After hearing the thirteen-year-old Clara Wieck give a piano recital in his Weimar home in 1832, Goethe gave her his portrait and pronounced her a "gifted artist." A few months later a reviewer in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung praised the girl's artistry, declaring that the "great skill, assurance, and strength with which she plays even the most difficult movements so easily is highly remarkable." Indeed, theWundermadchen was already well on her way to becoming one of the most famous pianists in Europe. At the time she was far better known than her older friend, playmate, and future husband, the aspiring critic and composer Robert Schumann.

Since her death in 1896, however, Clara's reputation has been eclipsed by that of her husband. Scholars and critics have tended to regard her primarily as his helpmate, the mother of his children, and a tireless and accomplished champion of his works. However, a recent surge of interest in Clara--including a motion picture (Spring Symphony, starring Nastassia Kinski), several biographies, the publication of many of her letters, new recordings of her compositions, and now an international piano competition in Dusseldorf bearing her name--is bringing her out of her husband's shadow and reestablishing her as not only one of a handful of the greatest pianists of the nineteenth century but as one of the most fascinating, complex, and remarkable women of her time, dubbed by Johannes Brahms as "diese herrliche Frau" (this magnificent woman).

Clara was born in Leipzig on September 13, 1819, the daughter of Friedrich Wieck, an obscure piano teacher and music dealer, and Marianne Tomlitz Wieck, a talented singer and pianist. As a result of her parents' divorce settlement in 1825, Clara was put into the custody of her father. Domineering and ambitious, he immediately set out to transform the musically precocious child into a piano virtuoso. She quickly responded and at age nine began a public concert career that would last over sixty years. After only a decade of concertizing, during which she garnered glowing reviews and public acclaim, Clara received in 1838 the greatest honor Austria could bestow, Konigliche Kaiserliche Kammervirtuosin (Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuosa).

She was unhappy, however. She chafed at the restrictions her father imposed upon her, resented his control over her income, and rebelled at his resistance to her developing romance with the young composer and critic Robert Schumann. The lovers had met when Schumann--nine years her senior--came to study piano with Wieck in 1830, staying in the Wieck's home. "To the impressionable Clara, the dashing Robert was the epitome of youthful genius and ardor. She frequently performed his early piano works, giving the unknown composer his first contacts with audiences. For his part, Robert was fascinated by this slender, talented, and winsomely beautiful child with the large oval eyes. Their growing attachment was violently opposed by Wieck, who feared that her marriage to an erratic, unknown composer would saddle her with a family and ruin her career (and his own income). The extravagantly romantic story of Clara and Robert's turbulent courtship, battles against Wieck, and eventual marriage in 1840 seem like the stuff of a melodrama--in fact, several versions have been enacted on the stage and in the movies.

The marriage and Clara's subsequent widowhood have likewise contributed to the storybook aura that still clings to her, enhancing her image as the great muse and helpmate of the troublesome Robert. Indeed, her years with him were taxing, even to a woman of her indomitable energies. She bore him eight children; assisted him in his various musical posts in Leipzig, Dresden, and Dusseldorf; supported him during periods of illness; and brought in needed income with her tours as a concert artist. Saddled with debts after his demise in an insane asylum in 1856, she continued to champion his work for the next forty years in her performances and also as the editor of his Collected Works--an edition she worked on, with the assistance of her great friend Johannes Brahms, from 1879 to 1893.

Despite the popular image of Clara as the monolithic embodiment of maternity, loyalty, and selflessness--a virtual ewigeWeibliche (Eternal Feminine) out of German Romantic literature--she was a flesh-and-blood creature whose complexities, virtues, and failings as a wife, mother, composer are only now being better understood. A prime source for the new understanding of Clara is Nancy Reich's 1985 biography Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman. Reich combines exhaustive musicological scholarship with insights gained from psychology to make an engrossing portrait of this complex woman that is widely regarded as the best of the many biographies written about her.

"This girl [was] born in an age when musical talent in a female was regarded only as an asset in the marriage market," writes Reich. Yet Clara went on to become one of the foremost musical figures of the century. Reich notes: "There was no question of a `weaker sex' as far as Clara Schumann's musicianship was concerned. She had been trained as a professional, she was a figure of power and authority in the musical world before she was forty, and as an artist was either extravagantly admired or fiercely criticized by both men and women." Reich insists Clara was not merely Schumann's wife and partner, but a colleague. As his condition worsened, "she was forced to make the decisions, musical and personal, which in that time and place were generally left to men."

At the same time, this was a woman with complex psychological problems, who had been denied a normal childhood and who for too long had lived under the emotional and professional tyranny of her father. Trained from childhood to regard herself first and foremost as an artist, after marriage she bristled at the constraints of being a Hausfrau and maintained a concert schedule throughout her eight pregnancies. When she resumed a full-time career during the late stages of her husband's illness and following his death, she was an emotionally distant, demanding mother.

