Clara Schumann

Trained by her father Friedrich Wieck, Clara Schumann was a touring virtuoso before she was a teenager and remained one for six decades. Born Clara Wieck in Leipzig, she built her recitals around Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms and Robert Schumann. She played from memory. As a composer she wrote songs, piano pieces, a Piano Concerto in A minor finished at fifteen, and the Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17, and the Three Romances for violin and piano, Op. 22. She married Robert Schumann in 1840; after his death in 1856 she supported her household from the keyboard, edited his complete works for Breitkopf & Härtel, and from 1878 taught at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. She gave her last public concert in 1891. She played at the Leipzig Gewandhaus at nine and toured Paris at twelve; at Weimar Goethe gave her a medal bearing his likeness, and Grillparzer wrote the poem Clara Wieck and Beethoven after hearing her play the Appassionata during her long Vienna season. More than thirteen hundred concert appearances are recorded, many of them in chamber partnership with Joseph Joachim and the cellist Alfredo Piatti, and she gave first performances of works by Brahms while raising the eight children of her marriage.