San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Joshua Kosman discusses a new recording of works by Clara Schumann.
This year marks the bicentennial of Schumann’s birth, and you might expect that musical organizations — who after all rarely miss a chance to celebrate such an anniversary — would be getting in line to observe the event. Well, think again.
I’ve been watching for performances of the composer’s songs and chamber music, or even the wondrous Piano Concerto in A Minor, but largely in vain. Even in her birthday year, apparently, Clara Schumann just doesn’t rate.
Oh, I’m sorry — did you think I was talking about her husband?
Of course you did, and it’s an understandable enough mistake. When the subject is early 19th century music, Schumann inevitably means Robert, renowned for his symphonies, his innovative torrents of piano music, his song cycles and his wondrous Piano Concerto in A Minor.
But that admittedly impressive musical legacy has made it all too easy to overlook the achievements of his wife. Clara Wieck, as she was known then, was a child prodigy pianist who was wowing audiences throughout Europe before she was out of her 20s, and even afterward she continued to be regarded as one of the leading keyboard celebrities of the period. She was a canny and original musical thinker, a trusted sounding board on creative matters for both her husband and, later on, for Brahms.
And she was a composer as well — at least up to a point. As a young piano virtuoso, Schumann wrote vehicles for her own artistry (including that concerto), and after her marriage she continued for a while to publish songs and chamber music. But the demands of domestic life, including looking after a devoted but temperamental spouse and no fewer than eight children, eventually took a toll. Clara’s compositional output slowed to a trickle and finally dried up altogether. Even after Robert’s death — and she outlived him by 40 years — she never returned to composing.
What we have here, in other words, is the painful and alltoofamiliar story of two creative dynamos in the same house, only one of whom was allowed to give full rein to their artistic impulses.
Yet the music that Clara did produce is astonishingly fine, as anyone can hear on a new recording titled “Romance,” released this month by the formidable young British pianist Isata KannehMason. Framing the disc are two of Schumann’s most ambitious works, the Piano Concerto — written when she was still in her teens — and a sturdy, delightful fourmovement Piano Sonata full of wit and vitality. In between are a variety of short character pieces, including a ravishingly beautiful set of three Romances for violin and piano that KannehMason (who's slated for a December recital for Cal Performances along with her brother, cellist Sheku KannehMason) performs with violinist Elena Urioste.
All of them attest to the remarkable ingenuity of Schumann’s creative gifts. Listen, for example, to the way she builds an intricate formal structure in the first movement of the concerto out of a small trove of clearly recognizable thematic material, or the blend of comedy and tenderness in the scherzo of the sonata. Consider, if nothing else, the inventiveness of putting the entire orchestra on hold for the slow movement of the concerto and simply writing a duet for piano and cello.
To listen to these pieces and others like them (Schumann’s Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 17, is a comparable gem) is to feel a complex mixture of emotions. There is the simple joy we always feel on becoming acquainted, or reacquainted, with splendid artistic work. There is the frustration, yet again, at the societal strictures that kept a creative woman from pursuing her career to its fullest.
And there is impatience, even anger, at a musical establishment that continues to minimize and overlook what composers like Schumann managed to accomplish in spite of everything. Two centuries later, the mythology of genius that kept Schumann from pursuing a fully realized creative career — the notion, which even she herself evidently took to heart, that composition is the proper purview of men — has still not been swept away with other outmoded cultural rubbish.
It lives on in the neglect of living female composers, who still struggle to even approach parity on concert programs with their male counterparts. And it lives on in the continued reluctance to correct the historical record by giving an airing to the works of women from centuries past.
Could there be a better opportunity to make some changes than an anniversary year? Every orchestra in the world is already salivating at the opportunity to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020, as though we weren’t already inundated with Beethoveniana. (Musicologist William Gibbons wittily pointed out on Twitter recently that the Beethoven year is the “White History Month” of classical music.)
But for Clara Schumann on her 200th birthday — which is Sept. 13, if you feel like baking a cake — there’s almost nothing. Kudos to KannehMason, who used the occasion of her recording debut to undertake something more noteworthy and more valuable than yet another recital of Chopin or Liszt. Let her example spread far and wide.