Indeed, hints Reich, the tragedy of Schumann's death and the pressing concerns about his debts may have been a mixed blessing: "Outsiders may have pitied her, but she soon realized that the life of an artist, even with all its trials and tensions, brought her a fulfillment that motherhood could not match." Shortly after Robert was sent to the sanitarium, she wrote their close friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, "Only now, for the first time, do I really understand how all my pain and joy can be relieved only by divine music." As a child, the sole activity that had brought her her father's love was playing the piano. As a widow, concertizing before an adoring audience became an invaluable emotional support.

The persistent rumors (which began in her own lifetime) that Clara consigned Robert to an asylum in order to carry on an affair with their young protégé, Johannes Brahms, Reich categorically rejects. She acknowledges the intensity of their mutual attraction--noting that many potentially revealing letters Clara wrote Brahms at the time have been destroyed--but finds no evidence for anything but platonic fulfillment between them throughout their long friendship.

Clara's qualities as a composer are no less problematic. Reich notes that her twenty-three opus numbers--comprising piano pieces, a piano trio, a piano concerto, songs, and several choral works--were composed out of a sense of duty to her father and, later, to Robert. After her husband's death she stopped composing almost entirely. She evinced a contradictory attitude toward her compositions. Privately she deprecated them to Robert and dismissed them in her diary as "women's work, which always lacks force and occasionally invention." Yet she resented outside criticism, even when it came from Robert. On the whole, says Reich, Robert took them seriously and praised them. They had a decided influence on his own music--particularly in his F-sharp Minor Piano Sonata. While not in the same class as Robert's, her music deserves independent study.

Recently at the International Clara Schumann Piano Competition in Dusseldorf, May 23-30, Reich, an invited guest, spoke about her continuing research into the various unresolved issues about Clara and her music.

"Collections of letters and papers are surfacing all the time," said Reich. "During this trip to Germany, for example, I'm investigating the sale at auction of a number of letters Clara wrote to a member of the Hartel family--of the publishing firm of Breitkopf and Hartel. I've been looking for these letters a long time because they cover a period of forty years, from the time she stopped composing in 1856 to the completion of her work on the Collected Works of her husband. I know they may offer some insight into her feelings about being a composer, about her own ambivalence about composing. This is a very interesting subject, especially to those who feel that women have been treated differently by publishers. The letters may show that she was not afraid in later years to push her own compositions, as Robert had done for her in earlier years. And they may also confirm what I believe are the two main reasons why she eventually ceased composing entirely: One reason was that family responsibilities demanded more and more of her time for her concertizing career; the second was that she missed the support and encouragement Schumann had always given her."

Insanity Explained

The biggest news of late is the discovery of Robert Schumann's medical records, kept by his doctor, a Dr. Richarz, at the asylum. Long unavailable--and even thought by some biographers to have been destroyed--these papers document in exhaustive detail the deteriorating physical and mental state of the composer during the last two and a half years of his life. Reich has seen reports of these papers, which now reside in the Berlin Academy of the Arts, and she says not only do they end years of speculation about the circumstances of his death, but they correct the falsehoods spread about Clara's apparent neglect of him.

"There have been claims over the years that he wasn't really in such bad shape," said Reich, "that Clara incarcerated him in the asylum in order to pursue an affair with Brahms (stories I hate even to repeat), and that she heartlessly destroyed some of his compositions from that time. Well, this is totally false. The truth seems to be that Schumann was much sicker than we had thought. He should have gone to the institution even sooner than he did--it was Clara who tried in every way to keep him at home. In fact, she had hired a male nurse to come into the home to watch him. He himself realized that he was getting out of control and was afraid he might do bodily harm to Clara and the children. His attempted suicide in the Rhine in February of 1854 may really have been a cry for help.

"Now we know from Richarz' papers that Schumann did, indeed, have syphilis, as several biographers like Eric Sams have speculated. Richarz has written that Schumann himself told him he had contracted the disease in 1831 but that he had been cured. But what probably happened was that the disease lay dormant during the period of his marriage--neither Clara nor the children ever contracted any symptoms--and then reemerged in the tertiary stage and killed him in those last years. All Clara knew was that Robert was out of control and that Richarz forbade her to visit him.

"People ask me why she didn't go see him anyway. Well, she was very conscientious and followed the doctor's orders. I think she also may have been afraid to see him--afraid to see him in his condition, even afraid he might harm her. It was a terrible situation. By the time he died he had lost all control of himself. As for the works she destroyed, we know from Dr. Richarz that the debilitating signs of the late stages of the illness had set in as early as 1852. Clara wrote her publisher that some of the works from this time, like some romances for cello, should not be published because 'they were unworthy of him.' She made these decisions with the help of Brahms and others. She was trying to protect his reputation."

These findings strengthen Reich's belief that Clara in no way abandoned her husband. "They confirm my speculations that she was a courageous woman coping the best she could with an impossible situation."

