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

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Alexander Stefaniak

Becoming Clara Schumann

Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon

Alexander Stefaniak

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English

Indiana University Press
02 November 2021

Music; Theory of music & musicology; Individual composers & musicians, bands & groups

Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband's death. Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music.

Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband's music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann's concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband's music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager.

By highlighting Schumann's navigation of her musical culture's gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.

By: Alexander Stefaniak
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 476g
ISBN: 9780253058287
ISBN 10: 0253058287
Pages: 326
Publication Date: 02 November 2021
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Alexander Stefaniak is Associate Professor of Musicology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is author of Schumann's Virtuosity: Criticism, Composition, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Germany.

Reviews for Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon

The book succeeds . . . by discussing the material world and practices of classical music. In setting forth concrete details and eschewing the hyperbolic and metaphoric, Stefaniak brings classical music back to life. -- M. Dineen * Choice *