Clara Schumann, Creator

On June 10, 1853, having just finished two songs based on poems from Hermann Rollett’s novel Jucunde, Clara Schumann opened her diary and wrote about the feeling of exhilaration that overwhelmed her. “Composing gives me great pleasure,” she said, adding with astonishment, “I wrote my last song in 1846, seven years ago!”Footnote ¹ Buoyed by that sense of exhilaration, she kept composing. Less than two weeks later she had completed an entire collection of songs on Rollett’s poems. The June 22 entry from her diary reads, “Today I set the sixth song by Rollett, and thus I have collected a volume of songs, which give me pleasure, and have given me many happy hours. … There is nothing which surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.”Footnote ² These six songs, published two years later as her op. 23, were some of the last she ever composed; fifteen days later, on July 7, 1853, she finished her Goethe setting “Das Veilchen” and never wrote another song.

The diary entry describing the composition of op. 23, especially its line about the “joy of creation,” has been quoted often – in scholarly works and in the popular press. Nancy Reich, in her groundbreaking biography of Schumann, highlights the passage in a section dealing with the ambivalence she felt about her creative work.Footnote ³ The lines are quoted in a 2012 article from The Guardian, about a Google doodle celebrating her 194th birthday (alas, Google did not celebrate her 200th).Footnote ⁴ There is even a biography of Schumann for young adults, called The Joy of Creation.Footnote ⁵

For all the airplay that these words have received, however, and for all that they underscore how much Schumann enjoyed composing and longed to do it more, her activities as a performer and the details of her life are better understood than the music she wrote. The past few decades have seen an outpouring of scholarship on Schumann, but the bulk of it is historical and editorial, not analytical. On the historical side, there are important biographies and studies of her career as a performer.Footnote ⁶ On the editorial side, there are valuable editions of her letters, diaries, and compositions.Footnote ⁷ Still, despite these strides, her music remains relatively understudied. In 1990, the German musicologist Janina Klassen published a pathbreaking book containing analyses of Schumann’s piano works,Footnote ⁸ and since then a number of scholars have written articles on various aspects of her music.Footnote ⁹ But to date there is no scholarly monograph devoted to her music aside from Klassen’s, and none that focuses on her songs. (Indeed, the number of monographs devoted to music by women composers is fairly small, and most of those books deal with twentieth-century composers.)Footnote ¹⁰ Schumann’s music, in short, is known but not known very well, or at least not well enough. That she was a gifted composer is widely acknowledged. But why she was such a gifted composer, what defined her musical aesthetic, and what made her music uniquely and unmistakably her own – this is less understood.

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Why have studies of Schumann’s life and career as a performer overshadowed studies of her music? One reason is that she spent far more of her life performing than composing. She plainly regarded herself as more of a performer-composer than a composer-performer, so it is no surprise that critics and scholars have done likewise. Nancy Reich has written that Schumann “genuinely believed her primary field of competence was as a performer: an interpretive rather than a creative artist,” citing as evidence (among other things) a passage from a letter to the violinist Joseph Joachim, in which she wrote, “Bin ich auch nicht producierend, so doch reproducierend” (I’m not so much a producer as a reproducer).Footnote ¹¹

Another reason is that she wrote relatively few works of music – precisely because she devoted so much of her time to performing, and also because, as a woman, she faced more impediments to a career as a composer than did her male contemporaries. Her solo piano works number fewer than thirty; so do her songs. She wrote almost all her songs between the year she was married (1840) and the year Robert died (1856),Footnote ¹² and basically stopped composing after his death. (She wrote her Romance in B minor in 1856, a few months after Robert died, and twenty-three years later she wrote a march for piano four hands, in celebration of the wedding anniversary of two friends. But that is it: two works in the forty years separating his death and her own, in 1896.) There is simply less music to analyze than with many other composers. One might even conclude – believing that lower levels of productivity correlate with lower levels of quality – that there is less music worth analyzing. If Schumann had been a man, this might not have been such an obstacle to recognition (Henri Duparc wrote only seventeen mélodies, and they are regarded as pinnacles of the genre). Yet if a female composer has written only a modest number of works, they are more likely to be overlooked.

A third factor that has contributed to the neglect of Clara Schumann’s music is that she expressed doubt about it, reflecting the “anxiety of authorship” that plagued so many female creators in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹³ In November 1839, she wrote in her diary, “I once believed that I had creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not wish to compose – there never was one able to do it. Am I intended to be the one? I would be arrogant to believe that.”Footnote ¹⁴ And the dedications on the pieces she gave to Robert as birthday and Christmas gifts are laced with self-deprecating comments: “Composed and dedicated to her ardently beloved Robert with the deepest modesty,” her own italics emphasizing her hesitancy; “To my beloved husband, … this renewed feeble attempt from his old Clara”; and so on.

