Ida Rubinstein: Dancer, Patroness, and Inspiration for Boléro

 by Emily E. Hogstad  

Dancer, actress, and arts patron Ida Rubinstein was a trailblazing figure in the arts, and her impact on early twentieth century music was profound.

A gifted performer, she knew how to captivate audiences with her beauty, stage presence, and creative moxie.

Whether starring in controversial productions or commissioning classics like Ravel’s Boléro, Rubinstein’s influence extended far beyond the stage and continues to resonate even today.

Great Wealth and Great Tragedy

Ida Rubinstein, 1912

Ida Rubinstein was born in October 1885 in Kharkov in present-day Ukraine, the youngest of the four children of Lev Rubinstein and his wife Ernestina.

The Rubinsteins were a hugely wealthy family, overseeing mills, breweries, and banks.

However, their extraordinary wealth couldn’t insulate them from tragedy. Ernestina died in 1888, then Lev died in 1892, possibly of cholera.

After their parents’ deaths, the Rubinstein children were split up. Ida and her sister Irène were relocated to St. Petersburg to live with an aunt.

She received a wide-ranging education that focused heavily on the arts and languages. The arts and arts philanthropy were hugely important to the entire family. (In fact, her cousin Iosif studied piano under Liszt.)

Finding Her Way to the Stage

Ida Rubinstein in tutu

As a young woman, faced with the prospect of entering the marriage market, she decided she wanted to pursue a life on the stage instead.

She studied theater for a few years in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In 1904, when she was just nineteen, she mounted and starred in a production of Sophocles’s Antigone, casting herself in the title role.

She hired painter and costume designer Léon Bakst for the project. He told her to start her career small and smart: to only present one act, and to do so privately.

The advice was sound. Her private performance was a major success, and Rubinstein proved to be incredibly talented and magnetic.

She also, fatefully, began studying dance. Despite her relatively advanced age, dance quickly became her major passion.

She had begun too late to become a great technician – or even a good one – but her charisma, grace, beauty, and stage presence made up for it.

Bringing a Controversial Salome to Life

Ida Rubinstein, 1922

In 1908, she caused a succès de scandale in St. Petersburg, when she appeared in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

The performance was banned by the Orthodox Church, the official state censor. The performers got around that by miming the entire performance.

The role offered her the opportunity to dance the highlight of the show: the Dance of the Seven Veils, performed to newly composed music by Alexander Glazunov. Her choreographer for the number was Michel Fokine, famous for choreographing The Dying Swan, Les Sylphides, Scheherazade, The Firebird, and countless other classics.

Alexander Glazunov: “Dance of Salome” op.90 

One contemporary described her gamble:

Never before had the St. Petersburg public been treated to the spectacle of a young society woman dancing voluptuously to insinuating oriental music (composed by Glazunov), discarding brilliantly colored veils one by one until only a wisp of dark green chiffon remained knotted round her loins. Although, as Alexandre Benois revealed, this final and reprehensible moment of the dance was dissimulated by means of a lighting trick.

Not surprisingly, her family was horrified and desperately wanted to rein her in. To ensure that none of them would have the power to take legal action against her, she married a cousin named Vladimir Gorvits.

Joining Forces with Diaghilev

Ida Rubinstein in Le Martyre de saint Sébastien, 1911

Choreographer Serge Diaghilev of the legendary Ballets Russes took notice of the striking young socialite with the penchant for nudity.

He cast her in the new ballet Cléopâtre, a work choreographed by Fokine and featuring music by Anton Arensky. She traveled to Paris and donned the see-through costume with great enthusiasm.

Anton Arensky: Egyptian Nights 

Despite her lack of training, she enthralled enchanted audiences.

She returned in the 1910 season in a ballet made up of music from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1888 symphonic suite Scheherazade.

That success was even greater than Cléopâtre had been, and it altered the course of music, design, and fashion for years to come. 

Striking Out on Her Own

Rubinstein could have continued with the Ballet Russes, but chose not to so that she could pursue her own projects.

Diaghilev became irritated with her. She had seemingly endless amounts of money at her disposal and could hire his greatest artists out from under him. He remained bitter about their relationship until his death.

After leaving the Ballet Russes, Rubinstein branched out on her own to produce the wildly ambitious Le Martyre de saint Sébastien.

This was a musical mystery play that she commissioned and produced, featuring a text by Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and incidental music by Claude Debussy. Fokine returned to choreograph.

