This paper expands upon the work of Kopiez, Lehmann and Klassen in their 2009 paper Clara Schumann’s collection of Playbills, in which they established the changes that occurred in her repertoire across her career to examine the areas of Clara Schumann’s shaping of pianistic values through her choice of repertoires in different cities, and the reception of her choices. Using their playbill collection, I examine the differences between the London and Vienna programmes during the 1860s. These cities and this decade are significant to the study of Clara Schumann’s programmes, as these are the cities in which she performed most often outside of Germany, Vienna the most visited in the first half of her career, London in the second. By the 1860s, Clara Schumann’s reputation was such that her performances were shaping musical trends in the cities she visited, and so the music she chose to promote would have broader implications for popular repertory in the city.

By comparing Clara Schumann’s programming in the two cities this paper demonstrates that she was employing alternative strategies for concertising depending on location. Through analysis of her programmes in the two cities, this paper demonstrates that in Vienna, her programmes were focused on the work of Robert Schumann alone, where as in London although his music is still prominently placed, it is joined by that of Beethoven and Mendelssohn in significant numbers. Furthermore, she chose to repeat works far more often in London than she did in Vienna. In my paper, I examine the implications that this data has for our understanding of canon-formation: in particular, I discuss how canons were developing differently in different cities and that traveling virtuosos, such as Clara Schumann, would have had an active part in shaping these different canons.

The analysis of Robert Schumann’s early piano cycles has been the sight of a lively scholarly debate. The puzzles of their tonal cohesion and avoidance of formal structures have been a particular locus for analytical interest. However, a thus far under-explored aspect of the history of these pieces is Clara Schumann’s work in performing them; at what times she played the whole piece or omitted parts, how she made these selections and what implications this might have for our understanding of these works. In this paper I propose to focus specifically on her performances of her husband’s op. 9, Carnaval, a piece she performed more than 60 times publicly, and many more privately.

This study also examines when and where Clara Schumann chose to perform this piece. Given its controversial reputation, when she chose to introduce an audience to Carnaval can be used as a bellwether for the reception of Robert Schumann’s music in a particular location. This will demonstrate the greater depth of understanding that can be gained by incorporating Clara Schumann’s performed versions of Robert Schumann’s works into our analysis of this music and explore how this can help us to find new approaches to canonic works. 

The 19^th century composer Robert Schumann in many ways embodied the Romantic architype of a tortured genius, dead long before his time. However, this paper focuses on the career of his wife, Clara Schumann how she shaped the perception of his memory and how others interpreted the memory of Robert Schumann through her performances, even in places he had never been, through her performances of his piano music.

This paper explores the relationship between the Clara Schumann and the cultural memory of the early German Romantic composers in London, as chronicled in the reviews of the concerts she gave. In her earliest concerts in the city (1856) she was viewed as a celebrated pianist, married to a tragically ill composers of contested merit. By the end of her concert activities in the city she was recognised as one of the last living links to a by-gone era of ‘great-masters’. Through the pieces she performed and her interpretations of them, Clara Schumann had a lasting impact on the understanding of the music of her early-nineteenth-century contemporaries in Britain, with her legacy, through her pupils, lasting well into the twentieth century. As the authoritative interpreter of this music for over three decades, Clara Schumann’s role in shaping the cultural memory of composers like her husband and Mendelssohn, and the reception of this provides a new insight into our understanding of the development of musical tastes in London during this period.   

