Art & Love

Visualized Feature on and with Clara & Robert Schumann
by Magdalene Melchers

Robert
“My beloved Klara, my dear, darling girl…”

Clara
“My dear Robert …”

Robert
“My lovely, beloved girl, now come sit beside me, incline your head a little to the right, which makes you look so darling, and let me tell you this and that.”


Clara
“I will remain wherever you want, my beloved Robert, and you are quite right: to be loved as a woman is the highest fulfilment! Yes, all I want is to love you and make you happy.”


 (Male / Female, Clara’s echo) - Marriage Law of 1828   
 “The husband is entitled to demand that his wife take on all the housework her rank permits. If the husband is an artist or artisan, the wife must help him therein without being entitled to remuneration.”
“If the wife is an artist in her own right, without neglecting the duties of her household, she alone may keep the income derived therefrom, without having to share it with her husband. However, if she neglects the services she owes, she must compensate her husband and reimburse him for any additional costs she has caused.”

Clara
“It is terrible that Robert hears me in his room when I play, so I cannot make use of the morning hours, the best ones for serious study. Alas! If only I could work.”


Author
Today, the voluminous documents have been researched almost without exception, they have been printed, recorded, turned into film versions, available to the world. They almost bring to life what bound two people together in mutual devotion. And still – what it was really like, what these two sensitive people really thought and felt during their lifetime, what united and separated them – all that remains a mystery.


Robert
“Couldn’t you play a little bit worse sometimes, so that they don’t overdo it so terribly – each thunderous applause drives your father to put one more step between us – bear that in mind.”


Clara
“You cannot understand this enthusiasm, as you do not know all the things I manage to do, and what not, because you know me too little as an artist, but never think that I hold that against you – on the contrary, it makes me happy to know that you do not love me for my art, but, as you once wrote on a little piece of paper: I do not love you because you are a great artist, I love you because you are so good.”

Robert
“My dearly beloved young wife,

First of all let me kiss you most tenderly on this day, your first day as a woman and the first day of your 22nd year of life. This little book I begin today has a very intimate meaning; it shall be a diary about everything that touches us mutually in our household and marriage; our wishes, our hopes shall be recorded there; it should also be a little book of requests that we direct toward one another whenever words are insufficient, also one of mediation and reconciliation whenever we've had a misunderstanding. In short: it shall be a good, true friend to us, to whom we confide everything and who knows our hearts. Do you agree, dear wife? If you agree with all this, woman of my heart, then sign your name below mine, and let us also speak the three words, upon which all happiness rests in life, as a talisman:

Diligence, frugality and fidelity.

I am, truly –
Your husband Robert who loves you with all his heart, and you? “

Clara
“As am I, your wife Clara who is devoted to you with all her soul.”


Robert
“I was able to give some little joy to my Clara with the first printed edition of my first symphony, with the second, which I had quietly completed, and also with two notebooks of Rückert songs by both of us. What else could I offer her, apart from my striving to create art? And how lovingly she partakes in it.“


Clara
“Practicing my art is the air that allows me to breathe.”

Children

Visualized Feature on and with Clara & Robert Schumann
by Magdalene Melchers

“Make use of the minutes – they never return”

Robert  
“A new chapter in life was reached not without worry but began happily, so we must be grateful to heaven with all our hearts. On the 1st of September, it gave us a girl through my Klara. The preceding hours were painful; I will not forget the night before the 1st of September, a Wednesday. So much was in danger; 10 minutes before eleven in the morning, the little one arrived – amidst thunder and lightning, as a storm was passing through the sky. But her first cries – and life stood before us again, bright and loving – we were quite overcome with joy. How proud I am to have a wife who has given me not just her love and her art, but such a gift.”

Author
During Clara Schumann’s lifetime, the interval between births in the so-called lower and middle class was about two years. Among the upper class, the interval was shorter, since women were supposed to ensure succession by having as many children as possible, and did not breast-feed, but turned infants over to wet-nurses.

Clara
“Now all is well with little Marie, but it was high time that we found a new wet-nurse for the child, otherwise she would almost have starved to death. My health is quite good now, and given how short a time it has been since giving birth, it is extraordinary. I go for walks every day for at least an hour with my beloved Robert, and I thank God that He has left me on earth, where I live so happily.”

“Make use of the minutes, they never return”.

Clara
“I had wished for a boy, especially for Robert’s sake, and surely my Robert was inwardly saddened that it was not so, but he is too good a person not to love the child, even if for my sake alone, and we are still young; heaven will grant him a boy to delight his fatherly heart. “


Clara  
“I hardly play at all at the moment; during the day it is impossible, as it disturbs Robert, and in the evenings I am always too tired, and my pregnancy makes playing all too difficult.”


Author
Before the birth of her eighth child, Clara Schumann wrote to her sister-in-law:

Clara
“My confinement is approaching, and I wish it were over again. There is so much attached to these events, making life difficult, and then all the children also cost a terrible amount of money! – Well, I think if heaven gives them to us, it will also give us the strength to bring them up.”


Robert
“Klara has also completed a little composition which is steeped in a rather beautiful character; she is allowed to play now again; but of course, the artist must sacrifice many an hour to the mother.”

Clara
“What will become of my work?! But Robert says: “Children are a blessing,” and he is right, for without children there is no happiness either…”


Author
In their marriage diary, do Clara and Robert Schumann write to each other what they might not have dared express face to face? It seems that there was candid transparency in their exchanges about emotions of every kind.