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas describes Le Martyre de saint Sébastien 

Rubinstein gender-bent the role, appearing as an androgynous St. Sebastian. Not surprisingly, that casting caused dismay among conservative factions. In fact, the archbishop of Paris warned potential Catholic theatergoers not to attend because she was both Jewish and a woman.

Unfortunately, the five-hour-long project was rushed, resulting in a lack of narrative cohesiveness, and despite her best wishes and the geniuses attached to the project, Le Martyre was not a success. 

In 1928, she established her own ballet company, Les Ballets Ida Rubinstein. She would commission important works over the following years from a variety of composers.

Igor Stravinsky’s “Le baiser de la fée”

In 1928, she commissioned Stravinsky to write a ballet using Tchaikovsky’s music. The result was “Le baiser de la fée.”

Stravinsky: “Le baiser de la fée” 

Stravinsky wrote to a friend whom he sent the piano score to:

Don’t show it to Ida, Nijinsky or Benois. It is necessary for people such as they are – not particularly initiated – that I play the music for them myself.

Diaghilev was deeply upset with Stravinsky for having accepted a commission from Rubinstein after he’d pulled back from Diaghilev.

“He would not forgive me for having accepted Ida Rubinstein’s commission, and he was loud, both privately and in print, in denunciations of the ballet and of me,” Stravinsky wrote later.

Stravinsky conducted the premiere at the Paris Opéra in 1928. Rubinstein only arranged for a single performance, to Stravinsky’s irritation: he was bewildered that anyone would spend thousands of dollars on such a venture. “Nobody in the artistic world is as mysteriously stupid as this lady.”

Despite his misgivings, her money talked. He reunited with her for 1934’s Perséphone, a work for speaker, singers, dancers, and orchestra. 

Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro”

In 1927, Rubinstein approached Maurice Ravel about creating a work for her.

He had his heart set on arranging some Spanish dances by Albéniz’s Iberia. However, he found out that another composer had the rights to the music, and that his project would be impossible to carry out. He complained, “The laws are idiotic. What am I going to tell Ida?”

He came back with what would become one of the most popular pieces in classical music history: the fifteen-minute long Boléro.

She negotiated exclusive rights to Boléro for three years in theaters and one year in concert halls.

Ravel: Boléro | Alondra de la Parra | WDR Symphony Orchestra 

At the same time, she resurrected Ravel’s orchestral tone poem La Valse, which Diaghilev had famously dismissed as “a masterpiece” but “not a ballet. It’s a portrait of ballet.” (This remark soured the formerly fruitful relationship between Ravel and Diaghilev once and for all.)

Ida Rubinstein disagreed with Diaghilev, and hired Bronislava Nijinska to choreograph it. In the late 1920s, she successfully presented Boléro and La Valse on the same program.

La Valse – Corps de ballet (The Royal Ballet) 

In 1932, Ravel was in a terrible taxi accident that left him with brain damage. It became increasingly difficult for him to compose and even to go about his daily life. Ida paid for a trip for him and a friend to visit Spain and Algiers, hoping it would improve his health.

The Legacy of Ida Rubinstein

In addition to her incredible contributions to the repertoire, it’s worth noting Ida Rubinstein’s famous free spirit.

She was always impeccably dressed in the latest fashions. She had romantic relationships with both men and women. She loved going on big game hunts and even living amongst wild cats. For a while, she kept a leopard cub and even a panther in her apartment. The panther once came close to attacking Diaghilev. He was bitter about that.

Ida Rubinstein retired to the south of France in the 1930s and died in 1960.

Historical opinion on her is mixed.

On one hand, it is believed that she was self-indulgent and perhaps a little too eccentric for her own good.

Simultaneously, no one can deny the number of masterpieces that she ushered into the world. Few wealthy people in the history of classical music have used their resources to bring so much musical joy to so many people.

20 Facts About Classical Music

by Emily E. Hogstad, Interlude

Interested in dipping your toe in the massive ocean that is classical music? Then keep reading!

Today we’re looking at twenty facts about classical music that will give you an overview of what classical music is, its extensive history, its most famous practitioners, and more.

© Musicnotes, Inc.

Let’s get started:

1. It’s really hard to define classical music – so much so that sometimes it’s defined by what it’s not.

Wikipedia defines classical music as “generally [referring] to the art music of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions.”

That said, although classical music is separate from folk music or pop music, it has often been influenced by both of those traditions.

