Clara Schumann: Scherzo No. 2 in C minor, Op. 14
Clara Schumann’s precocious musical ability gave her an early start to a 60-year performing career that would intersect with some of history’s most celebrated musical figures. Robert Schumann, her future husband, was so struck by a nine-year-old Clara’s piano playing that he abandoned the study of law to take music lessons from her father. An impressed Paganini offered to appear in concert with the child prodigy, and at 16 she premiered her concerto under Mendelssohn’s baton. Chopin urged Liszt to see her play, and she later developed a deep friendship with Brahms. These examples illustrate her unique position in musical history, but it is an unfortunate oversight that Clara is so often defined in relation to the men around her. Clara’s legacy is omnipresent today in the concert practices she codified by example in her 1,300-odd performances: she was one of the first pianists to perform from memory, and her championing of her husband’s compositions and other “serious” contemporary music fostered a culture of reverence for the archetypal master-composer that still prevails today. While the C minor Scherzo exhibits the flash of her earlier concert programs, its middle section is imbued with a mature lyricism that rivals that of her Romantic admirers.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
Clara Schumann’s precocious musical ability gave her an early start to a 60-year performing career that would intersect with some of history’s most celebrated musical figures. Robert Schumann, her future husband, was so struck by a nine-year-old Clara’s piano playing that he abandoned the study of law to take music lessons from her father. An impressed Paganini offered to appear in concert with the child prodigy, and at 16 she premiered her concerto under Mendelssohn’s baton. Chopin urged Liszt to see her play, and she later developed a deep friendship with Brahms. These examples illustrate her unique position in musical history, but it is an unfortunate oversight that Clara is so often defined in relation to the men around her. Clara’s legacy is omnipresent today in the concert practices she codified by example in her 1,300-odd performances: she was one of the first pianists to perform from memory, and her championing of her husband’s compositions and other “serious” contemporary music fostered a culture of reverence for the archetypal master-composer that still prevails today. While the C minor Scherzo exhibits the flash of her earlier concert programs, its middle section is imbued with a mature lyricism that rivals that of her Romantic admirers.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival