Schumann & The Symphony He Gave His Wife for Her Birthday
Sunday, September 13th, is Clara Wieck Schumann's birthday. It's also the day, back in 1841, that her husband gave her a symphony.
Robert Schumann had spent the summer sketching a new work in D minor, and by September 13 he had enough of it finished to hand Clara the manuscript as a birthday gift. The timing carried a second layer neither of them could have planned any better: that same day, the couple had their first child, a baby girl named Marie, baptized. One afternoon, one piece of paper, two things worth celebrating. Schumann would go on to call this piece his Symphony No. 4 — though, as it turns out, that number is one of the stranger accidents in the whole symphonic catalogue. More on that below.
NCO Performs: Schumann's Symphony No. 4 in D minor
Recorded on March 21, 2026
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A Prodigy Before She Was a Teenager
Clara Wieck didn't drift into music — she was built for it, deliberately, by a father who treated her training like an engineering project. Friedrich Wieck started her on piano at four, and once she was old enough for real lessons he had her studying piano, violin, singing, theory, harmony, composition, and counterpoint, with two hours of practice a day layered on top. She made her public debut at nine. By eleven she was already composing her own works, and by fourteen she'd written a piano concerto good enough to perform herself.
The touring started young and got serious fast. Clara played Paris and the major European capitals as a teenager, and by eighteen, during a residency in Vienna, she'd been named a Royal and Imperial Austrian Chamber Virtuoso — one of the highest honors the Austrian court gave a musician, and a rare thing for anyone that age to hold, let alone a young woman in the 1830s. Goethe gave her a medallion. Liszt praised her playing in terms usually reserved for his own idols. She also did something that sounds unremarkable now but wasn't then: she played from memory in performance, without the score in front of her, as early as thirteen — at a time when soloists routinely played from the page. Within a few decades, playing from memory would become the standard the entire concert world expected. Clara helped set that standard before she was old enough to vote.
A Love Story Fought, Literally, in Court
Robert Schumann met Clara when he moved into her father's house as a piano student — Friedrich Wieck was his teacher too, years before he was ever his father-in-law. Robert was nine years older, already a fixture in the household, and it took a while for the relationship to turn into anything Clara's father would notice, let alone approve of. When it finally did, Wieck did not take it well.
He refused consent outright, and when Robert petitioned the Leipzig court in 1839 for permission to marry without it, Wieck fought back hard. He accused Robert of drinking too much and having no reliable income; he demanded Clara hand over seven years of her concert earnings and post an eight-thousand-thaler guarantee against the marriage failing; at one point he broke into Clara's private letter box and used what he found there as evidence. The Leipzig authorities eventually vouched for Robert as, in their words, a quiet and decent citizen, and the court dismissed Wieck's objections one by one. Robert and Clara married on September 12, 1840 — one day before Clara's twenty-first birthday, which meant one more day and she wouldn't have needed a court's permission, or her father's, at all.
A Symphony Called a Fantasy
The year after the wedding turned out to be one of Robert's most productive stretches as a composer. He'd spent 1840 almost entirely on songs — more than a hundred and thirty of them, many written straight out of the two years he and Clara had spent separated by the lawsuit. Once they were married, he turned to the orchestra instead, and 1841 became something like his breakout year for large-scale writing: a symphony in the spring (later nicknamed "Spring"), premiered that same year under Felix Mendelssohn to real success, followed by the orchestral piece that would eventually become his Piano Concerto, and then the D minor symphony he gave Clara that September.
He didn't originally even call it a symphony. Modeling it loosely on Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, Schumann labeled the new piece a "Symphonic Fantasy" — its four movements were meant to be played straight through without pause, its themes threading and reappearing across movements rather than staying neatly boxed into their own sections. That was an unusual structure for 1841, and when it premiered that December in Leipzig — with Ferdinand David on the podium, since Mendelssohn wasn't available — the audience seems to have been more confused than won over. Schumann's publisher passed on it too, worried it would compete with the very symphony that had just made him a success that spring. Schumann shelved the score and didn't touch it again for ten years.
A Family Disagreement That Outlived Them Both
When Schumann finally came back to the piece in 1851, he was the music director in Düsseldorf, further along in his career and apparently ready to try again. He reworked the orchestration into something heavier and more fully scored, tightened the structure the 1841 audience had found puzzling, and published it — a decade late — as his Symphony No. 4. That's the reason the numbering looks backwards if you check the dates: the "Fourth" was actually the second symphony Schumann ever finished. It simply waited the longest to reach print. The revised version premiered in 1853, this time to the reception Schumann had originally hoped for.
Here's the part that makes for a good closing story: after Robert's death, Johannes Brahms — Clara's close friend and champion of her husband's music — found the original, leaner 1841 score among the family's papers and decided he actually preferred it to Robert's own 1851 revision. In 1891, over Clara's strong objections, Brahms had that earlier version published. Clara felt strongly that the 1851 score was the piece Robert himself had chosen to stand behind, and that publishing the earlier draft undercut his own final word on his own work. It's a small, very human footnote: two people who loved Robert Schumann's music, arguing — decades after he could weigh in himself — over which version of it actually belonged to him.
Hearing It Live
Almost two hundred years after Robert handed Clara that manuscript, the symphony still carries both stories inside it — the birthday-and-baptism afternoon that started it, and the decade-long detour it took before finding the shape audiences actually embraced. NCO performed it this season as part of our "Germanfest" program, alongside Mozart and Wagner.
Give it a listen above, on the same weekend it was written for.
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