2. Classical music has existed in one form or another for over a thousand years.

Gregorian chant

One reason why it’s so hard to define classical music with precision? The phrase can mean anything from Gregorian chants from a thousand years ago to elegant string quartets from the 1700s to spiky percussion solos from the present day.

The good news is that such an extraordinary range means that most people can find something within the genre that they really enjoy listening to.

3. There are dozens of groupings of classical musicians.

Edgar Degas: The Orchestra at the Opera

There are dozens of combinations of classical musicians, but here are some of the most popular:

• Symphony orchestra: a group of between fifty to a hundred musicians including violins, violas, cellos, basses, clarinets, flutes, oboes, French horns, trumpets, trombones, and a full percussion section
• Chamber orchestra: a smaller group of around fifteen to fifty musicians including most of the instruments above
• String quartet: two violins, a viola, and a cello
• Piano trio: one piano, one violin, one cello
• Piano quartet: one piano, one violin, one viola, one cello (usually)

4. Classical music grew out of church music.

The Christian church was an extremely powerful force in Europe for centuries.

To express its wealth and political and social power, as well as to increase the impact of worship services, the church hired musicians to compose and perform music.

In this way, the church provided countless creative and economic opportunities for musicians and artists.

5. There are at least six main eras in classical music history. (Some scholars believe there are more.)

© pixeljournal.org

Here’s a quick summary of the six best-known eras in classical music history. The dates are approximate.

a. The years from before 1400 are known as the Medieval era in music. The medieval era includes Gregorian chants and music and, thanks to newly standardized notation, music with increasingly complicated intertwining lines and rhythms. Famous composers from this era include Hildegard of Bingen, Machaut, and Pérotin.

b. The years between 1400 and 1600 are known as the Renaissance era in music. The Renaissance era includes madrigals, chansons, and motets, among other forms. Compositional rules hardened during this era, and religious and secular music began influencing each other. Famous composers from this era include Ockeghem and Palestrina.

c. The years between 1600 and 1750 are known as the Baroque era in music. This was the era in which many types of music developed into forms that are recognizable to modern-day musicians, such as sonatas, concertos, operas, and cantatas. Famous composers from this era include Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Telemann.

d. The years between 1750 and 1820 are known as the Classical era in music history. Composers during this era subscribed to Enlightenment ideals and valued elegance, clarity, balance, and naturalness. However, instrument technology advances also made wider spectrums of volume possible, which also led to a subgenre known as the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) style to develop. Famous composers from this era include Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, and Beethoven.

e. The years between 1820 and 1910 are known as the Romantic era in music. Composers in this era loved to explore drama, instrumental color, natural inspirations, nationalism, and emotional extremes. Famous composers from this era include Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Schumann, Berlioz, Dvořák, Wagner, Mahler, Sibelius, and many others.

f. The years between 1910 until around mid-century are known as the Modern era. (Sometimes another era is recognized as postmodernism, but people disagree as to how to classify twentieth century music.) Modern music is known for its individualism and experimentation. Famous composers from the twentieth century include Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Bernstein, Barber, Ives, Messiaen, and others.

6. The recipes for various types of classical music developed during the Baroque era.

Collage of music and arts in the Baroque period by Stephen Louis © Cathay Pacific

Classical music is full of different types of music that follow a specific structure, many of which became standardized during the Baroque era.

For instance, during the Baroque era, a concerto gained specific traits. A concerto is now understood to be…

• a work for a solo instrument or instruments.
• split into three parts, called movements.
• made of different musical material in each movement.
• three movements long, with the first faster, the second slower, and the final faster again.

To this day, many concertos follow this same basic recipe. 

7. The word opus and a number refers to the order in which a composer’s work was published.

We wrote an article about “How music is catalogued”

An excerpt:

To help identify and organise pieces of music by a particular composer, individual compositions or sets of works are usually given an “Opus” number. The word “opus” is Latin and means “work” or “work of art”, often abbreviated as “Op.”, or “Opp.” in the plural. The practice of assigning an “opus number” to a work or set of works when the work or set was published began in the seventeenth century. Opus numbers were not usually used in chronological order and did not necessarily denote when a work was actually composed. Unpublished works often were left without opus numbers.

8. People who play classical music are almost always taught by individual teachers, as opposed to self-taught.

In the classical music world, instrumental technique – which has been refined over hundreds of years – is very important.

Without careful oversight by a teacher, it is easy to injure yourself while playing music…or just not be able to make progress past a certain point.

