Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon

by Alexander Stefaniak

Overview

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 she 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 in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253058287
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	11/02/2021
Pages:	326
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction
1. Schumann's Early-Career Concert Vehicles: Transcendent Interiority and the Cutting Edge of Popular Pianism
2. The Imagined Revelation of Musical Works
3. The Compositional Agency of the Revelatory Interpreter
4. Clara Schumann's 1840s Compositions and her Midcentury Persona
5. Navigating and Shaping Local Concert Scenes and Canons: Clara Schumann's 1854-56 Tours
6. Revelatory Interpretation and the Performance of Memory
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Jeffrey Kallberg

Intricately interweaving musical and historical narratives and meticulously excavating little-explored documents, Becoming Clara Schumann significantly expands and deepens our understanding of the roles of performativity in nineteenth-century culture and aesthetics.

Marcia J. Citron

A valuable exploration of Romantic aesthetics and the contributions of female musicians, Becoming Clara Schumann traces Clara Schumann's transformative role in shaping an expanded notion of canonicity, one centered in performance. Through engaging prose, Stefaniak reveals in astonishing detail Schumann's sensitivity to repertoire and tradition, and shows how the classics and especially husband Robert's music gained prestige over her career.

David Ferris]]>

One of the strengths of Stefaniak's book is that he presents Schumann as a professional musician who pursued a career, not simply as a Romantic artist, and it is in this sense that he refutes some of the myths that still inform our view of her.

David Ferris

One of the strengths of Stefaniak's book is that he presents Schumann as a professional musician who pursued a career, not simply as a Romantic artist, and it is in this sense that he refutes some of the myths that still inform our view of her.

Mary Hunter

Stefaniak's original, humane, and intellectually capacious book deepens our understandings of canon formation in the second half of the 19th century, of Clara Schumann's powerful role in that process, and of the fascinatingly porous boundaries between performance and composition.

Editorial Reviews

"One of the strengths of Stefaniak's book is that he presents Schumann as a professional musician who pursued a career, not simply as a Romantic artist, and it is in this sense that he refutes some of the myths that still inform our view of her."—David Ferris, author of Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle

"A valuable exploration of Romantic aesthetics and the contributions of female musicians, Becoming Clara Schumann traces Clara Schumann's transformative role in shaping an expanded notion of canonicity, one centered in performance. Through engaging prose, Stefaniak reveals in astonishing detail Schumann's sensitivity to repertoire and tradition, and shows how the classics and especially husband Robert's music gained prestige over her career."—Marcia J. Citron, author of Gender and the Musical Canon

"Intricately interweaving musical and historical narratives and meticulously excavating little-explored documents, Becoming Clara Schumann significantly expands and deepens our understanding of the roles of performativity in nineteenth-century culture and aesthetics."—Jeffrey Kallberg, University of Pennsylvania

"Stefaniak's original, humane, and intellectually capacious book deepens our understandings of canon formation in the second half of the 19th century, of Clara Schumann's powerful role in that process, and of the fascinatingly porous boundaries between performance and composition."—Mary Hunter, A. Leroy Greason Professor of Music Emerita, Bowdoin College

"The book succeeds . . . by discussing the material world and practices of classical music. In setting forth concrete details and eschewing the hyperbolic and metaphoric, Stefaniak brings classical music back to life."—M. Dineen, University of Ottawa, School of Music, Choice

"Engaging eloquently with wide-ranging scholarship, pluralistic primary source materials, concert touring strategies, and programming and compositional practices, Stefaniak offers a fascinating, holistic look into Clara Schumann's canonical legacy."—April Prince, Notes

From the Publisher

The book succeeds . . . by discussing the material world and practices of classical music. In setting forth concrete details and eschewing the hyperbolic and metaphoric, Stefaniak brings classical music back to life.

Choice - M. Dineen

Engaging eloquently with wide-ranging scholarship, pluralistic primary source materials, concert touring strategies, and programming and compositional practices, Stefaniak offers a fascinating, holistic look into Clara Schumann's canonical legacy.

Notes - April Prince