Clara Schumann

In her Berlin concerts of February and March 1837, the seventeen-year-old Clara Wieck played two movements and then the whole of Beethoven's 'Appassionata' Sonata, Op. 57; Florence May, searching the press of the period, found no earlier public performance of the work. A Berlin review of the first concert noted that she played her entire programme from memory. During her stay in Vienna in 1837-38 she was appointed Imperial and Royal Chamber Virtuoso.

From her solo debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1830 to her last public concert in 1891, she regularly played the piano works of Robert Schumann, and Florence May lists several works by Johannes Brahms, including the Handel Variations, Op. 24, whose first public performances she gave. From 1856 she visited England nineteen times.

In 1878 she became principal piano teacher at the new Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, with her daughters Marie and Eugenie as assistants, and taught there until 1892. In the same period she took charge of the Breitkopf & Härtel Collected Edition of Robert Schumann's works (1879-86).

Her daughter Eugenie, who was taught by her after leaving school, recalled that Beethoven sonatas formed the core of every lesson and that her mother 'did not let the smallest inexactitude pass'. She asked whether Beethoven would have written every dot and tie if he had meant something else. She also disliked editions with added fingerings and annotations.

The daughter's account agrees with what the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick heard in her concerts in 1856 and 1858, and it offers one example of the close attention to the score scored in this profile. Detail Orientation

Reviewing her Vienna concerts in 1856, Hanslick called it 'unheard of' to perform Beethoven's Sonata Op. 101, Mendelssohn's Variations sérieuses and Schumann's Symphonic Etudes in a concert. He wrote that she played only serious music, while also regretting that her playing was more deeply understood than deeply felt.

At a time when concert programmes commonly mixed serious works with lighter virtuoso pieces, her choices fit the independent thinking scored here. That score is based on her adult programmes; as a child, her repertoire was chosen by her father. Independent Thinking

In January 1839, aged nineteen, Clara Wieck set out on a concert tour to Paris without her father for the first time. Florence May's account, based on her letters, says that in Paris she refused friends' urging to return home, dismissed the companion she had travelled with and arranged to stay with the family of her friend Emilie List. After her father refused the consent to her marriage that the law required, the dispute was decided in court, and she married Robert Schumann in September 1840.

Organising a foreign season on her own at nineteen fits the autonomy scored in this profile, as do the conditions she later set before accepting her Frankfurt teaching post in 1878. May also links the Paris journey to her hope of earning money for her future household. Need for Autonomy