Clara

The project “CLARA,” combining music and theater, tells the life story of the renowned German composer and pianist Clara Schumann (1819–1896).

Clara Schumann’s fate is shrouded in legend. Gifted with extraordinary piano talents from childhood, Clara Josephine Wieck, daughter of the strict and renowned piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, began performing and composing at the age of eleven. By nineteen, she was already a celebrated pianist touring Germany, Austria, and France—one of the few female concert pianists in Europe at the time. Soon, Clara marries the young composer Robert Schumann. In obedience to her husband’s wishes, she attempts to give up her performing career and devote herself to the family, ultimately bearing eight children. Fate brings another great composer into their home—Johannes Brahms, who falls in love with Clara, fourteen years his senior…

Like Alice in the Looking-Glass, Clara navigates the worlds of music and love, surrounded by eight children and her genius dreamer husband Robert Schumann, while striving not to abandon her calling—continuing her intense concert career…

In the concert-theater performance about Clara Schumann’s fate, the story is told through the works of C. and R. Schumann performed by pianist Guoda Gedvilaitė (who is often called the “Lithuanian Clara Schumann” in the music world), as well as fragments of letters, diaries, and contemporaries’ memoirs of the Schumanns, translated into Lithuanian for the first time and interpreted by actress Birutė Mar.