The Schumanns’ marriage linked two visions of the Romantic era, that of a self-referential love, and that of an artistic alliance (Künstlerbund). Clara achieved fame across Europe. She had her own cultural network and out-earned her spouse. Robert’s income from composing remained modest until the 1850s. Both wanted to start a family. According to the contemporary legal framework, understood as the law of nature, women were subordinate. Legally and culturally, a man’s work took precedence. Daily reality followed its own rules. A large brood, and Robert’s struggles with illness, as well as social, economic, and political crises tested the couple. Compromises had to be found. The Schumanns prevailed: they were able to start a family and realise careers as professional artists. Robert’s music continues to be performed. Clara was one of the most important pianists of the epoch whose full legacy is still being explored.

This chapter considers Clara’s 1842 tour in Northern Germany and Copenhagen – the first after her 1840 marriage and the 1841 birth of her first child – and the tensions that arose between her professional ambitions and socially-prescribed responsibilities as wife and mother. Drawing from correspondence and the Schumanns’ marriage diaries, I trace how Clara eased those tensions through rhetorical manoeuvres and performance strategies that transformed her work in the masculine public sphere of touring into the work expected of her in the feminine private sphere of the home. Tropes of sacrifice such as familial care feature heavily in how Clara justified to Robert (and to herself) her desire to continue touring after 1840. Additionally, her performance style and repertoire choices on tour are linked to images of the caring mother. This analysis highlights the unique forms taken by women’s labour in the creation of artistic cultures during the era of separate spheres.

Robert Schumann’s health issues have prompted sustained debates amongst physicians, historians, and musicologists. Proposed etiologies for his decline span bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, neurosyphilis, vascular disease, alcoholism, and personality disorders. Because his final years were spent in a psychiatric asylum, a retroactive narrative of inexorable decline has too often prevailed. Yet this reading reduces a richly textured life into pathology, overlooking Schumann’s literary imagination, resilience in the face of numerous personal losses, and unwavering devotion to music that persisted – often flourished – despite illness. This chapter discusses the diagnostic spectrum and its historiographical contexts from Richarz’s nineteenth-century ‘overwork exhaustion’ to Möbius’s dementia praecox, through contemporary arguments for bipolar disorder with psychotic features and tertiary neurosyphilis. It shows how shifting medical paradigms and cultural frameworks shape our understanding of genius, suffering, and the enduring interplay between creativity and illness.

Robert Schumann was brought up in the household of a publisher. Robert was used to editorial processes such as correcting galley proofs. He worked as editor of musical compositions for the musical supplement to his music journal. And he edited his own compositions for publication. Clara Schumann not only prepared her own works for publication, but also edited works by other composers, not least the complete edition of Robert’s works. This latter, though lacking a critical apparatus, still deserves attention, as does the instructive edition of the piano works with performance indications by Clara. Today Urtext editions are complemented by the ongoing New Complete Edition of Robert Schumann’s works.

For the young Clara Wieck, Berlin lay in a foreign country: Prussia. Musical life there was not considered to be at a high level in the 1830s, but it was where Clara’s biological mother lived. Vienna, however, was a centre of musical life, even after the death of composers such as Mozart and Beethoven. A half-year stay there for concerts in winter 1837/38 proved very successful for young Clara. On 15 March 1838 she was appointed Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuosa – a title that became the basis of her international career for more than the following half century.

The last few decades have seen the publication of a vast trove of primary documents concerning the Schumanns, including diaries, letters, and official documents. Biographers today have access to far more information about the couple than either of their earliest biographers, Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski and Berthold Litzmann, each of whom was constrained in various ways by the limited material available to them and by their biases. Yet because of their associations with the Schumann family, Wasielewski and Litzmann are treated as primary sources and their biographies are regarded as authoritative. While both accounts can be useful to modern-day biographers, they should be read critically, and their assumptions and conclusions should be interrogated.

The context in which Robert and Clara carried out their respective musical experiences as performers, listeners, and organizers of chamber music was richly varied. This chapter illustrates how, at the time, playing together with other musicians was considered of primary importance. Sometimes the Schumanns directly initiated such events, such as the Quartettmorgen (quartet mornings) that Robert had organized starting in 1838 in his own home. From the early nineteenth century onwards, concert series dedicated to chamber music flourished throughout Europe, often founded and run by musicians with whom Robert and Clara were in close contact. Above all, the number of student-populated instrumental ensembles increased, even in schools not specifically dedicated to music (such as military and art academies). The number of orchestras in which amateurs often played alongside professionals grew as well. Sometimes Robert himself conducted such groups.

This chapter examines Clara’s and Robert’s general educations and musical training in the context of schooling in early nineteenth-century Germany, underscoring aspects of the instruction they received that were typical and those that were unusual for individuals of their classes and genders. As relatively privileged children, Clara and Robert both benefited from general educations that far surpassed those available to children of the peasant and working classes; by virtue of his gender, however, Robert’s general schooling was much more robust than Clara’s. Privilege also afforded Clara and Robert access to extensive musical instruction, which intersected in the person of Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father. Friedrich, himself an autodidact, trained his daughter tirelessly from the earliest age, providing her with an extraordinary musical education, one that is all the more astonishing for the era, given her gender.

