50 Fun Facts About Clara Schumann

Which European currency's final 100 banknote carried a portrait of Clara Schumann?

The Deutsche Mark note carried her image, taken from an 1835 lithograph, until the euro arrived. Its reverse showed a grand piano she had played.

Which Hollywood star played Clara Schumann opposite Paul Henreid in the 1947 MGM film Song of Love?

Katharine Hepburn trained with a pianist for weeks before shooting so that she could be filmed playing convincingly. Robert Walker played the young Brahms.

How did Clara Wieck and Robert Schumann manage to marry in 1840 despite her father's refusal to consent?

They won a court ruling after suing Friedrich Wieck, and the wedding took place the day before her 21st birthday. He had even threatened to shoot Robert.

Which American jazz and soul star studied piano at Juilliard under Carl Friedberg, a pupil of Clara Schumann?

Nina Simone spent the summer of 1950 with Friedberg, who had learned from Schumann in Germany and carried her approach to New York.

Clara Schumann was among the first concert pianists to do what on stage, later the standard for recitals?

She began to perform from memory in public at thirteen, a feat her reviewers singled out as exceptional, and the practice became the norm for soloists.

What did Clara Schumann do in May 1849 when revolutionary fighting broke out around her family's home in Dresden?

She rescued her children on 7 May, walking back into the city past a pack of armed men to fetch the three who had been left with a maid.

What was Clara Schumann forbidden to do while her husband Robert spent his last two years in the Endenich sanatorium?

She could not visit him until two days before he died in 1856, although their friend Brahms was allowed to see him regularly.

What did Clara Schumann's eldest daughter, Marie, persuade her to stop doing with the letters Brahms had sent her?

Burning them was what Brahms himself had asked of her, but Marie talked her mother out of destroying the rest.

Which German poet gave the young Clara Wieck a medal bearing his portrait after she played for him in Weimar?

Goethe sent the medal with a written note addressed to the gifted artist Clara Wieck, after hearing her play a bravura piece by Henri Herz.

Why was twelve-year-old Clara Wieck's 1832 Paris recital so poorly attended?

A cholera outbreak had driven many Parisians out of the city, so the public concert her father had planned drew only a small audience.

In which German city, where Bach spent his final decades, was Clara Wieck born in September 1819?

Leipzig stayed her home until 1844: she and Robert spent their first four married years in a flat there that now holds exhibition rooms about them.

Clara Schumann was buried beside her husband in the Alter Friedhof of which city, the birthplace of Beethoven?

Bonn was her own choice of resting place: she died elsewhere in 1896 but asked to lie next to Robert, who had died forty years before her.

In which city did Clara Schumann become the first piano teacher of the new Hoch Conservatory in 1878?

Frankfurt beat rival offers from other cities because the director accepted her terms: short teaching days, lessons at home and four months of holiday.

Which flamboyant piano virtuoso's music did Clara Schumann stop performing during the War of the Romantics?

Franz Liszt put the performer's personality on show, while she believed it should vanish behind the composer; she even skipped a Beethoven festival because he took part.

Which composer conducted the 1835 premiere of the piano concerto Clara Wieck had begun writing at thirteen?

Felix Mendelssohn led the orchestra while the sixteen-year-old played the solo part herself; the slow movement pairs the piano with a long cello solo.

Into which river did Robert Schumann throw himself in February 1854, leaving Clara to support the family alone?

The Rhine did not claim him: fishermen pulled him out, and at his own request he entered a private sanatorium, where he lived two more years.

After sell-out recitals in 1838, eighteen-year-old Clara Wieck won the highest musical honour of which country?

Austria named her Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuoso that March, after a recital series so admired that the poet Franz Grillparzer wrote verses about her.

What was Robert Schumann's place in the Wieck household when he first got to know the young Clara?

Her father's piano student is how Robert arrived: he dropped his law studies to learn from Friedrich Wieck and rented a room in the family home.

A problem with which part of Robert Schumann's body ended his pianist hopes, leaving Clara to premiere his works?

His right hand developed a growing paralysis in at least one finger, so he turned to writing music while she introduced his piano works to audiences.

Which activity did Clara Schumann almost entirely give up after 1853, despite nearly four more decades on stage?

Composing gave way to concerts and family duties; after a burst of sixteen pieces in 1853 she produced little beyond piano transcriptions.

Which country did Clara Schumann tour sixteen times between 1865 and 1888, usually in winter and spring?

England first heard her in 1856, when she complained that a single play-through counted as a rehearsal there, yet she kept returning for three decades.

What did Robert Schumann give Clara on their wedding day in 1840 for the couple to keep jointly?

A diary was his gift, and his first entry said it should record the couple's lives, wishes and artistic achievements; she added many entries herself.

Which legendary violin virtuoso, also in Paris in 1832, offered to appear in concert with young Clara Wieck?

Niccolò Paganini made the offer during the tour that turned her from a prodigy into a mature performer; she had set out with her father the previous September.

What set Clara Schumann apart from every colleague on the Hoch Conservatory faculty when she joined in 1878?

She was the only woman on the staff, and her fame drew pupils from Britain and the United States; she accepted only advanced players.

Which violinist, the dedicatee of her Three Romances, gave over 238 concerts alongside Clara Schumann?

Joseph Joachim first met the Schumanns as a boy in 1844, and the duo became especially noted for Beethoven's violin sonatas.

