Clara Schumann - Later Career

Later Career

Clara Schumann's reputation brought her into contact with the leading musicians of the day, including Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Liszt. She also met violinist Joseph Joachim who became one of her frequent performance partners.

Clara Schumann often took charge of the finances and general household affairs. Part of her responsibility included making money, which she did by giving concerts, although she continued to play throughout her life not only for the income, but because she was a concert artist by training and by nature.

After Robert's death (29 July 1856), Clara devoted herself principally to the interpretation of his works. But when she first visited England in 1856 largely through the good offices of William Sterndale Bennett, the English composer and friend of her late husband, the critics received Robert's music with a chorus of disapproval. She returned to London in 1865 and continued her visits annually, with the exception of four seasons, until 1882. She also appeared there each year from 1885 to 1888.

She played a particular role in restoring Brahms's D minor concerto to the general repertory; it had fallen out of favour after its premiere, and was only rehabilitated in the 1870s, thanks mainly to the efforts of Clara Schumann and Brahms himself.

She was initially interested in the works of Liszt, but later developed an outright hostility to him. She ceased to play any of his works; she suppressed her husband's dedication to Liszt of his Fantasie in C major when she published Schumann's complete works; and she refused to attend a Beethoven centenary festival in Vienna in 1870 when she heard that Liszt and Richard Wagner would be participating.

She was particularly scathing of Wagner. Of Tannhäuser, she said that he "wears himself out in atrocities"; she described Lohengrin as "horrible"; and she wrote that Tristan und Isolde was "the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life".

In 1878 she was appointed teacher of the piano at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, a post she held until 1892, and in which she contributed greatly to the improvement of modern piano playing technique.

She held Anton Bruckner, whose 7th Symphony she heard in 1885, in very low esteem. She wrote to Brahms, describing it as "a horrible piece". But she was more impressed with Richard Strauss's early Symphony in F minor in 1887.

Clara Schumann played her last public concert in Frankfurt on 12 March 1891. The last work she played was Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Haydn, in the piano-duet version.

She suffered a stroke on 26 March 1896, dying on 20 May at age 76. She is buried at Bonn's Alter Friedhof (Old Cemetery) with her husband.

She was portrayed onscreen by Katharine Hepburn in the 1947 film Song of Love, in which Paul Henreid played Robert Schumann and Robert Walker starred as a young Johannes Brahms.

She was also portrayed more recently in a German film named simply "Geliebte Clara" in 2008 taking a look at the lives of 19th-century composers Clara and Robert Schumann.