Clara Schumann Studies, edited by Joe Davies

The publication of Clara Schumann Studies, the first volume in the Cambridge Composer Studies series to be devoted to a woman, ought to be a cause for celebration. Dedicated to Schumann’s renowned biographer Nancy B. Reich, who died in 2019, the volume begins with an introduction, penned by editor Joe Davies, describing the outpouring of scholarship that postdates her groundbreaking book Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman.¹ Reich’s influence looms large over this collection of essays by noted scholars of nineteenth-century art music, who are to be commended for following her lead through their in-depth consideration of one of the most important European musicians of the era. In reading their contributions, one has the sense that the seeds planted by Reich and other feminist scholars have yielded fruit. The book represents a second generation of research that can, because of their previous efforts, delve deeper into Clara Schumann’s professional circles, performance history, compositions, and reception. Rather than scholarship on female historical figures serving as an exception to male-dominated publications, Clara Schumann Studies here takes its position as part of the scholarly mainstream. New work on women who have long since broken through the musicological glass ceiling is now being undertaken for other composers as well, most notably Fanny Hensel, as reflected in the recent volume of essays The Songs of Fanny Hensel.²

Yet it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that I am also uneasy about the positive progress that Clara Schumann Studies represents, not because of the book’s specific content, but because it is a reminder of what has yet to be achieved in scholarship on women in music. Many of the factors that made Clara Schumann such a noteworthy figure cannot be separated from the canonic structures that have helped to exclude women composers from both the concert hall and musicological scholarship. If Schumann’s own music is not canonic, she is nonetheless a German Romantic who is deeply connected to Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and other male musicians essentially linked to the canon. Indeed, a few of the essays in the book are, not surprisingly, as much about Robert Schumann as they are about his wife, while other authors feel compelled to note, almost apologetically, when they are treating Clara separately from her husband. Her own historical significance, separate from that of the men in her orbit, is undeniable, yet her canon-adjacent status nonetheless makes it easier to incorporate her into enduring paradigms based on those men. While we can applaud the healthy state of Clara Schumann scholarship, we should also recognize how many historical women with few or no canonic connections have not been accorded the same level of consideration. If Cambridge University Press can produce Ernest Bloch Studies (2017) and James MacMillan Studies (2020), why not Louise Farrenc Studies, Cécile Chaminade Studies, Margaret Bonds Studies, or Shulamit Ran Studies? (This issue is, of course, no fault of the authors whose excellent research appears in the current volume.) In addition, to present Clara Schumann within a “composer studies” series is to maintain musicology’s long-standing emphasis on models of individual creative genius—models that, for a variety of historical and cultural reasons, often work less well for understanding women’s lives and careers. In considering Schumann as a composer, some of the most insightful essays in Clara Schumann Studies are those that provide detailed analyses or close readings of her works. Yet Schumann lived for some four decades after she stopped composing, and her musical output, while well worthy of study and performance, is relatively small. Thus, to treat her as merely a composer is to limit the wide-ranging understandings of her that Reich’s writings so richly presented, which included her roles as a pianist, teacher, editor, mother, and mentor. One of the strengths of Clara Schumann Studies, however, is that many of its contributions transcend the conceptual limitations of the “composer studies” framing of its series.

The book opens with two chapters based in biography. Anja Bunzel’s essay on the Schumanns’ Dresden circles considers both Clara and Robert, though sometimes to Clara’s detriment. The picture Bunzel paints of the Schumanns’ musical matinées, seemingly private and requiring an invitation yet reviewed in the press, is successful in reconceptualizing public/private dichotomies and reveals the more complex social and artistic interactions that shaped the couple’s careers. Susan Youens revisits the Schumanns’ experiences of the 1848 Revolution, relying on close readings of several post-revolutionary lieder by Robert as well as Clara’s “Geheimes Flüstern hier und dort” to argue that, in a land of censorship, their music expressed their political sentiments, their discouragement, and their continuing patriotism and belief in liberal ideals. Youens’s musical interpretations are both speculative and brilliant, and, of all of the book’s content, her chapter is the most likely to lead to new understandings of the Schumanns’ songs.

The multiple chapters forming the core of Clara Schumann Studies treat genres within Schumann’s compositional output or specific works, justifying the book’s position in its series. In focused, clear, and eloquently written essays, both Stephen Rodgers and Harald Krebs discuss Schumann’s treatment of poetry in her lieder. Krebs covers three of her songs from 1840, later songs from opuses 12 and 13, and her Rollett settings of 1853, demonstrating how her ability to manipulate declamation for expressive effect increased over this period. Selecting two songs as case studies (“Warum willst du and’re fragen,” op. 12, no. 11, and “Ich hab’ in deinem Auge,” op. 13, no. 5), Rodgers examines the ways in which Schumann weakens musical and/or poetic divisions through “softening, smudging, or even erasing” (p. 57) cadential moments. He underscores how treatment of musical closure is a defining factor in the Romantic style and proposes that musical analysts study vocal music as closely as they do instrumental. His call to consider Clara’s music on its own terms and to “focus on what makes her music distinctively her own” (p. 73) is well taken and not necessarily incompatible with the approaches of later chapters that reflect on its relationship to the music of other composers.

