Clara Schumann

Clara Wieck was born in Leipzig to a piano teacher who decided before she could talk that she would be a virtuoso. Friedrich Wieck controlled her practice, her diary and her earnings. She gave her first full recital at the Gewandhaus at eleven and was touring Europe in her teens, composing her own concerto and admired by Chopin, Paganini and Goethe.

When she fell in love with her father's pupil Robert Schumann, Wieck refused consent, spread rumours about Robert and fought the couple in court. They won, and married in 1840, the day before her 21st birthday. Robert's career as a composer took precedence in the marriage; she wrote in her diary that she was giving up composing, and eight children arrived in fourteen years.

In 1854 Robert, suffering from mental illness, threw himself into the Rhine. He was rescued and spent the last two years of his life in an asylum, where doctors would not let Clara visit until days before he died. She was 36, with seven surviving children and no income except what she could earn at the keyboard.

So she toured, for the next four decades, across Germany, Britain and Russia, championing Robert's music and that of her close friend Johannes Brahms. She edited her husband's complete works, taught at the Frankfurt conservatory and gave her last public concert in 1891. She died in 1896.