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Becoming Clara Schumann
Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon
Alexander Stefaniak (Author)
9780253058294
Hardback, published 2 November 2021
326 pages, 1 b&w illus, 6 b&w tables, 32 printed music items - 1 Illustrations, black and white - 32 Printed music items - 6 Tables, black and white
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.7 cm, 0.68 kg
The book succeeds . . . by discussing the material world and practices of classical music. In setting forth concrete details and eschewing the hyperbolic and metaphoric, Stefaniak brings classical music back to life. Engaging eloquently with wide-ranging scholarship, pluralistic primary source materials, concert touring strategies, and programming and compositional practices, Stefaniak offers a fascinating, holistic look into Clara Schumann's canonical legacy. [Stefaniak] weaves a complex dialogue among voices....[and] prefers a multidisciplinary approach that interrogates social history, the history of structures and ideas. ... [His] extensive discussion relies on often unpublished or little-known sources, as well as on sources that have been interpreted in different ways: a vast body of writing that makes the volume especially precious, even beyond the specific interest in Clara Schumann.
Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband's death. Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music. Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband's music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann's concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband's music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager. By highlighting Schumann's navigation of her musical culture's gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction
1. Schumann's Early-Career Concert Vehicles: Transcendent Interiority and the Cutting Edge of Popular Pianism
2. The Imagined Revelation of Musical Works
3. The Compositional Agency of the Revelatory Interpreter
4. Clara Schumann's 1840s Compositions and her Midcentury Persona
5. Navigating and Shaping Local Concert Scenes and Canons: Clara Schumann's 1854-56 Tours
6. Revelatory Interpretation and the Performance of Memory
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index