The Clara Schumann Channel
Dedicated to one of the most influential composers and pianists of the Romantic Era.
Category: johannes brahms
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Time for some romantic indulgence. I’ve written multiple posts, probably hundreds of tweets, emphasizing Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann’s professional relationship. But it was not strictly professional between them. It was also very personal. Music was love for Clara – thanks to her relationship with Robert – and that rubbed off on Johannes real fast.…
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This story is classic. A historic day in music history, the day 20-year-old Johannes Brahms met the woman who would make his career and, in many ways, define the rest of his life. The story has been told and retold so many times, it’s hard to know what’s true anymore. The details of the day…
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Many of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms’s orchestral works have Clara Schumann’s fingerprints—quite literally—all over them. Her input is most obvious on Robert’s piano concerto and on Johannes’s first piano concerto, but third on the list of works she most influenced is, perhaps, Johannes’s German Requiem. Early seeds of the work are visible in Clara’s…
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To call Clara Schumann “the muse of Brahms” is a reductive stereotype. It’s like saying Wolfgang played piano, or Ludwig wrote nice tunes, or Pauline Viardot sang pretty. Those things are technically true, but as descriptors, they laughably miss the point. They are limiting and dismissive of the truth. If you’ve read Clara and Johannes…
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It’s pride month! So I can’t help digging into this question. And the answer is one giant YES! There was so much queer in Clara Schumann’s life– starting with her own husband! 1) Robert Schumann was probably bisexual. We’ll never know for sure, but the Peter Ostwald bio has a quote from a letter Mendelssohn…
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Clara Schumann (1819-1896), the Queen of the Piano, the Priestess of Art, was a powerful force in classical music’s Romantic Era. Her career as a composer and pianist shaped the piano repertoire as we know it and influenced the most prominent European musicians of the mid to late 19th century. Today, she’s most famous as…
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There are countless myths around the relationship between Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Some of them involve love triangles and infidelity. Most of them belittle Clara in some way, either morally, personally, or professionally. Some of them poke fun at Johannes or try to humiliate Robert. One myth even claims that Johannes dumped Clara –…
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What are my research sources? Here’s a compilation of the sources I use for most of my tweets, posts, videos, etc. It’s not exhaustive as I’ve read more articles than I can remember. They’re not listed in alphabetic order (sorry librarians!), but in order of how frequently I use them or how relevant they are…
The Clara Schumann Channel 