In other musical traditions, the passing along of knowledge is often less formalised and more organic.

9. Classical musicians used to improvise much more than they do now.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven were not just famous composers; they were famous improvisers, too.

However, as instrumental technique advanced and became increasingly demanding to learn, and as musicians were encouraged to choose a specialty between composing and performing soloist, their comfort levels with improvisation dropped.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the tradition of improvisation in classical music had largely died out.

However, there have been efforts to revive it in the modern day. 

10. Classical composers have often taken inspiration from folk music.

Nationalism was very important to classical composers and musicians, especially in the nineteenth century after the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, and the political turbulence that happened afterwards.

Especially in occupied countries, composers from classical music history used folk music to provide colour to their music.

Jean Sibelius wrote Finnish folk music into his compositions. Franz Liszt was inspired by the music of Hungary. Antonín Dvořák was inspired by Czech and Bohemian influences. There were many other similar examples. 

11. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of the most astonishing child prodigies of all time.

Louis Carrogis Carmontelle: Mozart family on tour: Leopold, Wolfgang, Nannerl, ca 1763

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born to a professional musician and his wife in 1756.

He had an older sister named Maria Anna Mozart who was also a child prodigy, and as a toddler he watched her lessons. Soon, inspired by his older sister, he began learning instruments himself.

By five, Wolfgang was composing keyboard music. By eight, he’d written his first symphony.

In 1762, the Mozart family went on the road to showcase their precocious children and make money, and the rest is history!

12. Ludwig van Beethoven lost his hearing but still kept composing.

Joseph Willibrord Mähler: Beethoven, 1804–1905 (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien)

Ludwig van Beethoven first realised he had hearing issues in the 1790s, when he was in his mid-twenties.

The following years were torturous for him healthwise. He didn’t just go deaf; first, he dealt with long periods of tinnitus.

Between the tinnitus and his fear of what such a disability would mean for his ability to support himself, he entertained ideas of suicide.

By his mid-forties, he was completely deaf and could only communicate with friends and family by writing out his conversations. However, he could still hear things in his mind, and he continued composing.

13. Violinist Niccolò Paganini and pianist Franz Liszt set new standards of virtuosity.

Liszt concert by Ralph Steadman

Violinist Niccolò Paganini (born in 1782) and pianist Franz Liszt (born in 1811) each set new standards for virtuosity on their respective instruments and helped to kickstart a new era of technically dazzling performances.

It is believed nowadays that Paganini may have had a health issue like Marfan’s Syndrome or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. His joints were extra flexible, which opened new doors for instrumental technique. He was also very pale, gaunt, and cadaver-like. Rumours spread about his apparently supernatural abilities, and rumours flew that he’d made a deal with the devil.

Franz Liszt also made a splash with his audiences, so much so that a medical term was created for the specific hysteria that his presence unleashed: Lisztomania. His fans went so far as to save the butts of his cigarettes.

These two figures were some of the first instrument-playing idols. Their fame helped to create the archetypes of the twentieth-century rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. 

14. Romantic era composer Robert Schumann fell in love with great pianist Clara Wieck. They got married…after protests from her father.

Robert and Clara Schumann

Many people vaguely remember the name Robert Schumann from their music education classes. They may also remember that his wife’s father tried to keep him and his wife from getting married and that the whole family went to court to resolve the issues.

However, it’s not often explained how Clara Wieck Schumann was one of the greatest pianists of the century. She had a decades-long career and made sure that her husband’s work entered the canon.

15. Composer Richard Wagner took opera to an extreme with his Ring Cycle.

Richard Wagner, 1876

Composer Richard Wagner embraced the idea of the “Gesamtkunstwerk”, or “total work of art.”

In such a work, music, visuals, and script would all work together in harmony.

Wagner’s crowning achievement was a set of four massive operas, known collectively as The Ring Cycle. When the operas that make up the Ring Cycle are played one after another, they last for fifteen hours: the equivalent of two seasons of a one-writer prestige TV show.

16. Composer Gustav Mahler wrote symphonies on a mammoth scale.

Gustav Mahler, 1892

Gustav Mahler’s third symphony lasts for ninety minutes.

His eighth symphony is written for up to a thousand performers, including multiple choirs. Hence its nickname, Symphony of a Thousand. 

17. Classical music has been famously used in cartoons.

We’ve written a variety of articles about the use of classical music in cartoons. In this one, we looked at how the animators incorporated classical music into Bugs Bunny cartoons.