Clara
Week 19
“It is against our agreement that I should write here this week, but if my husband is composing a symphony, one can hardly ask him to attend to anything else – if even his wife sees herself pushed to the bottom of the list!”

Week 20
“I have no time at all to play; sometimes my ill health, sometimes Robert’s composing prevents me. If only the evil of the thin walls could be resolved; I am forgetting everything I knew, and I shall become quite melancholy about it”.

Author
Eugenie Schumann, whom Clara Schumann gave birth to in 1851, writes in her memoir of her mother:

Eugenie Schumann 
“Mother herself was relentlessly industrious, and demanded the same of us. During the part of the day that was devoted to work, she could not bear to see us idle.
“Make use of the minutes, “ she said.”

Clara
“Make use of the minutes, they never return.“

Money

Visualized Feature on and with Clara & Robert Schumann
by Magdalene Melchers

Clara
“How much are we worth?”

Robert
“How much are we worth?”

Author
Since the age of nine, Clara Wieck had been giving successful concerts all over Europe. At the age of 20, she wrote in a letter to Robert Schumann:

Clara
“Everything I bought with my own money, my parents did not give me as much as a pin. They never gave me anything as a gift, not even a cherry or plum would my mother give me – “She has her own money,” they always said.”

Author
So for many years, Father Wieck profited from his daughter’s income. In the early 19th century, the basic social order meant that a man – a husband – should not live off a woman’s income, especially not his wife’s. In the Vormärz period – when industrialization was slowly starting and agrarian states increasingly transformed into industrial ones, when the lightbulb was yet to be invented, washing machines were still a figment of the imagination and the first trains connected Leipzig with the world, Clara and Robert – who had two daughters at this point – wrote to one another in their marriage diary:

Clara
“You are such an artist, in the true sense of the meaning – your entire spirit and striving is so poetic and tender, I would like to say holy, that I would like to spare you any prosaic concerns, which married life, however, makes unavoidable.”

Robert           
“Now Klara is sorting her songs and several piano compositions. She always wants to forge ahead; but on her right, Marie hangs on her skirts, Elise is also a burden, and the husband sits immersed in thoughts of the Peri. Keep forging ahead then, through joy and sorrow, my Klara, and love me as you have always loved me.”


Clara
“Alas, Robert! ... All my concern is entirely about you; the thought that you should work for money is the most terrible to me, for this cannot make you happy, and yet I see no other way, if you will not let me work as well, if you cut off all my possibilities of making money.”

Robert           
“Our separation has brought our oddly difficult position home to me again. Should I neglect my talent to serve you as a companion on your journey? And you, should you let your talent lie fallow because I am bound by the journal and the piano? Now, when you are young and at the height of your energy? We have found a solution. You have hired a companion; I return to our child and to my work. But what will the world say? These thoughts torture me.”

Author
For the wife and mother, being forced to make money fed the main, fundamental needs of this pianist, composer, piano teacher and virtuoso.

Writing:
Minimum level of subsistence
3 thalers per week
156 thalers per year

Net revenue of Clara Schumann’s Russian concert tour
January - May 1844
2300 thalers

Clara
“For several days, I have been plagued by indescribable melancholy – thinking you do not love me as you did – I often feel so clearly that I cannot suffice for you, and when you are gentle, I sometimes feel that this is due to the goodness of your heart, which does not wish to hurt me. In addition to this sorrow, I have bleak thoughts of the future now, which often fail to leave me for days on end and which I cannot manage to banish, so that you will have to be lenient with me at times.”

Author
Entry in the households account book, 19. February 1841:

Robert
“Drank a damnable lot in the evening. Stupid fool.”

Robert
“We spend more than we earn.”

Clara  
“We spend more than we earn.”
“I, however, would like to earn, in order to give you a life which is devoted to your art alone; it pains me profoundly when I have to ask you for money and you give me what you have earned, then it often seems to me as if this robs your life of all its poetry.”
_

Author
Clara Schumann was accustomed to being an outsider – which woman at the beginning of the 19th century would earn money for her family’s living as an artist? By Robert Schumann’s side, this housewife and mother – of ultimately eight children – managed to be a successful pianist and composer as well, but the price was unspeakably high.

Robert
“Unless a hand intervenes from heaven, I have no idea how I might increase my income within a short period of time to a level I would wish for you. You know the nature of my works, you know that they are of a spiritual nature only, that they cannot be wrought, like a craft, at any time of the day.”

Clara
“Do you believe that my love is not also rhapsodic? Oh yes, I am capable of rhapsody as well, but all rhapsody ends when worries fill our hearts, and you of all people would feel brought down to earth again by them.”
“I accept that even a simple life requires much – yet I have no doubt that everything will work out. My trust is solid.  Your ring reminds me daily: Faith. Love. Hope.”

Author
This interplay of love and artistic prowess continues to enrich concert life in the 21st century. Our listening enjoyment of various works reveals none of the daily struggle for recognition, which would allow them to earn a living for this large family.

Robert
“We spend more than earn.”

Clara
“We spend more than we earn.”

Robert
“How much are we worth?”

Clara
“How much are we worth?”

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Image Credits

Christian Kern
CD Schumann-Haus: KOCMOC  

Text & Audio Production
Concept /Texts: Magdalene Melchers, Franziska Franke-Kern
English Translation: Alexa Nieschlag
Audio Production: Magdalene Melchers 

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