"A woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?"
Clara Schumann wrote those words when she was 20, around the time she married composer Robert Schumann in 1840.
Clara herself had already written a concerto and a clutch of solo pieces for piano, and her own career as a composer seemed destined to flourish.
That never happened. Although Clara continued to write music sporadically during her marriage to Robert, her output eventually sputtered away to nothing.
Why? What happened to Clara's precocious early promise? Did marriage keep her from becoming as good a composer as her husband?
These questions are examined in "The Prodigious Life of Clara S.," a new play with music devised by Minneapolis theater troupe the Moving Company with the Minnesota Orchestra. Marking the anniversary of Clara's birth 200 years ago in Leipzig, Germany, it premieres July 27 as part of the orchestra's annual Sommerfest.
Twin Cities actor and singer Jennifer Baldwin Peden plays Clara. She agrees that Clara's development as a composer was stunted by the expectation that a married woman of her period should first and foremost be a housekeeper and mother.
But she cautions against the assumption Clara was necessarily unhappy with the role she occupied, playing second fiddle creatively to her husband.
"I don't think she could comprehend the idea of being unfairly treated the way that we can now," Baldwin Peden said. "She really had a more pragmatic mind-set than that, and she was really about making money for the family."
Clara did that by working as a concert pianist, giving recitals all over Europe and acquiring a reputation as one of the outstanding soloists of the 19th century.
The money she earned was critical, as Robert's income from composing and music criticism was insufficient to support the comfortable middle-class lifestyle to which they aspired.
Clara's busy concert schedule ate greedily into the time she had available for composing. So too did the increasingly heavy demands of raising a family of eight children.
"Clara was married to Robert for 15 years, and she was pregnant 10 times in that period," said Nathan Keepers, co-author of the script for "The Prodigious Life."
Choice between art and life
Although the main focus of "The Prodigious Life of Clara S." is inevitably on Clara herself, her husband (portrayed by Steven Epp) and their composer friend Johannes Brahms feature prominently, too.
As a critic, Robert Schumann played a crucial role in publicizing the young Brahms' budding artistic genius. Clara's relationship with Brahms was more personal, however, and became particularly intense when Robert was committed to an asylum following a mental collapse in 1854.
"It certainly was a romantic relationship, though not necessarily in a physical, sexual way," Baldwin Peden said.
Keepers plays Brahms in "The Prodigious Life," and agrees that the relationship between Brahms and Clara was something special.
"They were deeply in love," he said. But although they both lived for 40 years after Robert's death in 1856, they never married.
Why? The answer is that Brahms was effectively married to his music.
"He struggled for a long time over whether to choose art or life," Keepers said. "To him it was an either/or, and he chose art."
Robert was also dedicated first and foremost to his artistic activities, and would eventually be judged one of the greatest composers of the 19th century.
Was the success of his career bought selfishly at the expense of Clara's? Robert certainly worried about the extent to which his wife's creative instincts were being stifled, while seeming powerless to change the situation.
"To have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing," he wrote sheepishly. "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."
A 'distinctive voice'
"The Prodigious Life of Clara S." will give its audience a rare opportunity to hear some of the music Clara did "work out" before she stopped composing in her mid-30s.
"Jennifer is a singer, so we'll be doing a lot of Clara's songs, as well as music by Robert Schumann and Brahms," said Minnesota Orchestra violist Sam Bergman, who has acted as a creative partner in the project.
"You'll see the orchestra in very different configurations from the usual," he added. "It will be present through the whole show, but sometimes it will be three people, sometimes a full orchestra."
While bemoaning that Clara was "held back" as a composer, Bergman rates the music she did complete highly. "I hear an incredibly distinctive voice," he said. "It is utterly different from her husband's, and from Brahms'. It would be worth hearing even if no one knew who Clara Schumann was."
Bergman also pointed to the power Clara wielded as what we nowadays would call an influencer, molding the tastes of 19th-century audiences.
She could, he said, be "scathing and brutal" in passing judgment on fellow musicians. But in her recitals she tirelessly championed music by composers whom she valued, particularly that of Brahms and her husband.
The picture that emerges from "The Prodigious Life of Clara S." is of a phenomenally capable, multi-tasking woman — a mother, a muse, a businesswoman, a great pianist, a tastemaker, a writer.
Might she have developed into a truly great composer? Should we be disappointed that she didn't?
Possibly. But Keepers rejects the notion that composition should be the ultimate measure of greatness in the realm of classical music.
"We tend to put the composer at the pinnacle of music, but you can be a great interpreter and curator of art, too, and inform a whole generation," he said. "That's a beautiful thing, and that's what's interesting about Clara's story."
Although there are now many more women working as composers and performers in the classical music field than in Clara's era, Baldwin Peden is skeptical of the notion that the glass ceiling has been definitively shattered.
"I'm still learning my music with two children wanting to play over my hands at the piano," she said, smiling wryly.
Claras still exist — perhaps a lot of them, Bergman said.
"In some ways we've moved on a ton, and there has never been a better time to be a woman in composition than right now," he said. "But you still don't see works by women on the vast majority of classical programs in this country.
"In terms of what is played, it's still very much a man's world."
Terry Blain is a freelance classical music critic for the Star Tribune. Reach him at artsblain@gmail.com.