In which celebrated concert hall did nine-year-old Clara Wieck make her official debut on 28 October 1828?

Gewandhaus audiences heard her there again seven years later, when she returned as the soloist in a concerto she had written herself.

Which Wagner opera did Clara Schumann describe as the most repugnant thing she had ever seen or heard?

Tristan und Isolde drew her sharpest verdict, but she also called Lohengrin horrible and resented how scornfully its composer spoke of her husband.

Which song cycle did Robert Schumann compose in 1840 as a wedding gift for his fiancée, Clara Wieck?

Myrthen means myrtles, a traditional part of a bride's bouquet; he presented its 26 songs to her on the eve of the wedding.

Which Beethoven sonata, as played by eighteen-year-old Clara Wieck, moved Franz Grillparzer to write a poem about her?

Appassionata was the piece he heard at one of her recitals, and his poem paired her name with Beethoven's in its title.

Which actress played the young Clara Wieck opposite Herbert Grönemeyer in the 1983 West German film Spring Symphony?

Nastassja Kinski led a cast that included Rolf Hoppe, and the film was shot at Berlin's Tempelhof Studios and on location across Saxony.

Which renowned pianist recorded the soundtrack heard when Clara Schumann plays in the 1947 film Song of Love?

Arthur Rubinstein supplied the playing and said the film's leading lady, who had trained for weeks, performed almost as well as he did.

Which Baroque composer's keyboard sonatas, twenty in all, did Clara Schumann edit for publication?

Domenico Scarlatti also featured in her recitals, part of her move away from showy virtuoso pieces toward music by leading composers.

Clara Schumann gave the first public performance of Brahms's 1861 Variations and Fugue on a theme by which composer?

Handel's theme was just one case: she was the first to play many of Brahms's works in public and kept programming his music in her recitals.

Near which German spa town did Clara Schumann and her family spend their summers from 1863 onward?

Baden-Baden was close to Lichtenthal, where her summer home became a family meeting place and a setting for music-making with friends such as Brahms.

Clara Wieck's Opus 1, published in 1831 for her own recitals, was a set of four piano pieces in which dance form?

Polonaises made up her first published opus, and she went on producing between one and eight new works a year until 1848.

In which piano cycle built on a four-note motif did Robert Schumann portray the teenage Clara Wieck as Chiarina?

Carnaval also sketches Chopin and Ernestine von Fricken, who appears two movements after Clara under the name Estrella.

What mishap left Clara Schumann playing in great pain with the newly formed Berlin Philharmonic in 1883?

A fall on a staircase the day before did not stop her: she played Beethoven's Choral Fantasy and was enthusiastically celebrated.

Robert Schumann said a famous 1838 piano set grew from Clara Wieck's remark that he sometimes seemed like what?

A child was her phrase, and he told her it inspired thirty small, droll pieces, of which thirteen were published as Kinderszenen.

In which city were Robert and Clara Schumann living when the unknown twenty-year-old Brahms called on them in 1853?

Düsseldorf had hired Robert as its director of music in 1850; Brahms arrived with a letter of introduction and left both Schumanns deeply impressed.

Besides Beethoven, for which composer's piano concertos did Clara Schumann write and publish her own cadenzas?

Mozart's D minor concerto was one she still played with her own cadenzas in 1885, when she was in her mid-sixties.

Clara and Robert Schumann jointly set poems by which German poet in their 1841 song collection Liebesfrühling?

Friedrich Rückert's Spring of Love poems became the one joint publication of the pair, issued as her Opus 12 and his Opus 37.

Which composer friend, who died in 1847, did Clara Schumann reportedly intend as the dedicatee of her Piano Trio?

Fanny Hensel died before the trio was published, so the work finally appeared that year with no dedication at all.

Which composer's Seventh Symphony did Clara Schumann dismiss as a horrible piece in a letter to her friend Brahms?

Anton Bruckner's symphonies, with their advanced harmony and massive orchestration, stood for the New Music she opposed to the end of her life.

Brahms wrote his Alto Rhapsody after which of Clara Schumann's daughters became engaged to Count Marmorito in 1869?

Julie was 24 and Brahms, 36, had never declared his feelings; he handed the manuscript to her mother and called it his wedding song.

Which conductor, who led Clara Schumann in Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto in 1877, was her younger half-brother?

Woldemar Bargiel was the son of her mother's second marriage, and in 1885 she was glad to give him the direction of another of her concerts.

Which actress played Clara Schumann in Geliebte Clara, the 2008 film by director Helma Sanders-Brahms?

Martina Gedeck starred in what proved to be the director's final film, a Franco-German-Hungarian production about the Schumann marriage.

What did Friedrich Wieck, Clara Schumann's formidable father, study at the University of Wittenberg as a young man?

Theology was meant to lead him into the ministry, but after preaching his trial sermon he left it and spent nine years as a private tutor.

Which monarch declared Clara Schumann's Three Romances a marvellous, heavenly pleasure after hearing them performed?

George V of Hanover heard the pieces on a tour she made with the violinist to whom they are dedicated.

For which music publisher did Clara Schumann edit her late husband's collected works, aided by Brahms?

Breitkopf & Härtel issued the edition between 1879 and 1887, though the editors left out some late pieces they thought marked by his illness.

Clara Schumann's mother, Mariane Tromlitz, performed weekly solos in her home city as a pianist and what else?

A singer of local fame, she performed soprano solos every week, and she gave her daughter her very first piano lessons at the age of four.