Clara Schumann Beat Her Father in Court to Marry Robert, and Stopped Composing at Thirty-Six

She was a child prodigy groomed by a father who sued to block her marriage, a composer praised by Chopin who wrote that a woman must not desire to compose, a widow at thirty-six who raised seven surviving children on more than thirteen hundred concerts across Europe, and the woman Brahms loved for forty-three years without ever marrying her.

The diary entry

In November 1839, a twenty-year-old woman sat in a room far from her childhood home and wrote a sentence that would haunt every biography written about her for the next two centuries. She had been performing publicly since she was nine. She had published eleven opuses. Chopin had heard her play and given her a manuscript. Liszt had praised her in print. Goethe had presented her with a medal. The Emperor of Austria had conferred on her the title of Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuoso. She was one of the most famous musicians in Europe.

She wrote: "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? It would be arrogant to believe that. That was something with which my father tempted me in former days" (Clara Wieck, diary, November 1839, as quoted in Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman, p. 228).

Clara Wieck wrote those words while preparing to sue her own father for the right to marry the man she loved. The father who had trained her to compose was the man she was about to fight in court. The talent she was disowning was the talent that had made her famous. And the man she was fighting to marry would, within fifteen years, go mad, try to drown himself, and die in an asylum, leaving her with seven children, no income, and a decision she had already half made: to stop composing and start earning.

The father's machine

Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was an ambitious piano teacher who ran a piano rental business from the family home in Leipzig. Her mother, Marianne Tromlitz, was a gifted singer and pianist who performed weekly at the Gewandhaus. Clara was born on September 13, 1819. Marianne left in 1825, and under Saxon law the five-year-old Clara stayed with her father. She had responded to the tensions in the household, including Wieck's rages, by not speaking until age four (fembio biography).

Wieck set about turning his daughter into a prodigy with the precision of an engineer. Daily lessons in piano, violin, theory, harmony, composition, and counterpoint, followed by two hours of practice. Her general education was sacrificed to the musical one. She did not attend school beyond the briefest stint. She was his creation, his advertisement for his piano method, and, as biographers have noted, his retirement plan.

The investment paid off. Clara made her Leipzig Gewandhaus debut at age nine. By eleven she was touring. She performed for Goethe in Weimar, for Chopin in Paris, and in Vienna in 1838 was conferred the title of Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuoso, Austria's highest musical honor. She was eighteen. She was also composing. Her Opus 1 was published at eleven. Her Piano Concerto in A minor, begun at fourteen, she premiered at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1835 with Mendelssohn conducting. She was sixteen.

Robert Schumann entered the household in 1830, a twenty-year-old law student who had begged his mother to let him study music. He was nine years older than Clara. They fell in love around 1835, became secretly engaged by letter in August 1837, and then Wieck discovered what was happening and did everything in his power to stop it (Berliner Philharmoniker).

He sent Clara away on tour. He intercepted her mail. He threatened to shoot Robert. When she would not give Robert up, he demanded conditions: she must surrender all her concert earnings from seven years of touring to her half-brothers, pay a thousand thalers to retrieve her own piano from his house, and Robert must set aside eight thousand thalers as a guarantee in case the marriage failed (Wikipedia, Friedrich Wieck). Clara wrote in her diary: "I am supposed to let my fiancé furnish me? No, I am too proud for that, the thought could crush me" (Clara's diary, 1839, via Schumann Portal).

On June 15, 1839, Clara signed a legal document giving Robert power of attorney to sue her father. She wrote to Robert: "Today, my beloved Robert, I signed, now I am entirely yours" (Schumann Portal). Wieck retaliated with a court filing accusing Schumann of alcoholism, mental instability, and mediocrity as a composer, calling his music "unclear and almost impossible to perform." He had obtained some of this information by breaking into Clara's locked letter box. He circulated copies of his court testimony in every city where Clara had concerts planned (Interlude.hk).

On August 1, 1840, the court ruled in their favor. They married on September 12, 1840, the day before Clara's twenty-first birthday. On September 13, she would have been legally free to marry without her father's consent. They chose the last possible day to beat him (Robert Greenberg).

