Lecture “Clara Schumann and Fryderyk Chopin”

About the event

Chopin was a constant companion throughout Clara Schumann's artistic life: at the age of twelve she studied Chopin's Opus 2 and performed it in Weimar in 1831. And almost 60 years later Clara Schumann played Chopin for the last time – on 7 November 1890 in Frankfurt am Main, where she performed Chopin's Second Piano Concerto in F minor. Clara Wieck met Chopin in person three times: in Paris and in Leipzig. In her more than a thousand surviving concert programmes the name Chopin appears well over 300 times. It is therefore no surprise that a year before her death she told her grandson Ferdinand: “Chopin's pieces are all pianistic, Beethoven's often are not.”

Dr Wolfgang Seibold studied school music in Stuttgart from 1960 and German studies, musicology, folklore and art history at the University of Tübingen from 1964. From 1967 to 1999 he taught music and German at grammar schools in Stuttgart, Esslingen, Madrid, Karlsruhe and Karlsbad. In musicology he has published various essays on Schumann and Liszt since 1965. His dissertation “Robert and Clara Schumann in their relationships with Franz Liszt” appeared in 2005, his book “Family, Friends, Contemporaries. The dedicatees of Schumann's works” in 2008, “Liszt's concert tour through Spain 1844/45” in 2017 and “Clara Schumann in Württemberg (Stuttgart – Wildbad)” in 2018.

Sontraud Speidel, described by the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik as “a kind of Clara Schumann of our day”, performs worldwide as a soloist and chamber musician. She is professor of piano at the Karlsruhe University of Music and a sought-after jury member at national and international competitions. She is the only German ever to have won first prize at the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Washington D.C. and, in Tanglewood/USA, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Jackson Prize for new music. She has recorded some 40 CDs to date; her latest double CD “Romantik aus den Fugen” was released in 2018. In 2005 Sontraud Speidel was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Biographies