Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon

by Alexander Stefaniak

Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was
already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized
extensively for several decades after her husband’s death. Despite
being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and
played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the
culture of classical music.
Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire
career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband’s
music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full
run of Schumann’s concert programs, detailed accounts of her
performances and reception, and other previously unexplored
primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself
within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He
reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played
roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the
course of her six-decade career and shaped the canonization of
her husband’s music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned
success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and
composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager.
By highlighting Schumann’s navigation of her musical culture’s
gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she
cultivated her public image to win over audiences and embody some
of her field’s most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.
Alexander Stefaniak is Associate Professor of Musicology at Washington
University in St. Louis. He is author of Schumann’s Virtuosity: Criticism,
Composition, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Germany.