Clara Schumann's Life And Music

Clara Schumann was born September 13, 1819 in Leipzig, Germany. Clara was born into a musical family in school her father Friedrich Weick studied theology but made his career in music. He later settled in Leipzig where he taught piano, opened a business selling instruments, and began a music lending library. He taught his wife Marianne and his future son-in-law Robert Schumann, he also received the reputation as a first-rate piano teacher. Wieck an and Marianne divorced after eight years of marriage when Clara was five years old, leaving Clara’s father to raise her and her four brother when her mother moved to Berlin. Unfortunately her father felt he neglected her general education but recognized her talents and saw that Clara had the finest musical education. In Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin Clara studied piano with her father and violin, theory, and different areas of composition with the best teachers. In Leipzig she attended all of the important performances and learned about business of music. In her teens Clara fell in love Robert Schumann, which was one of her fathers students, and later on became one of the most prominent composers of the 19th century. Schumann was 9 years older than Clara and had been living in her house as a piano student. In

She saw her husband die and four out of eight of her children die in front of her own eyes. Her first son died when her was just an year old in 1847. One of her sons and her husband both ended their lives in a mental asylum. In 1854 her husband attempted suicide and was committed into an insane asylum for the last two years of his life. Her son Ludwig suffered from a mental illness just like his father in Clara’s words he had to be “buried alive” in an institution. When her son Ferdinand died at the age of 43 he left behind his children to be raised by their grandmother. Later in life she became deaf and was also confined to a