Andreas Staub, portrait of Clara Wieck-Schumann, pastel, 1838. From the Melos Library.
In 1837 an eighteen-year-old pianist plays an entire programme in Berlin without a score, from memory. At the time it is an oddity bordering on arrogance: playing without the notes in front of you means showing off, and several critics write as much. Her name is Clara Wieck, in three years she will marry Robert Schumann against her father’s wishes, and to do it they will have to go to court, and over the following sixty years she will do more than anyone else to build the solo piano recital as we know it today.
Three things we take for granted today were not so then, and all are hers or her generation’s.
The first is playing from memory. Before the mid-nineteenth century the pianist kept the music in front of him, and memory was considered an affectation. Franz Liszt imposes it as spectacle, Clara Schumann imposes it as method, and within thirty years it becomes the norm, to the point that today appearing at a recital with the score is judged a shortcoming. The shift has a cost nobody mentions: memorising takes months on a single piece, so every pianist’s repertoire narrows, and in narrowing it concentrates on the same titles. Part of the museumification of the concert begins there.
The second is the programme. In the first half of the nineteenth century a piano evening was a variety show: the soloist alternated his own brilliant pieces, variations on fashionable opera arias, improvisations on themes suggested by the audience, and in between someone sang. Clara Schumann dismantles that format and puts in whole sonatas by Beethoven, Bach, Scarlatti, and then Schumann and Brahms. She shifts the centre from the virtuoso to the composer. It is a revolution of enormous scope and it has two faces: on one side arises the idea that a concert is a serious journey, on the other begins the era in which the performer stops composing.
The third is the repertoire of the dead. Until then people played mostly the music of the living, as today we listen mostly to the music of the living in any other genre. The nineteenth-century concert invents the canon: the great figures of the past are performed, a list is built, and that list grows very slowly. Clara Schumann bears direct responsibility for this, and she was aware of it, because she devoted half her life to promoting her husband, who died in 1856, and to defending Brahms, alive.
Her career lasts sixty-three years, from 1828 to 1891. In that time she raises eight children, buries four of them, looks after her husband, confined at Endenich, until his death, teaches at the Frankfurt conservatory and keeps touring Europe playing, because the piano is what supports the family. She composes too, and well: a piano concerto written at fourteen, a trio, Lieder. Then she almost entirely stops, and in a note from 1839 she writes that a woman must not desire to compose, that none has yet succeeded, and asks why she should be the one. It is the saddest sentence of nineteenth-century music, and it is written by someone who was right about everything else.
The rest is known. Her music comes back into circulation only from the 1970s, and today the Trio in G minor and the Lieder are performed regularly. Her work as an interpreter, on the other hand, has never been called into question, because it simply became the way concerts are given: one person alone on the stage, without paper, with a programme that tells something, and in the hall silence.
That silence, which today seems a natural condition of listening, has a date and authors. And like all conventions with a date, it can be questioned.