Why People Hate on Clara Schumann

Who harasses me on social media, what they say, and why they're threatened by women composers

Dear Clara fans,

First, I’ll share an amazing experience which you may have seen me posting about on Instagram. I got to spend a weekend paling around New York City with Liz Schumann Brumfield, a great-great-granddaughter of Clara and Robert Schumann.

You can imagine how much fun we had. Backstage after a concert, we met the great pianist Beatrice Rana who recorded Clara and Robert’s concertos last year. We went to the Morgan Library where we saw more manuscripts, autographs, and letters of Clara and Robert’s than we could possibly appreciate in two hours.

At the Morgan Library reading room, Sarah Fritz and Liz Schumann Brumfield looking at a letter written by Clara Wieck to Robert Schumann in August of 1840, one month before their marriage.

I’ll never forget it, and I’ll have lots more posts in the future about what we saw in the library collection!

But that lovely subject is for a later time. The rest of this newsletter is about a long overdue, much different topic. I wrote this two months ago, and I’ve been afraid to send it. It’s an ugly subject. I don’t like talking about how often I get harassed on social media, but recent news of abuse in the industry has reminded me—I need to talk about it. Just yesterday, I got a new round of gaslighting hate. I can’t keep putting this off.

Many of you have requested details about why people harass me and what they say… So here goes!

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Who Hates Clara Schumann & Women Composers—What they say & Why they say it

I’ll start with a grand thank you for your kind replies and comments on social media. YOUR support and engagement is WHY I do it. You make it worth putting up with the harassment. 95% of my interactions on social media are positive. The following is a mere fraction—but also the most burdensome part of my job.

It’s not just me who gets it. Lots of others know firsthand the depths of disgusting racism and misogyny which festers unspoken in our genre. Whenever I even imply that, for example, Florence Price or Clara Schumann’s works compare to a canon composer, it exposes deep prejudices.

Most people are shocked to learn I get harassed for promoting Clara Schumann and other women composers. I’ve been called a cult leader, a conspiracy theorist, and worse. This week I was called “tedious” and “salty” for not agreeing that Wolfgang Mozart was “the most precocious genius the West ever produced.”

For a long time, I would just block and forget. But then I was being gaslit by people saying I was making it up, and even I was forgetting what the haters said. So I’ve started documenting it. Now I screenshot first then block. Sometimes I go blissful months without getting any. But then somehow a new group will latch onto me like a pack of rabid dogs.

The scary truth is—the majority of the hate comes, not from random anonymous trolls, but from people who know classical music, i.e. fans, connoisseurs, and even professional musicians.

If you prefer to watch / listen to a discussion about this, here’s the link to the Insta LIVE chat I had with Sandra Mogensen a few weeks ago!

Trigger warning: In this post, there is a trigger warning section. It is farther down, clearly marked, and easily skipped. But if that’s a no-go for you today, totally okay to not to read any further. <3

Harassment from 2024

In general, most people clearly come after me because I’m a woman. (It would be an interesting experiment to change my profile to masculine presenting and see how it changed.) But it’s clear in their tone. People regularly condescend to me like I don’t know better. Even sometimes people who I consider friends or who supposedly “support” women composers will only reply to correct me or tell me I’m wrong rather than for a reasonable discussion. That’s just general sexism most women deal with regularly in real life. 

What I’m talking about here is pure harassment and hateful misogyny. For example, this tweet received over 50 replies that were gaslighting, harassing, mocking, and/or hateful:

(To any reaction of “you were asking for it”, please consider how that statement is often applied to women who are harassed in many contexts. Remember, I expected to share this with a couple hundred of my friends / followers. I never asked for haters. )

I blocked over 30 accounts which descended en masse, as though I were some sort of scourge to be rooted out and silenced. Their replies were scarily similar, mocking me or demeaning me for not seeing that, of course, Mozart was the reasonable choice for the definition of the word composer, how dare I suggest otherwise.

Though you can see by the 121 likes, the vast majority of the engagement was positive. I rarely get hate on posts with less than a hundred likes.

The haters insulted me in a myriad of ways. I had a “persecution complex.” I “lack common sense.” I’m spreading “goofy conspiracy theories.” Or my personal favorite—I’m “on the fritz.”

For your enjoyment, someone also created this SpongeBob meme.

Isn’t it hilarious (and sad) how much they care? Confession: part of me feels complimented when they take the time to make me memes.

One actual troll called me a Marxist, “an ugly seething cretin full of resentment that they dress up as virtuous empathy.” This is an example of a random anonymous troll, not a classical-music-informed hater. There is a big difference between the two.

I eventually found the source of the hate flood. It was from one dude’s followers—an account whose bio claims to be a musicologist and orchestra manager—who quote retweeted my tweet. The account is followed by 48 people who I follow. *face palm*

I don’t care how “reasonable” someone might seem. No one “reasonable” is inspiring so many of their followers to such gross mass harassment.

More General Misogyny:

The following examples are replies to different tweets which I’ve documented since July of 2023. Each one is from a different account which I blocked.

“Because the female Beethoven doesn’t exist. Reach the peak of creativity and then we can talk.”

“Sadly, now that women have taken their equal place, music is finished.”