Increasing Popularity

To a degree impossible to predict a decade ago, Clara Schumann's musical compositions are now being heard with increasing frequency in concert halls and are widely available in record stores. From a mere handful of long-playing records containing a few of her piano pieces a discography has blossomed to include dozens of compact discs that encompass more than fifty of her compositions. Among these is Jozef De Beenhouwer's monumental three-CD set of her complete piano works on the Partridge label (Partridge 1129-2, 1130-2, and 1131-2). Inevitably, all of these works are very much a part of their time, suggestive of the prominent composers of her circle, especially Schumann and Mendelssohn. That does not, however, diminish the assurance and charm of the piano trio, the authentic feeling and intensity of the songs, the lovely freshness of the violin/piano pieces, and the wealth of invention in the piano pieces. Even the most casual perusal of the Beenhouwer set, for example, reveals formidable pianistic challenges (the scherzi, Opp. 10 and 14, 1838-41), complete mastery of polyphony (the preludes and fugues, 1845), richly hued harmonies (Three Romances, Op. 11, 1838), and some startlingly piquant ideas ("Ballet of the Demons," 1833).

Meanwhile, Reich is planning a revised edition of her 1985 biography, which she says will contain a catalog of the complete works--including published and unpublished arrangements as well as a thematic catalog containing background information and the first few measures of each work. "I'm also considering the emergence of the feminist movement in music scholarship since my book was published. It's now a subject of great interest in all the American universities and in Europe as well. That has had an influence on my thinking about Clara," says Reich. "She did not think of herself as a feminist, because she didn't think of herself as battling for women's rights. She just assumed that her place in the world was as an artist, and she couldn't conceive of the fact that some women might have a harder time of it. She may have felt inadequate as a composer but never as a performer. She took her own place in the world as if by right, and she did it very early. She has been a model of inestimable importance."

The International Clara Schumann Piano Competition

The First International Clara Schumann Piano Competition was held May 23-30 in Dusseldorf, Germany. Held in conjunction with the fifth Robert Schumann Festival and sponsored by the Robert-Schumann-Gesellschaft of Dusseldorf, it attracted forty-two entrants from around the world.

Before an eminent jury consisting of pianists Martha Argerich, Boris Bloch, Nelson Freire, Alexis Weissenberg, Sylvia Caduff, and Shoko Sugitani (a seventh jurist, Vladimir Ashkenazy, did not arrive until the final evening), the entrants spent the first four days of preliminary competition in the Robert Schumann Saal, a lovely concert hall near the Dusseldorf Tonhalle, within sight of the Rhine. They were instructed to limit their selection of compositions to specified works by Clara Schumann, Beethoven, and Liszt in the first qualification round; by Robert Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin in the second round; and by Chopin, Brahms, and Liszt in the third round.

"We have limited the pianists' choices to works associated with Clara Schumann," explained Frau Dr. Gisela Shafer, organizer of the competition and director of the Robert-Schumann-Gesellschaft in Dusseldorf. "That is one of the things that makes this competition unusual."

Dusseldorf was a logical choice for the Clara Schumann Competition. Clara and her husband, Robert, had resided here in the 1850s. She had met Brahms here. A Clara Schumann Music School is here. And her life and music can be studied in the Robert Schumann Research Center, located on the Bilker Strasse, near the Schumanns' former home.

On the afternoon of May 28, reporters and cameramen from the ZDF, WDR, and St. Petersburg networks gathered for the announcement of the five competition finalists. They were Vesselin Stanev of Bulgaria, Anna Gourari of Russia, Ari Kani of Tokyo, Alexy Botvinov of Ukraine, and Lev Vinocour of St. Petersburg. Following only two days of rehearsals with orchestra, all five performed a piano concerto of their choice with the Robert-Schumann-Orchestra of Dusseldorf on the evening of May 30 in the Tonhalle.

It was a long evening, to say the least, and it was not until after one o'clock in the morning that all five concerti had been performed. Long before, the audience, most of which remained, had declared its favorite--Anna Gourari of Russia, performing Beethoven's Concerto in C Minor. Her command of the keyboard and poised musicianship clearly outclassed the others. Thus, it was with a roar of approval that she was announced as first prize winner. The award carries not only a purse of five thousand deutsche marks but a guarantee of concert appearances with the Bavariana Radio Orchestra and the Dusseldorf Symphony, as well as a recording on the Koch International label of Munich. Second prize was shared by Botvinov and Vinocour. Assisting Schafer in the presentations was Clara Schumann's great-great-granddaughter, the Countess Elisabetta de Nardis di Prata.

The Concours Clara Schumann, as it is known in Europe, is not only the newest major international piano competition, but, according to jurist Boris Bloch (who is artistic director of the Odessa Opera as well as professor of piano at the Hochschule fur Musik in Essen), it is one of the first to take advantage of the changing face of Europe. "You find so many people here from places like Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Romania, the Ukraine, Russia, and so on," he observed. "Before, the world hardly knew about those places; but with the dismantling of the Soviet Union, you find a new freedom for people to come and go if they feel like it--and if they have the money! This is progressive, this is wonderful."

The next Concours Clara Schumann is scheduled for 1997 in Dusseldorf.

--J.C.T.