Honouring a great yet neglected talent
Clara Schumann Festival
St John’s Smith Square, London
In the roll-call of neglected composers of the 19th century, Clara Schumann cuts an especially poignant figure. Feted from childhood as a virtuoso pianist, she was a figure of European renown, second only to the much more flamboyant Franz Liszt – whom she really disliked, saying his playing made her sick (my hunch is that he tried to flirt with her, and the somewhat austere Clara was put out). On top of all that she found the time to bear eight children, nursemaid her demanding husband Robert – and compose a small body of beautifully crafted music.
But how should we evaluate her work now? This four-day festival to mark the 200th anniversary of Clara’s birth was a welcome chance to savour her compositions at length, and get a feel for their range and depth. It was an intelligently conceived survey, which mingled Clara’s music with those composers whom she knew personally and whose music she played on her gruelling tours – Mendelssohn, Brahms, and her husband Robert. It included her Piano Trio and Piano Variations in G Minor, the two works of hers which get regular performances, as well as little-known pieces like her Preludes and Fugues (which show that, like Robert and Mendelssohn, Clara was a keen student of Bach). To perform them the festival’s curator Beverley Vong gathered together a group of 17 young singers and instrumentalists.
The opening concert, which offered all of Clara’s 24 published songs, was a vivid reminder that in many ways Clara was typical of her age. She set the same poets as the male composers, apart from one female poet (the remarkable Friederike Serre). They have the same sentiments of longing for a distant beloved, the same tendency to project romantic feelings onto nature. Her songs are full of drooping roses and lilies limned with “tears” of moisture, whispering about love to the moon. As for the music, it’s full of echoes of those other composers – as it was bound to be, given that Clara spent so many of her waking hours practising their music.
It was strangely moving to observe that the strongest echoes were of her husband Robert. One song, about the joys of singing in the mountains and listening to the echoes, had a striking way of shifting the harmonies upwards over a fixed bass. It produced that sense of fluttering excitement which we think of as “typically Schumannesque” – but which Schumann? It prompted the thought
that many of these musical ideas were actually joint property, conceived during the hours Robert and Clara spent together at the piano.
Among the songs were a handful that had the stamp of a real masterpiece. In these, all the familiar clichés of the genre suddenly blazed with intensity as if they’d just been invented – like the beautiful Geheimes
Flüstern, Secret Whisperings. In truth it might have blazed even brighter, if pianist Eugene Asti had let go a little. He had an exquisite touch, but these songs are not made of porcelain, and at times a more forceful approach would have helped. The singers were more unbuttoned. Belgian soprano Sophie Karthäuser had a lovely way of approaching a key word with touching diffidence, and then flaring the tone into magnificence. Thanks to her and tenor Alessandro Fisher one felt the passion underneath the flowery bourgeois sentiments. Alongside the songs were the Piano
Variations Clara wrote on a theme by her husband, performed by Mishka Rushdie Momen in a way which revealed the music’s tenderly exquisite workmanship. But Clara was a composer of many moods, even within this one piece, which a more forthright approach would have revealed. Gamal Khamis’s performance of Robert Schumann’s great C Minor Fantasy caught the piece’s delicate inward moments, but was less successful at projecting its grandeur.
Despite its occasional tendency to treat her music with kid gloves, the festival showed that Clara was a composer of greater range than she’s normally given credit for. She could strike a note of hymnlike radiance and simplicity, but she could also summon an emotional tumult which is astonishing, even when compared to the storms of better-known romantic composers. She didn’t have her husband Robert’s feeling for the uncanny and the carnivalesque, but rivals his beautiful way of evoking the sublime. In all, this was an invaluable and moving tribute to a composer who was never less than masterly, and at times rose to greatness.
‘Her songs are full of drooping roses and lilies… whispering about love to the moon’