Soirées musicales, Op. 6, is a set of six piano pieces composed by Clara Schumann in 1836. The pieces are written in a light and lyrical style, showcasing Schumann’s skill in melody and piano technique, her ability to combine elements of Romanticism with classical structures, and it remains one of her notable works in the solo piano repertoire.

During her lifetime, Schumann was an internationally renowned concert pianist. Over 1,300 concert programs from her performances throughout Europe between 1831 through 1889 have been preserved. She championed the works of her husband and other contemporaries such as Brahms, Chopin and Mendelssohn.

The Schumanns were admirers of Chopin, especially of his Variations on "Là ci darem la mano", and she played the piece herself. When she was 14 and her future husband 23, he wrote to her:

Tomorrow precisely at eleven o'clock I will play the adagio from Chopin's Variations and at the same time I shall think of you very intently, exclusively of you. Now my request is that you should do the same, so that we may see and meet each other in spirit.

— Robert Schumann

In her early years, her repertoire, selected by her father, was showy and in the style common to the time, with works by Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Adolf von Henselt, Sigismond Thalberg, Henri Herz, Johann Peter Pixis, Carl Czerny and her own compositions. She turned to including compositions by Baroque composers such as Domenico Scarlatti and Johann Sebastian Bach, but performed especially contemporary music by Chopin, Mendelssohn and her husband, whose music did not attain popularity until the 1850s.

In 1835, she performed her Piano Concerto in A minor with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, conducted by Mendelssohn. On 4 December 1845, she premiered Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto in Dresden. Following the advice of Brahms she performed Mozart's Piano Concerto in C minor at the Hanoverian court and in Leipzig.

Along with Arabella Goddard she was one of the first woman pianists to perform Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata in public, doing so on two occasions before 1856. Her busiest years as a performer were between 1856 and 1873, after her husband's death.During this period, she experienced success as a performer in Britain, where her 1865 performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto in G major was met with enormous applause. As a chamber musician, she often gave concerts with violinist Joachim. In her later career, she frequently accompanied lieder singers in recitals.

Compositions

As part of the broad musical education given to her by her father, Clara Wieck learned to compose, and from childhood to middle age she produced a good body of work. Clara wrote that "composing gives me great pleasure... there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound". Her Op. 1 was Quatre Polonaises pour le pianoforte composed in 1831, and Op. 5 4 Pièces caractéristiques in 1836, all piano pieces for her recitals. She wrote her Piano Concerto in A minor at age 14, with some help from her future husband. She planned a second piano concerto, but only a Konzertsatz in F minor from 1847 survived.

After her marriage, she turned to lieder and choral works. The couple wrote and published one joint composition in 1841, setting a cycle of poems by Friedrich Rückert called Liebesfrühling(Spring of Love) in Zwölf Lieder auf F. Rückerts Liebesfrühling, her Op. 12 and his Op. 37. Her chamber works include the Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17 (1846) and Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22 (1853), inspired by her husband's birthday. They were dedicated to Joachim, who performed them for George V of Hanover, who declared them a "marvellous, heavenly pleasure".

As she grew older, she became more preoccupied with other responsibilities in life and found it hard to compose regularly, writing, "I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?" Her husband also expressed concern about the effect on her composing output:

Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out.

— Robert Schumann

She produced one to eight compositions every year beginning at age 11, until her output stopped in 1848, producing only a choral work that year for her husband's birthday and leaving her second piano concerto unfinished. These two works, while reserved for her opus 18 and 19, were never published. Five years later, however, when she was 34 in 1853, the year she met Brahms, she engaged in a flurry of composing, resulting in 16 pieces that year: a set of piano variations on an "Album Leaf" of her husband (his Op. 99 No. 4), eight "Romances" for piano solo and for violin and piano, and seven songs. These works were published a year later, after Robert's confinement, as her Op. 20 through 23.

For the next 43 years of her life, she only composed piano transcriptions of works by her husband and Brahms, including 41 transcriptions of Robert Schumann's lieder (commissioned by a publisher in 1872), and a short piano duet commissioned for a friend's wedding anniversary in 1879. In the last year of her life, she left several sketches for piano preludes, designed for piano students, as well as some published cadenzas for her performances of Beethoven and Mozart piano concertos.

Most of Clara Schumann's music was never played by anyone else and largely forgotten until a resurgence of interest in the 1970s. Today her compositions are increasingly performed and recorded.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Schumann / License: CC BY-SA 4.0