In November 1920 the first performance was given of Sophocles’ tragedy Electra, in a new scenic performance, with Willem Royaards as stage director and music by Alphons Diepenbrock. Diepenbrock set his music for speaking voices and orchestra from a Dutch translation made for this occasion by the well-known poet P. C. Boutens. Problems arose at the start of the project, mainly due to the fact that Diepenbrock, also a teacher of classical languages, disagreed with Boutens transferring the Greek verses into Dutch, neglecting the original metre. As a result, Diepenbrock made many changes to Boutens’ translation, which caused a conflict when the poet heard the first performance. After Diepenbrocks death, Balthazar Verhagen wrote a completely new translation of Electra (using Diepenbrock’s suggestions), which was printed in 1928. However, the Boutens translation was used again for a new scenic performance in 1935, on the occasion of Willem Mengelberg’s 40th anniversary as conductor of the Concertgebouw Orkest. The unexpected success of this performance, which was followed by many repetitions – the piece stayed in the repertoire until 1940 -, coincided with a revival of Greek tragedy on the Dutch stage. It is remarkable that composers of music to these tragedies, like Diepenbrock, Willem Pijper and Bertus van Lier, all preferred the speaking voice to the singing voice. In relation to this, two developments must be mentioned. First: the revival of ‘melodrama’ in Germany, with pieces like Das Schloβ am Meere (1899) and Enoch Arden (1897) by Richard Strauss, and Das Hexenlied (1902) by Max von Schillings. Second: the new interest in the art of declamation with great artists like Ernst von Possart and Ludwig Wüllner. Wüllner’s 1933 recording of the famous Hexenlied, which Wüllner also performed in Holland, gives a good impression of the performance practice of this style of melodrama. Various emotions are expressed in a way nowadays considered as exaggerated or pathetic. In order to paint the words Wüllner uses technical devices such as elevated speech, portamenti and accentuations by pitch or by lengthening the vowels. Diepenbrock, however, who heard him in 1905, detested this theatrical style of declamation, as did other young Dutch artists. In the periodical De Kroniek they propagated a more simple style of declamation, focussing on the sound instead of the content. They were influenced mainly by the psalmodic way in which Paul Verlaine recited his poems during his visit to Holland in 1892. It is unfortunately not possible to gain a good impression of the declamation style in the performances of Electra before the Second World War, since it has not yet been possible to trace any of the recordings from the period. This is a pity because there must be a big gap in style between the declamation of the actress Charlotte Köhler (the Electra in the scenic performance of 1935) and Joanna Diepenbrock, who took part in many concert performances of Electra from 1936 onwards. Joanna Diepenbrock, the eldest daughter of the composer, studied classical languages as well as music and considered the voice part in Electra purely from the musical side. Moreover, Diepenbrock never notated pitch or rhythm for the speaking voices in his incidental music, which made it particularly difficult for actors like Charlotte Köhler, who lacked any musical training, to perform his melodrama. This is why younger composers preferred a new type of melodrama, where the rhythm is fixed (as in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat) or where rhythm and pitch are fixed (as in Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire). Considering Electra there is one recording which is very important. This is a recording of a student performance from 1962, supervised by Joanna Diepenbrock, who was responsible for the speaking voices. The recording took a year to prepare, and gives an impression of how much can be achieved with sufficient preparation. To trace the relation between words and music, as the composer intended, more investigation will be necessary. Verhagen even writes that Diepenbrock composed his music to Electra directly from the Greek words. His argument is challenging enough to examine; but it will require study of Greek verse. After the Second World War the unfixed melodrama did not survive long. When, in 1954, the stage director Ton Lutz was asked to make a new scenic performance of Electra for the Holland Festival, he refused to use elevated speech. He considered the declamation style of Joanna Diepenbrock and others an affectation. During this performance the text of Boutens was spoken normally. Lutz made many changes to the Boutens translation, as Diepenbrock had done. To my knowledge, no performance of Electra with the composer’s changes to the text has been given since the premiere. A performance of the original version would probably be rather outdated by modern theatre standards, but it might be an important experiment for the study of the performance practice of the melodrama, and could make Diepenbrock’s intentions more clear.

The centrality of Vaughan Williams to British music in the first half of the twentieth century is now a commonplace in musicology, but this has not always been so. Prior to 1914 Vaughan Williams was regarded by a number of British critics as a figure of considerable potential, but of less interest than composers like Granville Bantock, Cyril Scott, and Joseph Holbrooke: a reflection, in part, of the many different strands that existed in musical modernism in pre-war Britain, as well as scepticism that Vaughan Williams’s engagement with English folksong offered anything original. In this chapter, I consider this inauspicious early period of Vaughan Williams reception, when even works considered seminal today like the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis were received by some critics with bewilderment, and the changes that took place in the years after World War One after which Vaughan Williams became the leader of British musical modernism. I argue that Vaughan Williams’s emergence reflects a change in attitude by British critics to modernism in general, to their approach to musical criticism, and to Vaughan Williams’s musical language; in particular I note the distinction increasingly drawn by critics between folksong arrangements and a musical language derived from folksong.