This chapter surveys the awards and professional affiliations that Clara Schumann received during her career and considers the significance of these recognitions for Clara’s reputation. The honours Clara earned across her career reinforced her stature as one of nineteenth-century Europe’s most famous and influential musicians, as well as one of its most prominent pedagogues. To illuminate her multifaceted career, the chapter spotlights recognitions chronologically in four pivotal locations, from her anointment as a Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuosa in Vienna to Honorary Member of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Society (among others). She also became an esteemed teacher in England and Frankfurt. In examining such honours, this chapter situates Clara’s reputation within nineteenth-century Europe’s cultural industries and its institutions while shedding light on some of their mechanisms and tendencies.

This chapter surveys recordings of the Schumanns’ music released since their bicentenaries (Clara’s in 2019, Robert’s in 2010) vis-à-vis trends in their reception history. The albums discussed represent a cross-section of styles and approaches, with several performers being long-standing champions of Clara’s music. Their strategies range from reappraising the relationship between Clara’s and Robert’s creativity, to reviving the ethos of nineteenth-century practices, namely mixed-genre programmes, and reimagining their music through improvisations, transcriptions, and contemporary commissions. Collectively, they recapture something of the Schumanns’ own context while offering varied ways of programming their music in the twenty-first century.

The most immediate and tangible musical influence that can be attributed to Robert and Clara Schumann is that which flowed between themselves, in terms of published compositions (Op. 37/Op. 12), compositional critique, and performance. Next in significance is Brahms, whose relationship with Clara continued for four decades after Robert’s death. Robert’s Piano Quintet, Op. 44, emerges as particularly influential, in terms both of its scoring and employment of ‘cyclic’ thematic devices: these are pursued in later works by Saint-Saens and de Castillon, as well as in d’Indy’s composition treatise. The French reception of Robert’s Lieder is considered, as is the broader question of how and whether ‘influence’ may be reliably discerned in given contexts. Finally, and ironically, one must acknowledge the negative influence of Clara on her husband’s legacy as reflected in her suppression of late works such as the Violin Concerto.

Robert and Clara Schumann’s life and work converged at the piano. They witnessed and influenced the enormous evolution of piano manufacturing in their various roles as composer, music critic, virtuoso, and teacher. Their creative work demonstrates how advances in instrument-making are a result of craftsmanship coupled with artistic demands. What can modern pianists and listeners learn from the Schumanns’ involvement with the piano? Their activities – improvising, practising, teaching, performing, and composing – were intricately interwoven. Their explorations of pianistic possibilities were always supported by inborn curiosity and artistic aspirations. Stepping back in history and experimenting with historic pianos or replicas renders one sensitive to the interrelation between the art of composition and the instrument. For the modern-day performer, knowledge of historical piano manufacturing is indispensable and can lead to fresh ways of interpreting the Schumanns’ music.

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.