All of this, however, needs to be understood in context. In focusing on performance over composition, in writing relatively few works, and in expressing doubt about the works she wrote, she was abiding by prevailing societal expectations that a woman should be modest and humble and leave the creation of artworks to men.Footnote ¹⁵ (One senses both her acceptance of these expectations and her desire to overcome them – a tug between ambition and resignation – in her words “I once believed that I had creative talent, but I have given up this idea. … It would be arrogant to believe that.”) She was also, as Reich notes, in the habit of comparing herself (unfavorably) with her husband, whom she revered as a composer. “Any musician married to such a figure,” Reich writes, “would find his stature intimidating; as the younger of the two, she asked for his criticism, but feared and resented it at the same time. She accepted fully the dictum that the husband was the dominating figure in a marriage.”Footnote ¹⁶

In any case, whatever doubts Clara Schumann may have expressed about her work, they are belied by its quality. One of the most important things we can do, therefore, to celebrate her achievements and reveal the stunning artistry of her compositional craft is to look closely at the music she wrote.

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My book places Clara Schumann’s music front and center, focusing on her small but extraordinary output of songs. One of my goals is to illuminate her underexamined songs, to explore what makes them so distinctive, so affecting, and so lasting. Yet the book is not only about her songs. An equally important goal is to use her songs to raise several broader questions about the analysis of music by women composers and the analysis of nineteenth-century song. The book treats Clara Schumann’s songs as a prism, casting light not just on them but also through them, using this small body of music to make several claims that extend beyond it. I spell out these claims in detail in the pages that follow, but a rough sketch of them here can give a feeling for the various contexts into which I place her music.

The first claim has to do with the relationship between Clara Schumann’s and Robert Schumann’s musical styles – and, more broadly, with the common tendency to tie female composers to the dominant male figures in their lives. Historically, Clara Schumann’s music has been placed in the shadow of her husband’s and discussed mainly in relation to his. Comparisons of Clara’s music with Robert’s have yielded valuable insights, but they have also tended to treat his music as a center of gravity that exerts a constant influence on hers. Her music has generally been treated as merely more or less like his (and, all too often, as less successful than his); the rules of engagement have been determined by his musical aims and predilections rather than her own. My book is guided by the conviction that Clara Schumann’s music ought to be taken on its own terms, so that we can get a complete and accurate picture of her style and her achievements as a song composer – and also by the belief that this is a useful way to study music by other women composers, particularly those who stand directly in the shadow of a more famous male composer.Footnote ¹⁷ Doing so need not mean removing Robert from the picture entirely, or arguing that Clara’s songs are in no way related to his. This would be as much of a distortion as arguing that their songs are identical. But it should, as a general rule, mean letting her music dictate the kinds of analytical approaches we take to it and the kinds of things we find in it.

This brings me to my second broader claim: detailed musical analysis has a crucial role to play in demonstrating Clara Schumann’s importance to the history of the nineteenth-century Lied and, by extension, in developing a deeper understanding of the achievements of women composers, whose music is still woefully under-analyzed compared with the music of their male counterparts. In this I echo Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft, editors of the ongoing four-volume series Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers. In the introduction to the first volume they note that while the amount of research into music by women has grown enormously in the past twenty years, detailed discussions of that music are still relatively uncommon; music analysis, they argue, can “supply something that has hitherto been lacking in the discourse surrounding music by women composers: evidence from the works themselves.”Footnote ¹⁸ Gathering this kind of evidence, engaging in this kind of close reading, need not mean rejecting traditional analytical tools. Nor, however, should it mean hewing doggedly with tools that place a premium on the very qualities – large-scale “coherence,” structural “unity,” and so on – that are often absent (which is not to say “lacking”) from works, like Clara Schumann’s songs, that are smaller in scale and more modest in their ambitions. The most productive approach, and the best way to reveal the marvels of her songs, is to use the most powerful tools available as sensitively and musically as possible, attuned to the various contexts that gave rise to the music and open to adapting those tools as we encounter new repertoires.