The composing voice and its silencing

Robert opened the marriage diary on September 13, 1840, the day after their wedding. "This little book shall be a diary about everything that touches us mutually in our household and marriage," he wrote. "Our wishes, our hopes shall be recorded there" (Marriage Diaries, September 13, 1840, via Minnesota Public Radio). They kept it for four years, alternating entries weekly.

The diaries reveal a marriage of deep love and structural tension. Clara wrote of her terror of being forgotten as a performer: "Everyone keeps asking why I don't travel, I will fall into total oblivion" (November 8, 1840). She wrote of her guilt at asking Robert for money: "It pains me most deeply when I have to ask you for money, and to give me what you have earned. I often feel that this must rob your life of all poetry" (November 1842).

Robert encouraged Clara to compose. He urged her to write songs, exchanged musical ideas with her, and published two of her works in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the journal he edited. She resisted, then yielded. "Whenever Robert goes out, I spent my time trying to compose a song, and finally was able to complete three which I intend to give him for Christmas," she wrote. "They may be of no value whatsoever, that I admit" (Interlude.hk).

Robert recognized the tension himself. "Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before," he wrote. "But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost" (Robert Schumann, diary, via Wikipedia).

Clara gave birth to eight children between 1841 and 1854. One, Emil, died at fourteen months. She was pregnant or nursing for most of the 1840s, while also touring and preparing piano scores of Robert's orchestral works. Her composing output slowed to a trickle after 1848 and stopped for five years (Wikipedia).

Yet she also wrote, on October 2, 1846, after hearing her Piano Trio in G minor performed: "Nothing surpasses creative activity, even if only for those hours of self-forgetfulness in which one breathes solely in the world of sound" (Clara's diary, October 2, 1846, as quoted in Reich, p. 228).

In 1853, the year she met Brahms, something unlocked. She composed sixteen pieces: variations on a theme of Robert's, eight Romances, and seven songs. These became her Opuses 20 through 23, the last works she would publish. She composed for fifteen years after writing that women should not compose. Then she stopped. Society told her women should not compose, and she had absorbed the message so deeply it came out as her own voice. Touring paid and composing did not. Robert's encouragement had been the counterweight, and Robert was about to disappear.

The breakdown and the breadwinner

On February 10, 1854, Robert Schumann began to hear things. First it was music, "more wonderful than one ever hears on earth." A theme he believed Schubert, dead for a quarter century, was dictating to him. Then came the voices. Angels sang to him. Demons called him a sinner and told him he would go to hell (BBC Music Magazine). Clara, six months pregnant with their eighth child, stayed up with him night after night. "Ah! And one can do nothing to ease him!" she wrote in her diary (Clara's diary, February 1854, via Clara Schumann Channel).

On February 26, Robert told Clara he must go to an asylum. He no longer had his mind under control. Clara asked: "Robert, will you leave your wife and children?" He answered: "It will not be for long. I shall soon come back, cured."

The next morning, February 27, he slipped out of the house in a dressing gown and slippers, walked through a carnival crowd to a pontoon bridge over the Rhine, and jumped. A river worker pulled him from the freezing water. He left a note in his study: "Dear Clara, I am going to throw my wedding ring into the Rhine; do the same with yours, and then the two rings will be united" (Clara Schumann Channel).

On March 4, 1854, at his own request, he was taken to a private asylum in Endenich, near Bonn. Clara watched from a window as the carriage left the courtyard. The maids stood by and wept (Joseph Joachim Archive). She would not see him again for two and a half years. The doctors believed that contact with his family would overstimulate his fragile mind. For the first six months, she was not even allowed to write to him.

Clara retreated to the concert stage. "Monday, the 6th of March, I began once again to give lessons!" she wrote the day after he was taken away. "And oh, it was a hard battle! But on the one hand I felt that only strenuous activity could sustain me now, and on the other, I had a double responsibility to earn" (Clara's diary, March 6, 1854, via Joseph Joachim Archive).

