For all her infamous name recognition, performances of Clara Wieck Schumann’s works are still puzzlingly rare. For decades I never questioned this; I bought the industry-wide indoctrination of “low quality.” But when I began to objectively look and listen, I realized Wieck’s compositions were filled with innovative tonal relationships, thematically unified structures, advanced motivic developments, and genre-forwarding architectures. The more I sit with her music, the more the ignorant, inbred assertion of her inferiority—within an art form that prides itself on intellectual taste—mutates to a stain of embarrassment.
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