars have identified interiority as a foundational ideal in Romantic musical aesthetics, within and beyond German contexts and from the concert stage to the salon.⁷ Listeners heard interiority in a wide range of music, including but not limited to the canonic tradition: for example, the way performers interpreted musical works (see chapter 2), the unfolding of a Beethoven sonata, or the German Lied.⁸ The cases I am considering here focus our attention on how pianists could stage interiority with specific, highly virtuosic showpieces. By “interiority,” I am not necessarily describing an affect—a tender quality one might describe as innig. Rather, the term describes how Schumann’s contemporaries conceptualized particular instances of virtuosic display: where virtuosity issued from, how it resonated with the listener, and how it related to other elements of a composition. Writers imagined various ways in which interiority could combine with resplendent virtuosity. Some urged readers to hear the music fully transcending the physical, while others imagined a synthesis of the sensuous and the interior. They identified a wide range of musical features that, for them, conveyed transcendent interiority. All converged on the claim that interiority was a prized quality, one that set some instances of virtuosity apart from supposedly shallow others.

By making these showpieces integral to her concerts, and by emulating them in her own compositions, Schumann aligned herself with one of her culture’s most pervasive aspirations for music’s cultural prestige. Regardless of what she herself believed about opera variations and Henselt’s etudes during the 1830s and early 1840s, she was well aware of how musical tastemakers were touting them. This aspect of Schumann’s work offers a window into a broader reality. During this part of the century, elevating the prestige of virtuosity could indeed mean engaging with the canonic tradition. But this aspiration also shaped a more expansive, varied field of repertory and critical discourse that included recent, fashionable showpieces.

Considering this early career strategy of Schumann’s ultimately gives us a more nuanced perspective on her mid-1840s shift in programming, clarifying that when she transformed her concert repertoire, she was phasing out one approach to elevating virtuosity and redoubling her investment in another that was becoming increasingly central to her concert world. It also points us toward a new way of understanding one of Schumann’s most substantial midcareer compositions, her Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann op. 20.

Constructing Interiority and the Cultural Prestige of (Some) Virtuosity

The ideal of interiority in keyboard performance was not a nineteenth-century invention. As Wolfgang Scherer has observed, for example, eighteenth-century clavichord and harpsichord treatises described the imitation of vocal effects as a way of manifesting the player’s spirit or even of giving the mechanical instrument a soul.⁹ By Schumann’s time, however, critics had become intensely preoccupied with constructing hierarchies according to which some instances of virtuosity combined displays of physical dexterity with inner qualities and some did not. The rhetoric of interiority was conventional and ubiquitous. Indeed, although many nineteenth-century writers on music—most famously Robert Schumann—read widely in literature and philosophy, they also encountered impassioned discussion about the value of interiority and the stigma of mechanical virtuosity in music journals. Music criticism offered an important context in which writers’ and musicians’ aspirations about interiority took shape, providing a forum, vocabulary, and conceptual framework.

Reviews of pianist-composers contain numerous examples. Viennese piano teacher, composer, and scholar Joseph Fischhof invoked interiority in an attempt to validate Liszt’s extravagant performing gestures and lively facial expressions. His language stressed the priority of interior over exterior—Liszt’s gestures were, in Fischof’s mind, only a reflection of his inner being, and his physical engagement with the instrument faded before his effect on listener’s inner souls: “This fantastic exterior, however, is only the shell of an inner volcano, out of which tones are hurled like flames and giant wreckage—not something ingratiating, but something colossally thundering. Because one thinks not of his hands, nor of their technique, nor of the instrument . . . he grips our souls and draws them powerfully to a height that makes Philistines dizzy.”¹⁰ When Heinrich Heine applied the rhetoric of interiority to Chopin, he placed greater emphasis on compositions. Reporting from Paris in 1843, he imagined that Chopin’s works possessed inherent depths that took precedence over the music’s display of physical technique: “I completely forget the mastery of piano playing, and sink into the sweet abysses of his music, into the painful loveliness of his creations, which are as deep as they are delicate.” Such a quality distinguished Chopin as “much more a composer than a virtuoso”: a musician whose achievements went beyond extraordinary capability at the instrument. For that reason, Heine wrote, he preferred Chopin to Thalberg.¹¹ More equivocal was Eduard Hanslick’s 1869 assessment of Thalberg. Looking back on the pianist-composer’s compositions, Hanslick expressed reservations but hinted at traces of interiority...