Brahms and the violinist Joseph Joachim became Robert's only visitors, and Clara's only source of news. Brahms reported back: "Schumann's eyes were moist, he spoke continuously, but I understood nothing. Often he just blabbered, sort of bababa dadada" (April 1856, via Minnesota Public Radio).

On July 27, 1856, the doctors finally let Clara in. Robert was dying. She wrote: "He smiled at me and embraced me with great effort, because he could no longer control his limbs. Never will I forget it. For all the world's treasures, I wouldn't exchange this embrace" (Clara's diary, July 27, 1856, via Minnesota Public Radio). He died two days later, on July 29. He was forty-six. She was thirty-six.

She refused all offers of charity, including a proposed benefit concert. "I will never allow anyone to give a concert for me," she said. "That I will do for myself when it is necessary" (via Minnesota Public Radio). She had seven surviving children. More than 1,300 concert programs from her career survive, spanning sixty years (Wikipedia). She edited Robert's complete works in thirty-one volumes. She taught at the Frankfurt Conservatory from 1878 until her death. She never composed again, with one exception: a keyboard march in 1879 containing quotations from Robert's works (BBC Music Magazine).

Brahms and the forty years

Johannes Brahms was twenty years old when he arrived at the Schumanns' door in 1853. Robert was electrified, calling him "the young eagle" and writing an article prophesying his fame (The Marginalian). Clara was thirty-four. Five months later, Robert was in the Rhine.

Brahms moved into the household, took over household duties, taught Clara's students, managed finances, and visited Robert at Endenich. Clara later told her children he was "my friend in the fullest sense of the word" (via The Marginalian).

He was also in love with her. In June 1854, he wrote to a friend: "I often have to restrain myself forcibly from just quietly putting my arms around her. I think I can no longer love an unmarried girl, at least, I have quite forgotten about them; they only promise heaven, while Clara shows it revealed to us" (Brahms letter, June 1854, via Minnesota Public Radio). In June 1855: "I can no longer exist without you. Please go on loving me as I shall go on loving you, always and forever" (Brahms letter, via Minnesota Public Radio).

Clara's responses are gone. She destroyed her early letters to Brahms, and they agreed to burn the letters from the most intimate period. But her diary survived: "There is the most complete accord between us. It is not his youth that attracts me... No, it is the fresh mind, the gloriously gifted nature, the noble heart, that I love in him" (Clara's diary, 1854, via Minnesota Public Radio).

They did not marry. Clara wrote in her diary that she loved him "like a son" (Clara Schumann Channel). She also knew what marriage and children had cost Robert as a composer, and what it had cost her. The pressure to support a family, she believed, had contributed to his collapse. She may have decided that Brahms's symphonies mattered more than her own happiness, or his. Brahms never married. He never had children.

Their correspondence lasted forty-three years. Over seven hundred letters survive. He relied on her judgment for the rest of his life. In 1874, she wrote: "To witness your growing fame constitutes the happiest experience that the latter years of my life could bring" (Clara to Brahms, 1874, via The Marginalian).

When Brahms urged her to slow down, she answered with the line that defines her life: "You regard it only as a way to make money. I do not. I feel a calling to reproduce great works, above all, also those of Robert, as long as I have the strength to do so. The practice of art is, after all, a great part of my inner self. To me, it is the very air that I breathe" (Clara to Brahms, as quoted in Reich). She did not say "to create." She said "to reproduce." She had given up creating. She would spend the rest of her life reproducing the work of the man she had married and the man she had not.

Clara Schumann died on May 20, 1896, at seventy-six. She was buried beside Robert in Bonn. Brahms attended the funeral. He had ten months to live.

She left behind twenty-three published works. She composed her first at eleven and her last at thirty-four. In between, she wrote a piano concerto that Mendelssohn conducted, a piano trio still performed and recorded today, and dozens of songs. She also left behind a sentence she wrote at twenty, in a diary, while preparing to sue her father: "A woman must not wish to compose." She spent the rest of her life proving it wrong, and then, for forty years, proving it right.

Read the full life: Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman by Nancy B. Reich (Cornell University Press, 1985, revised edition 2001).