In the classical music realm, nothing tops Warner Bros.’ take on Wagner in What’s Opera, Doc? This 1957 cartoon used music from all 4 of the Ring operas, Tannhäuser, Rienzi, and The Flying Dutchman to create the immortal story of Elmer Fudd hunting, as usual, Bugs Bunny. 

18. Classical music probably doesn’t make your kids smarter.

In 1993 a famous study was published in Nature, claiming that college-aged subjects in experiments improved their performance on spatial tasks after listening to classical music. This helped lead to a cultural conversation about “the Mozart effect.”

Later experiments tried to replicate the results with children, but were unsuccessful.

19. Classical music can help you relax.

© health.clevelandclinic.org

If you can find classical music that keeps a steady volume and beat, has pleasant harmonies, and features no lyrics, that music might lower the stress hormone cortisol and lower your blood pressure, according to studies.

20. Composers are still writing new music in the classical music tradition today.

Classical composers are still active today! Many are women and people of colour, defying the preconceived notion that a composer has to be a dead white man.

Here are a few modern composers to check out:

• Caroline Shaw
• Jessie Montgomery
• Max Richter
• Missy Mazzoli
• Wynton Marsalis

There are so many more, too! Remember, classical music isn’t only written by dead white guys in powdered wigs.

We hope you’ve enjoyed these classical music facts! The genre is massive and features a wide variety of types of music. Chances are you’ll eventually find something you’ll love listening to!

Which Composer Had the Worst Childhood?

 by Emily E. Hogstad, Interlude

It’s not easy to be a composer, and many have had dramatic lives full of pain and struggle.

But some composers have had worse times than others, especially in their vulnerable childhood years.

Today we’re looking at five composers who had particularly difficult childhoods.

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler as a child

Gustav Mahler struggled with three major issues during his childhood and adolescence.

First, he came from an impoverished background. (His grandmother had actually been a street peddler.) His father began his career as a coachman and ultimately became an innkeeper. But the large Mahler family never felt financially comfortable.

They were also Jewish, which made them minorities in Bohemia. As a result, Gustav always felt like an outsider within broader Austrian cultural life.

Finally, Gustav’s mother gave birth to fourteen children over the course of her life, and half of them died young.

The timeline is devastating: Gustav watched younger siblings die in 1865, 1871 (two brothers died on the same day in December), 1873, 1874, 1875, and 1881. This series of losses led to an understandable obsession with fate and death.

The consequences of these traumas turned out to be far-reaching, both personally and professionally. All are echoed in the music that he wrote as an adult decades later. 

Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven at 13 years old

Ludwig van Beethoven came from a musical family.

His paternal grandfather was also named Ludwig. Ludwig the Elder had grown up in destitution. Fortunately, his raw musical talent got him noticed by the Prince-elector Clemens August of Bavaria, whose court was in Bonn. By 1761, Beethoven’s grandfather became Kapellmeister there.

Ludwig the Elder’s youngest son was Johann, born around 1740. Johann inherited his father’s musical talent and also worked in the Bonn court.

In 1767, Johann married a young widow named Maria. Together they had three children who lived to adulthood, the eldest of whom was Ludwig van Beethoven.

From an early age, it was clear that little Ludwig was extremely musically talented. Johann decided he wanted to train him and make money off of him. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s father had recently gone on tour across Europe, showcasing his children’s prodigious talent, and Johann considered doing the same with Ludwig.

Unfortunately, Johann struggled with severe alcohol addiction. Johann would drag Ludwig out of bed in the middle of the night and force him to perform for his drinking buddies all night long. He was also abusive, beating Ludwig or locking him into the cellar if he didn’t practice enough.

This was all bad enough, but Ludwig’s beloved mother Maria died in 1787, when he was just sixteen.

Johann’s drinking problem had led him to neglect his job, and responsibility for supporting the household was placed on the son’s shoulders.

In 1789, the situation got so bad that Ludwig had to petition for half of Johann’s paycheck to be sent directly to him, just so that his father wouldn’t spend it all on alcohol.

In 1792, when he was eighteen, Ludwig left his dysfunctional childhood home in Bonn to make a name for himself in Vienna. Not long after he left, he got word that his father had died.

The stormy personality that Ludwig developed during his long abusive childhood endured…and, arguably, appeared in his music for years to come. 

