Summary: <br> Clara Schumann in 1857, age 38<br> <br> <br> <br> With our heads bowed and our hands on our hearts, we mark the death – 123 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck Schumann, who died of a stroke at the age of 76 on May 20, 1896.<br> <br> <br> <br> She was among the most outstanding pianists of her time, a child prodigy whose performances were described with awe by her contemporaries. She was a composer of outstanding promise, who – for reasons having to do with the world in which she lived and her own self-doubts – never had the opportunity to fulfill that promise. She was the compositional muse for her fiancé and husband, the great Robert Schumann, and the spiritual muse of her best friend, the even greater Johannes Brahms. And she was a survivor: someone whose life reads like some endlessly tragic Victorian novel, only without the “happy ending” tacked on at the end.<br> <br> <br> <br> Honestly: whenever any of us get into one of those self-pitying funks (of which I am an especial virtuoso), during which we stand convinced that our personal lives represent the very nadir of human existence, I would recommend that we think of Ms. Wieck-Schumann and her life as an example of how very badly things can go if fate is not on one’s side. If such reflection doesn’t shame our own self-absorbed misery, frankly nothing will.<br> <br> <br> <br> Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873); nice comb-over<br> <br> <br> <br> Clara Josephine Wieck was born on September 13, 1819 to Marianne Tromlitz-Wieck and Johann Gottlob Friedrich Wieck. Daddy was a creep: an uncompromising, unrelentingly ambitious autocrat who brooked no interference with his plans to make his little Clara the greatest pianist of her time. He was a horror to live with; in 1824, after five years of marriage, Clara’s mother Marianne could take no more and left him. Under Saxon law their three children were the “property” of the father, and so a distraught Marianne Weick had to be satisfied with the occasional visit and letter from her Clara.<br> <br> <br> <br> Wieck controlled every aspect of Clara’s life in his efforts to mold her into a great pianist. In this Wieck was very, very lucky, in that Clara’s innate musical genius responded brilliantly to his training; she did indeed become a great pianistic prodigy. <br> <br> <br> <br> In 1828, at the age of 9, Clara met another of her father’s students at a recital: an 18-year-old lapsed law student named Robert Schumann. Wieck’s “method” did not work for Schumann: the eight-hour-a-day exercise regimen Wieck prescribed for Schumann permanently ruined the ring finger on Schumann’s right hand, destroying his future as a professional pianist (though, gratefully, assuring that his energies were turned to composition). <br> <br> <br> <br> Clara and Robert fell in love when she was 16 and he was 25. Wieck behaved like a madman for 5 years in his attempts to keep them apart, but to no avail, and they were married on September 12, 1840.<br> <br> <br> <br> Clara did not know at the time that Robert was both bi-polar and syphilitic. Despite the fact that he was in his latency stage at the time they married – meaning that he was non-infectious and symptom free – it remains a miracle that he didn’t pass his syphilis on to her at some point, as they continued to reproduce well into his tertiary stage. (Their first child, Marie, was born in 1841; their eighth child, Felix – named for their dearly departed friend, Felix Mendelssohn – was born in June of 1854, four months after Robert’s mind had snapped and he had been institutionalized.)<br> <br> <br> <br> Robert and Clara in 1847; he is 38, she is 29<br> <br> <br> <br> Robert’s slow, excruciatingly painful descent into madness pushed Clara to the brink herself. His mind finally gave way on February 27, 1854, when he attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge in Düsseldo...