The remaining chapters about Schumann’s compositions focus on her instrumental music. Her Piano Trio, op. 17, appears in two chapters. The first, by Susan Wollenberg, explores how the Schumanns’ study of J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier influenced Clara’s Preludes and Fugues, op. 16, and the Trio’s thematic material, which she hears as shaped by Bach’s G minor Fugue; in the second, Nicole Grimes primarily examines the Trio’s formal manipulations. Both Grimes’s chapter and the one coauthored by Katharina Uhde and R. Larry Todd, who consider Schumann’s Romances, helpfully position her music within a much broader context. Grimes situates Schumann’s Piano Trio within the numerous works in the genre in her repertoire as a performer, as well as those that Robert Schumann wrote about in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Uhde and Todd’s chapter deftly captures the musical interchanges between the romances produced by Schumann’s circle, including those of her husband, Brahms, and Joseph Joachim. If many of the resemblances between these works are already known, such as the evocation of Clara’s exquisitely poignant Romance in B minor by Brahms’s Intermezzo op. 119, no. 1, which shares its key, it is nonetheless beneficial to have them so well documented here. Joe Davies likewise writes about the position of Schumann’s Piano Concerto within the historical development of the genre and its relationship to the aesthetic of the sublime. He notes some of the significant stylistic choices that Schumann makes, such as the disappearance of orchestral accompaniment in the slow movement and the reduction to chamber forces for the second theme of the finale. Yet these may have more to do with the kinds of practical considerations required for touring pianists that Halina Goldberg has revealed in her study of scoring practices in Chopin’s concertos than with the deliberately Romantic aesthetic Davies ascribes to them.³

In the spirit of Reich’s more comprehensive approach to her subject, Clara Schumann Studies concludes with two chapters regarding Schumann’s performing career and three related to her overall reception. Amanda Lalonde reveals that the pianist’s early image was not that of the well-known “priestess” selflessly devoted to faithful transmission of increasingly canonic male composers, but that of a charismatic “prophetess” with “a strong demonstration of personality and a sense of abandon” (p. 188). She thus complicates previous conceptions, connecting Schumann more firmly to the world of Romantic virtuosity. Alexander Stefaniak draws on the earlier research of Valerie Woodring Goertzen in exploring the mosaics of small pieces that Schumann linked in performance through improvised transitions,⁴ finding that these acts of compositional agency were similar to the ways in which she omitted and rearranged the ordering of movements of Robert’s sets of character pieces from the 1830s. Here the presumed interrelationships between concepts of composition, performance, and the work might, as in the writings of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, be even further destabilized.⁵

The three chapters centered on Schumann reception that close the book are those that most acknowledge the historical role of gender, frequently overlooked elsewhere. Like Lalonde, Roe-Min Kok thoughtfully complicates Schumann’s “priestess” persona with what she refers to as the Androgyne, the complete integration of a heterosexual couple in marriage, a notion on which Clara relied after Robert’s death. Kok utilizes historical sources that explain the Androgyne principle, the couple’s own writings, and the contemporary press to demonstrate the ways in which the concept’s “gender fluidity” rendered Clara’s “male-identified acts, especially those undertaken on behalf of her husband’s artistic legacy, culturally and socially acceptable” (p. 242); the Androgyne thus functioned as a form of spiritual justification for undertaking her vocation.

Jonathan Kregor traces Schumann’s appearances in American periodicals throughout the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the influence of critic John Sullivan Dwight’s reprinting of Franz Liszt’s 1855 essay about her. Clara was typically seen in relation to her father and husband, sometimes in order to present models of feminine virtue for American women. Kregor also uncovers an English-language version of Schumann’s “Liebst du um Schönheit” that is edited in ways that undermined the work’s climactic verse. The lied was sung in a women composers’ concert at the World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago in 1893, and it seems likely, with increased digitization of newspapers, that more American performances of Schumann’s music will be unearthed in conjunction with the rise of the women’s club movement during the Progressive era.

Drawing on published reviews, Natasha Loges describes how the careers of two of Schumann’s British students, Fanny Davies and Leonard Borwick, were shaped by their association with the legendary pianist. Contemporary writing about Davies consistently treated her as Schumann’s pianistic offspring, considered a badge of honor yet one from which she could not escape. In contrast, Borwick came to have a separate artistic identity from his teacher, even when programming Robert Schumann’s music, despite her influence on his performing style. While Loges’s essay features only two examples, the contrast between Schumann’s position in reviews of her female student and that in those of her male student is suggestive, and the gendered implications of the author’s findings deserve to be explored further in relation to Clara’s other students, as well as with regard to other pedagogue-student relationships.

The essays in Clara Schumann Studies will appeal to those most interested in the oeuvre of Clara the composer. Yet readers should not overlook the essays that consider her political beliefs, her performances, her public persona, and her lasting musical and cultural influence. With the possible exception of the more revelatory chapters of Youens and Lalonde, the contents of Clara Schumann Studies extend and deepen the established scholarship about its subject, providing additional insights into a continually fascinating figure.