This chapter examines the evolution of concert programming practices among nineteenth-century musicians, focusing on Robert and Clara Schumanns’ approaches within changing cultural, financial, aesthetic, geographical, and technological contexts. Drawing on concert programmes, personal correspondence, and historical reviews, the chapter identifies shifts from genre-spanning miscellany programmes to more homogeneous recitals emphasizing what would become the classical canon and standardized repertoires. Clara is shown to have used programming strategically to promote her husband’s music and her own artistic identity, while Robert’s programming reflected both his aspirations, as well as his vulnerabilities and limited practical skills. These practices had significant implications for gender roles, artistic autonomy, and the dissemination of music during the period. Overall, the Schumanns’ practices underscore how concert programming shaped musical reception and professional identity, highlighting its enduring influence on modern concert management and programming strategies.

This chapter surveys contemporary responses to the Schumanns across a variety of artistic media: music, dance, theatre, visual arts, and literature. It argues that while these can be opportunities for reflecting historical affinities and differences, artists typically reflect the myths surrounding these musicians, rather than engaging with current research. While Robert Schumann has become a cipher for mental illness, his relationship with Clara Schumann née Wieck, and the couple’s relationship with Johannes Brahms, have also attracted a great deal of attention. Responses to the Schumanns have also reflected broader trends in artistic practice, including the theatricalization of concert music, the mash-up, and ‘composed reception’ (musical responses to stylistic aspects of their works). The Schumanns both represent the past but also provide artists with opportunities for imaginative time travel, to reassess and in some ways reinvent their present.

Although Clara Schumann pursued a career primarily as a concert pianist, she composed some fifty works that, taken together, illustrate a two-pronged interest found also in the output of her husband, Robert Schumann. On the one hand, Clara and Robert adopted compositional styles and genres in vogue during their day. On the other hand, both deeply appreciated the traditions of their largely Germanic forebears, and they paid tribute by grounding their music in historical methods inherited from their predecessors. This chapter considers their output from each perspective and then concludes with examples that illustrate a productive dialogue between the two.

Robert Schumann’s father August ran a publishing company; Robert grew up surrounded by books. As a teenager, he founded a literary society; as an adult, he made annotated reading lists filled with strong opinions. His early years belonged to the Age of Goethe, whose works he loved throughout his life, and he was captivated by the radical novelty that was Heinrich Heine. Other Romantic and contemporary poets, from Eichendorff to Adelbert von Chamisso, Rückert, and Robert Reinick, provided him with texts for songs, as did Robert Burns. He and Clara lived through the Revolution of 1848, and their liberal political convictions are inscribed in selected lieder. Later in his life, Robert discovered the poems of Nikolaus Lenau and Eduard Mörike, Emanuel Geibel, Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, and Elisabeth Kulmann. Both composers’ engagements with the literature of their day had massive impacts on their musical imaginations throughout their lives.

This chapter traces musical dialogues between Clara and Robert Schumann – conversations that are ripe with hermeneutic implications. It situates these references on a continuum: from indisputable quotations with clear links to external stimulants, through allusions to works by other composers that are distanced from their sources, to more ambiguous examples that are implied though not openly stated. The chapter shows how dialogues could move in both directions between Clara and Robert, as well as how they each conversed with the music of their contemporaries and predecessors. Collectively, the examples discussed demonstrate the vitality of conversations – both personal and creative – to the music of the Schumanns and their wider circle.

Exploring the middle ground between the much-debated public and private spheres of nineteenth-century music making, this chapter discusses Clara and Robert Schumann’s private musical gatherings in their own as well as in their friends’ homes in Leipzig of the early 1840s, in light of the gatherings’ dual purpose as musical and social interaction. The chapter traces the Schumanns’ contact with their closest circle in Leipzig through diary entries and letters to contemporaries such as Felix Mendelssohn and Ferdinand David. It examines how the private interactions with these friends and their mutual chamber music making mirror the Schumanns’ wider importance for Leipzig’s society and musical life. The chapter concludes that the distinction between the public and private spheres was blurred in the Schumann household in the couple’s final and most active years in Leipzig.

Both Paris and London had a well-established musical culture that developed during Clara and Robert Schumann’s lifetimes in response to changing artistic and entrepreneurial activities. Robert considered both Paris and London when seeking a new outlet for the publication of his journal, the NZfM, in 1838. While Clara’s first concert tour to Paris in 1831 was under her father’s close guidance, her second in 1839 was marked by her independence from his control, together with the stress caused by his opposition to her marrying Robert. Her third visit to Paris in 1862, mid-career, was the most successful. Her nineteen concert tours of England from 1856 onwards, with London as base, included chamber music performances with Joachim and Piatti, opportunities that Clara particularly valued. The hectic concert schedules she endured, covering a wide stretch enabled by train travel, nevertheless left space for cultivating social contacts and music-making in a domestic setting.