Clara
from Part I - Family and Friends
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2025
Extensive source materials allow for a close look at the familial, artistic, and social networks that Clara Schumann built up over the course of her career, and by which she was supported. In this chapter, her mother, Mariane Bargiel (1797–1872), and her father, Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873), are discussed as representing separate branches of the family, as the parents divorced when Clara was not yet five years old. Both remarried and formed new families, from which Clara acquired half-siblings. With her marriage to Robert Schumann (1810–1856) in 1840, Clara added her husband’s birth family to her familial networks. Throughout her life, Clara strove to continue and develop these networks through her letters and visits, and above all, through her teaching activities with various family members.
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