Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon by Alexander Stefaniak

Abstract

Reviewed by: Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon by Alexander Stefaniak April L. Prince Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon. By Alexander Stefaniak. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. [xiii, 308 p. ISBN 9780253058294 (hard-cover), $75; ISBN 9780253058287 (paperback), $20; also available as e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Tables, music examples, endnotes, bibliography, index. Alexander Stefaniak opens his recent monograph with the always astonishing details of Clara Schumann’s musical life: over a thousand concerts performed across sixty years, international acclaim, collaborations with some of the most important musicians of her era, admiring critics, undeniable compositional prowess, and pedagogical acumen. By 1877, the fifty-eight-year-old was at the pinnacle of her career. That same year, the critic L. K. reflected on Schumann’s trajectory in an article for Leipzig’s Signale für die musikalische Welt. L. K. had first heard the performer in 1833. While her earlier performances relied on music that they considered “wild and chaotic,” Schumann’s concerts were now grounded in Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (p. 2). The critic celebrated these programmatic transformations: “The change between ‘Clara Wieck’ and ‘Clara Schumann’ signifies the marriage of the old virtuosity with the classical garb and Verseistigung [spiritualization] of the new” (p. 2). This “marriage” of sorts—between Clara Schumann and the Austro -German canon—guides Stefaniak over the course of his excellent new study. In the past several decades, Clara Schumann scholarship has evolved in exciting trajectories. Current studies show fresh, critical perspectives on all aspects of Schumann’s life. (See Joe Davies, “Introduction: Clara Schumann in the Musicological Imagination,” in Clara Schumann Studies, ed. Joe Davies [Cambridge: Cambridge University [End Page 233] Press, 2021], 1–12.) Stefaniak’s Becoming Clara Schumann situates itself firmly within this community. 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. An important complement to his previous examination of Robert Schumann’s nineteenth-century virtuosities, this new monograph shifts to investigate how Clara Schumann similarly navigated the perils of empty virtuosity and authentic revelation by “inherently infus[ing] pianism with interiority” (p. 11). (See also Alexander Stefaniak, Schumann’s Virtuosity: Criticism, Composition, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Germany [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016].) Positioning Schumann as both a pragmatic “strategist” and a musical “idealist,” Stefaniak asks us to recognize how performers—perhaps even more so than composers—profoundly shaped canonic ideologies. To be sure, “Schumann invites us to view the canonic tradition not only as a body of musical works but as a dynamic, evolving reality in the everyday professional lives of performers” (p. 281). Organized largely chronologically, each chapter examines a distinct issue related to aspects of Schumann’s career and canonic status. Traversing from her earliest concertizing to her time as a professor in Frankfurt at Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium, Stefaniak keeps several threads front and center: “canon formation, concepts of interiorit y, Schumann’s gendered public image, and the ways in which she and other performers exercised creative agency” (p. 15). In the first two chapters, Stefaniak examines Schumann’s early concert programming and her 1840s transformation into an authentic interpreter. While this period is sometimes positioned as antithetical to the development of the canonical ideal, Stefaniak guides the reader through compelling music analyses and argues that Weick’s showpieces by Frédéric Chopin, Adolf von Henselt, and Sigismond Thalberg shaped her approaches to resplendent virtuosity. Her strategies were undeniably successful, as relatively quickly “critics heard interiority in the very sound Clara Schumann produced at the piano, regardless of what repertoire she played” (p. 36). Greater attention to aesthetic debates grounds the second chapter, as Stefaniak focuses on the ways Schumann expanded and ratified this association to interiority. Undeniably, her marriage to Robert Schumann positioned her as a crucial part of a composer–interpreter partnership—a musical partnership that was quite calculated in its alignment with the practices of canonic formation. As Robert transformed his compositional approach to gain critical...