“I don’t pick music based on genitals.”

“Your comments and your posts are not funny. They are embarrassing.”

“There is no equality without quality.”

“Chill a little… Spend your rage on something else.”

“The marginalized group includes many composers, also many white men.”

I once got a reply to a newsletter—an email in my inbox that said only, “What an idiot.”

Clara specific misogyny:

Some examples of hateful things people say about Clara:

“Just alter the page to say Clara was a male cross dresser and be done with it.”

“Her constantly modulating by major 3^rd is what convinced Robert to jump in the Rhine.”

“Yea and I’d be like bitch please you pushed your husband off a bridge into the Rhine.”

Misogyny Specific to Clara as a composer:

“She wrote nothing worth remembering.”

“At College they used to tell us that one thing that makes for great music is ‘memorability.’ Clara wrote her piano concerto at the age of 14. I can’t remember a bloody BAR of it. Whereas another composer’s k.175 (written at the same age) is etched into my brain indelibly.”

“Didn’t “her time” include Liszt, Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn, etc.? What a joke.”

“There’s no reason to get involved with Clara Schumann’s compositions unless you want to be bored out of your mind or unless you are a fat, short haired, unmarried not by choice, late 50s woman musicologist looking for grant money.”

Sometimes it’s a cocktail of misogyny toward me and Clara.

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*Trigger warning for the next section: sexual violence*

The following section has sexual violence tweets about Clara. For ease of skimming, all violent words are isolated to italicized quotes. Feel free to scroll past. The end is clearly marked: “END TRIGGER WARNING SECTION” with a divider line.

Or just close the email. Take care of yourselves, friends.<3 This is rough stuff.

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Sexual Violence Toward Clara Schumann

The sexual violence toward Clara—always about the horrendous slander around Johannes Brahms—is the worst and most physically painful, genuinely traumatizing at times.

I see tongue-in-cheek conversations all the time:

“Oooh- Johannes and Clara Sitting in a tree, KISSING” / “LOL finally the true story of his love for her.”

“Haha Brahms had the hots for his buddy’s wife” / “She had the hots for him too hehe”

On the surface, these are just examples of innocent fun, but I see regularly how these devolve into horrific violence.

This was a reply to a tweet that mentioned Robert, Johannes, Felix Mendelssohn, and Franz Liszt:

“Did they all shag her though? *grin emoji*”

There are no emojis for how disgustingly horrible that is. *vomit*

I had someone—who implied they were a music student—mock me for saying we couldn’t “know for sure” if Clara and Johannes ever had a physical love affair:

“What if she was a bad bitch who liked a lacy thong? We can’t know for sure.”

And that’s not the worst one.

In January, I got one so harmful, I will not subject myself to the horror of rereading it. (Though I do still have the screenshot.) All I remember—besides how horribly violated it made me feel—was something like:

Clara needed multiple men’s “German sausage” to “make her sing.”

Except much more violent. I reported it, and X/Twitter actually found it a VIOLATION of the rules! The only silver lining—I guess those policies still work on occasion.

Please be careful about your sexual jokes around Clara, especially in relationship to the slanderous “love triangle” s%^*. It snowballs real fast into harmful slut shaming and objectifying violence.

I’d love if everyone just stopped making those sex jokes about Clara and Johannes entirely. This is part of what fuels me to expose the truth of Clara’s relationship to him, which was primarily MUSICAL and PROFESSIONAL.

Clara’s legacy deserves better than this!

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Why haters hate

All the negative is a fraction of the POSITIVE. That’s why I keep going. Every one of your positive replies makes up for a hateful one.

One request: PLEASE no sarcastic “jokes” about misogyny. Sarcasm looks the same as hate. It’s not funny. Misogyny is not a joke; it’s my reality. I can’t tell the difference between a joker and a hater that says something like, “Because women are too busy in the kitchen to compose.” I will block you for my own self-preservation.

The main point I want to make is— These haters are not just random trolls. They know about the genre. These are people in the classical music community; some are even professionals who are followed by people I follow.

Please be aware of how many people still cling to canon composer greatness as proof of white patriarchal superiority. It’s far more than many people want to admit. These are examples of how “peaceful appreciators of art” can turn hateful when their beloved white male canon worship feels threatened. Some people who seem like positive actors are only like that when it’s canon composers. Some actively work AGAINST those of us who are trying to expand the canon beyond just cis white men. The haters are overwhelmingly cis white men, but not always. . .

From where I sit, the rampant harassment and abuse in our industry is LINKED to the white male canon worship. This is far too evident in the recent news about the NY Philharmonic and in the low number of Black musicians employed by our orchestras. What we see in the repertoire is reflected in our organizations—or vice versa.

I know what the haters want: they want us to shut up. I work hard not to let them win but… none of this is easy. It hurts no matter what I do. Barrages of hate / harassment always force me to correct my course or back off for a while, to protect myself.

If you’re wondering why I bother staying on X/Twitter, platforms like Blue Sky are great for social communities of around a thousand. However, to build a larger platform for purposes of sales, marketing, publicity etc. the model does not currently work. Maybe it will someday.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for caring. I couldn’t do this without you. If you are reading this—you are one of the people who make all of the tears, toil and perseverance worth it!