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Ambrosius Bach, J.S. Bach’s father

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in March 1685, the youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach and his wife Maria. Johann Ambrosius was director of the town musicians in Johann Sebastian’s birthplace of Eisenach and was likely Johann Sebastian’s first teacher.

Not a lot of documentation exists about Bach’s childhood, but we know enough to extrapolate that it was a difficult one. His first major loss came when his mother died in the spring of 1694, just a few weeks after Johann turned nine years old.

Johann Ambrosius needed a wife to help him raise his children, and six months later, he married his second wife. But in February 1695, Johann Ambrosius died, too. Johann Sebastian was now nine years old and an orphan.

After this horrifying year, Johann Sebastian moved in with his oldest brother, Johann Christoph.

Johann Christoph became another one of Johann Sebastian’s early keyboard teachers. The brothers lived together for five years, and then, as a teenager, Johann Sebastian moved out to join the choir of St. Michael’s Convent in Lüneburg.

Around the time that he left, Johann Sebastian composed a Capriccio dedicated to his eldest brother. It’s now known as BWV 993. 

Joseph Haydn

Haydn in London

Joseph Haydn was born in the small town of Rohrau, Austria, in 1732, the second of twelve children.

His father was a wheelwright by day and amateur singer by night. Young Joseph soaked up the music around him like a sponge.

His idyllic childhood was shattered when he was six years old. A distant relative named Johann Matthias Frankh, a schoolmaster and choirmaster, came to visit and noticed Joseph’s musical talent. He proposed that he take Joseph away with him as his apprentice. Haydn’s parents agreed. Tragically, however, once he arrived in the Frankh household, little Haydn was starved and beaten.

The following year, yet another traveling musician noticed Joseph’s talent. His name was Georg von Reutter, and he was in charge of selecting boys for the choir at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. So in the spring of 1740, at the age of just eight, Haydn arrived in Vienna to be trained as a professional musician.

Haydn’s life at the cathedral was difficult. His general education was less thorough than he would have liked, and he still had trouble securing enough food. He was relieved whenever he was invited to aristocratic parties to sing, because at least he could eat there.

However, he was acutely aware he couldn’t stay at the Cathedral forever. His voice began to break in 1749, the year he turned seventeen. Apparently the Empress referred to his singing as “crowing.”

Around the same time, a prank during which he snipped off the pigtail of a fellow chorister went wrong. The choirmaster threatened to cane him for insubordination. Haydn responded that he’d rather leave the choir than be hit. He ended up on the streets of Vienna both beaten and fired, with nothing to his name. For all intents and purposes, his childhood was over.

Clara Wieck Schumann

Clara Wieck, 1828

Clara Wieck Schumann was born in September 1819 in Leipzig to an ambitious piano teacher named Friedrich and his singer/pianist wife Mariane.

Friedrich desperately wanted a child who he could use to experiment on pedagogically, and use as an advertisement for his methods. Friedrich chose Clara to be his golden child.

Unfortunately, around the same time, the Wiecks’ marriage fell apart. Mariane couldn’t handle Friedrich’s controlling nature and embarked on an affair with Friedrich’s best friend. The two were divorced.

Clara stayed with her mother as a toddler, but once she turned five, Friedrich exercised his custody rights. From that point forward, he would have free rein with her.

He taught her piano, violin, and voice, as well as theory subjects like counterpoint and harmony. She was also taught languages because Wieck believed fluency in multiple languages would ease her path as a professional touring virtuoso.

Underlining his attitude of ownership toward her, Friedrich kept a joint diary with Clara in which he sometimes wrote entries from her point of view. This behavior demonstrated a deeply unnerving level of what a modern observer might call enmeshment.

In 1828, at a salon concert, she met an up-and-coming pianist named Robert Schumann. She was nine and he was eighteen. Schumann was so impressed by her training that he signed up to study under Friedrich. Friedrich’s plan was working as intended.

Clara toured throughout Europe as a child. She was a continent-wide sensation, celebrated not only for her playing but also for her compositions.

Disaster struck in her teens when she fell in love with Robert, inciting a family civil war. Her efforts in her teens to assert her independence and to extract herself from Friedrich’s sphere of influence proved to be incredibly challenging. She had to fight in the courts to make sure that Friedrich would not take away the money she’d earned…and to win the right to marry Robert without Friedrich’s permission.

Although the legal battles were deeply traumatising, she emerged victorious. After all of the heartbreak and trauma of her youth, she ended up becoming one of the greatest, most influential musicians of the nineteenth century.