My third main claim has to do with the need for more analysis of form in Romantic song. The main tools that I employ in this book are inspired by recent work in the “new Formenlehre,” a subdiscipline of music theory that explores the formal strategies, processes, and types that define common-practice-era music. Indeed, my book is the first to apply these tools exclusively to texted music.Footnote ¹⁹ In recent years, scholars of the new Formenlehre have turned their sights on Romantic music, in an effort to understand how nineteenth-century composers modified the formal conventions of their eighteenth-century predecessors. (I discuss some of this work in the next chapter.) As they have done this, however, they have focused mainly on instrumental genres. In our ongoing exploration of Romantic form, it is vital that we bring these theories to vocal music as well. Doing so affords us a richer view of Romantic practice as a whole and reveals the many ways that the formal strategies of nineteenth-century song composers are dependent upon their reading strategies. As I have suggested elsewhere, song composers’ decisions about such things as theme-types, phrase lengths, melodic contours, cadences, and key areas are intertwined with their understanding of such things as poetic rhythm and meter, rhyme schemes, punctuation, and syntax, not to mention the images, ideas, and affects conveyed by a poem.Footnote ²⁰ This is no truer than in Clara Schumann’s songs. For example, as I discuss in the coming chapters, she shows a remarkable sensitivity to the flow of poetic syntax and the effect of different strategies of poetic closure. Her songs exhibit a strange and wonderful mixture of regularity and fluidity – regularity because they tend to move in four-bar chunks, and fluidity because those chunks somehow do not feel like chunks; they feel like undulating arcs of motion, like the crests of a gentle sine wave. This sine wave quality, this long-breathed continuity, is, I believe, a direct result of her keen awareness of the continuity of poetic texts – the way ideas, feelings, word repetitions, and structures of syntax flow across line and stanza breaks, pushing onward toward the poem’s final, decisive full stop.

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As a whole, the book moves from the general to the specific. Part I (“Context and Style”) contains two chapters. Chapter 1 (“Three Assumptions”) spells out the three claims that I outlined earlier, having to do with the importance of treating Clara Schumann as her own song composer, analyzing her songs closely, and bringing the new Formenlehre to Romantic song. Chapter 2 (“Three Hallmarks”) discusses three stylistic fingerprints of Schumann’s songs: a fascination with expansive themes that unfold in long-breathed arcs, a tendency to undermine cadences so that each arc pushes onward to the next and decisive closure arrives only at the end of songs, and an inventive use of piano texture.

With this framework in place, I move, in Part II (“Analyses”), to more detailed discussions of Schumann’s songs. This part of the book is divided into two chapters. Chapter 3 (“Songs without Opus Numbers”) explores her songs that were not published in separate opuses, including her earliest songs, composed in the 1830s, before her marriage, as well as several songs from the 1840s. The main goal of this chapter is to highlight some of the stylistic hallmarks that are present even in compositions from her youth, and that become even more pronounced in her later songs. Chapter 4 (“Songs with Opus Numbers”) concentrates on Schumann’s three published song opuses: the three songs from op. 12 (a collaborative song cycle that she produced with Robert), the six songs of her op. 13 collection, and the Sechs Lieder aus Jucunde, op. 23, the songs that filled her with a sense of joy and self-forgetfulness when she wrote them in the summer of 1853. As with my discussion of the songs without opus numbers, here, too, I show how the songs of opp. 12, 13, and 23 bear the telltale signs of her songwriting style. At the same time, I make a broader argument about a feature that binds these three opuses together and distinguishes them from Schumann’s other songs: they show a preoccupation with strophic form, deploying this commonplace song form in ways that are at once subtle and novel.

I have structured Chapters 3 and 4 in such a way that readers can either dive into individual analyses, turning to a favorite song by Schumann and immersing themselves in its wonders and then flipping to another song and doing the same, or read the analyses in succession, tracing recurring compositional strategies through groups of songs and seeing how Schumann’s style changes over time. Treating each song as its own analytical vignette will also, I hope, make the book more amenable to use in the classroom, where students can use these analyses as models for their own.

Finally, in an epilogue, I reflect on what the study of Schumann’s songs reveals about the seemingly fathomless depths of the nineteenth-century Lied and the staggering number of little-known songs by underrepresented composers whose names may be less familiar than Schumann’s but whose music is no less deserving of being published, performed, recorded, analyzed, and celebrated.

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My wife, Lindsey Henriksen Rodgers – a musicologist and keyboardist – recently rediscovered a piano method book for young children, which includes a short exercise called “The Schumanns.”Footnote ²¹ Beneath a simple melody, in quarter and half notes, are these words, meant to be sung by children as they play: “Clara played, all day long, all of Robert’s finest songs.” Seeing that the book was originally published in 1955, it is remarkable that it would mention Clara Schumann at all. What is less surprising is that it would present an image of Robert as composer and Clara as interpreter – as someone who, as she herself put it to Joseph Joachim, “reproduces” rather than “produces.” That the 2000 edition of the book is identical to the 1955 edition shows how deeply ingrained this image is. Thanks to the pioneering work of scholars who are finally taking Clara Schumann seriously as a reproducer and a producer, we are in a position to offer a revision: “Clara played, all day long, all of her finest songs.” I hope my book might prompt others to do the same.