Clara Schumann's Three Variations Explore

Clara Schumann—a famous female pianist, composer and educator, editor form Germany, is one of the important romantic music characters with a long career of 71 years. Her achievements in piano playing made great impact on later pianist. As an educator, she cultivated a large number of outstanding students and had her own teaching characteristics. As one of the few female composers, she made 23 numbered compositions, small in number but exquisite in quality.Variation is usually a genre for composers to show their composing skills, including various of the variations and colorful techniques. As a pianist, Clara used many advanced piano techniques as well as preface, interlude and cadenza in the writing of variations. Because these three variations came from her works of different periods, we can see the development of her music aesthetics, fashionate taste, piano techniques and so on.This paper further explores Clara Schumann's three variations through bibliographical references, theoretical analysis and other methods. It introduces Clara Schumann as pianist,Ⅱeducator and composer, draws the outline and reviews the writing background of these three variations, analyses the most obvious variation techniques respectively, and finally elaborates the playing and teaching of these three compositions based on music sheets, my own performance and recordings .Through these studies we can deeply understand and master Clara Schumann's works and her writing characteristics and the difficulty on playing.