Date: Thursday 23 October 2025
Time: 16.00
Location: Boydell Recital Room, House 5, Department of Music, Trinity College Dublin.
Admission is free and all are welcome.
‘Clara Wieck's Virtuosity: Concertising and Composing in the Postclassical Age’.
Clara Wieck-Schumann (1819–1896) made her solo debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in November 1830. The further 186 concerts she performed across Europe over the following decade were pivotal in shaping her artistic identity as Clara Wieck: a Wunderkind and celebrated touring virtuosa. This talk invites us into young Clara’s musical world: what repertoire defined her childhood, and how did it contribute to her rise on the concert stage? Why did this differ from the music that later characterised her persona as Clara Schumann?
Drawing on the rich archival holdings of the Robert-Schumann-Haus in Zwickau, we explore Wieck’s 187 extant concert playbills, spanning her first public appearance to the final performance before her marriage in 1840. These programmes reveal a fascinating body of virtuosic piano variations that flourished in the 1820s and 1830s. Though their aesthetics and composers are relatively unknown to twenty-first-century musicians, such works were central to Wieck’s early success, and emblematic of a broader performance culture — both on the concert stage and in the private realms.
Recordings made on Wieck’s childhood piano (1825) and live demonstrations on Trinity’s Steinway accompany our exploration of this repertoire, bringing to life the style and aesthetics of Wieck’s formative years. Framing this decade of her career within the postclassical age of pianism, this talk invites us to consider how interactions between composer, performer, audience - and even piano manufacturer — shaped a distinctive aesthetic central to nineteenth-century pianistic virtuosity.
Cheryl Tan is a pianist, fortepianist, researcher, and lecturer whose work focuses on keyboard culture of the long nineteenth century. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from Cornell University, where she studied historical performance practice and completed a dissertation entitled 'Clara Wieck and her Piano Variations: Postclassical Pianism of the 1830s'. She previously studied in Britain, graduating from the University of Oxford with First Class and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama with Distinction. Cheryl joined Trinity College Dublin as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in September 2025. Her project, `Revisiting Clara Wieck(-Schumann): Virtuosity, Identity, and Lost Repertory', explores the postclassical milieu at the intersection of performance, analysis, and historical-cultural study. She has also taught across performance and academic disciplines, having held positions across Britain at the Universities of Southampton, Bristol, and Oxford, as well as at Cornell University in the United States. Cheryl has presented papers, recitals, and lecture-recitals internationally on both modern and historical pianos; her research has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Music Review. Shaped by her experiences as a pianist and scholar, her research into lost pianistic traditions and the works of women composers seeks to bring scholarship and practice into mutually illuminating dialogue.
For further information on this event please email Dr Nicole Grimes, Department of Music, School of Creative Arts at nicole.grimes@tcd.ie