On this date in 1840, the Schumanns finally got hitched. The couple had wanted to marry for years, but Clara’s father – Robert’s former teacher, Friedrich Wieck – bitterly opposed the match, so violently in fact that the matter landed everyone in court.
At the time of their first meeting, Robert was 20 years-old and a live-in student at the Wiecks’. Clara was 11. Clearly circumstances were problematic. The minute Clara turned 18, she accepted Robert’s proposal of marriage. The elder Wieck declined to grant his permission, and the young couple was compelled to bring suit against him. In the end, the judge ruled in the lovers’ favor, and the two were at last able to wed – one day before Clara’s 21st birthday, at which point she would no longer have needed her father’s consent!
Ah well. In the interim, after he had been tossed out of the house, Robert’s passion for Clara was sublimated into ardent love letters and bursts of creative energy. He composed reams of piano music at white heat up until the year of their marriage. Thereafter, he wrote for piano and orchestra, always with Clara in mind.
The two maintained a joint diary, and the entries are frequently touching. The Schumanns, like any married couple, had their issues, but they clearly loved one another very much. They became one of the great power couples of their time, with Robert a composing dynamo and Clara one of the great concert pianists of her day. More than 20 years after Robert’s death, she became a professor at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. Her 61 year concert career played a huge role in molding public taste in so far as what we have come to expect, down to the present day, from a piano recital.
Happy anniversary to the happy couple.
Schumann’s “Widmung” (“Dedication”), written as a wedding present for Clara:
Schumann’s love letters, read by Sting!
