Celebrated in her lifetime above all as one of the great pianists of the 19th century, Clara Schumann was also a gifted composer. Yet she struggled with the prevailing belief that composition was not a suitable vocation for a woman. In 1839, at age 20, she wrote, “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to be a composer—there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?” Despite such doubts—and later, the demands of raising eight children while maintaining an international performing career—Clara continued to compose. During a burst of creativity in 1853, she wrote of the profound satisfaction it brought her: “There is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness when one lives in a world of sound.”

That same year, Clara and Robert Schumann heard the young violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim perform Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at the Lower Rhine Music Festival. Clara was overwhelmed, writing that Joachim played “with a finish, a depth of poetic feeling, his whole soul in every note,” and that she had never received “so indelible an impression from any virtuoso.” In July, she composed the Three Romances for Violin and Piano, op. 22, her only original work for violin and piano, and dedicated the set to Joachim. Robert composed his Märchenerzählungen just three months later, from October 9–11. Breitkopf & Härtel issued Clara’s Romances around the end of 1855, and she and Joachim subsequently performed them together many times. A critic in the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung praised the set: “All three pieces display an individual character conceived in a truly sincere manner and written in a delicate and fragrant hand.”

Throughout the three compact Romances, the violin and piano serve as expressive partners. The lush, dreamy Andante molto unfolds as an intimate dialogue, briefly echoing the opening of Robert Schumann’s First Violin Sonata, op. 105, at its central climax. The second Romance, an Allegretto marked Mit zartem Vortrage (“with tender expression”), begins wistfully in G minor, brightens to G major, then returns to its opening mood. The final Romance, marked Leidenschaftlich schnell (“passionately fast”), is the most impassioned of the three: a long-breathed violin melody soars above rippling, increasingly virtuosic piano writing, bringing the set to an ardent close.

—Jennifer More, ©2026