In Her Own Name: The Complete Works of Clara Schumann - Album
Overview
In Her Own Name: The Complete Works of Clara Schumann is a twelve-volume live recording cycle led by Jacob Keller, released through Tessitura, the classical imprint of Fifth Bar Records, and recorded across the 2037–2038 performance season at Alice Tully Hall. The project presented Clara Schumann’s complete surviving musical catalog, including not only her original compositions but also her arrangements, transcriptions, cadenzas, and editorial work. Jacob treated those forms of labor as part of her authorship rather than peripheral material to be omitted from a composer-centered survey.
Each volume preserved one concert from the season-long residency. The performances were lightly edited and mastered, but no volume was assembled from multiple nights. Digital volumes appeared on a rolling schedule after Jacob approved the master; the complete cycle was later issued in two limited CD editions.
Background
Jacob had loved Clara Schumann’s music since childhood and programmed her work throughout his early career. He performed her Scherzo in D minor during his freshman Juilliard recital and included her Romance, Op. 11, on Live in Berlin: Variations & Violence. He and Camille DuPont named their daughter Clara after the composer in 2035.
By 2037, Jacob had completed his Doctor of Musical Arts degree and was building a career that combined performance, composition, publication, and teaching. He was also adjusting his professional life around early fatherhood. A New York residency allowed him to undertake a large public project without an extended tour, return home between performances, and retain the medical and family support structures he already used.
The cycle’s title stated its argument without making Jacob the subject. Clara Schumann’s music appeared under her own name and as the work of a whole musician: composer, pianist, arranger, transcriber, editor, cadenza writer, chamber collaborator, and teacher. Works known only by title and documented as lost were not fabricated or represented as recovered. “Complete” referred to the surviving catalog.
Residency and Recording
The twelve concerts occupied the full 2037–2038 performance season. Jacob initially wanted a shorter timetable, but Elliot Landry pressed for a calendar that did not turn Jacob’s health into a deadline. Concerts were separated by recovery periods, and the residency retained protected alternate dates for migraines, seizures, or family needs. The audience was promised the complete cycle, not a date by which Jacob’s body had to finish it.
Alice Tully Hall remained the acoustic home for every volume. The stable venue allowed the production team to preserve a consistent piano setup, lighting plan, recovery room, arrival route, and recording approach. Each concert was captured as a complete public performance and received only light editing and mastering afterward. Breath, pedal noise, room sound, and small performance imperfections remained audible.
The Orchestra of St. Luke’s provided the professional orchestral backbone. Chamber players, singers, choral musicians, and orchestral fellows joined through invitations and international calls to conservatories, with participants drawn from Juilliard, Mannes, Manhattan School of Music, and institutions outside the United States. They were credited descriptively as the cycle ensemble of ‘’In Her Own Name’’ rather than launched as a separate permanent brand.
Volumes and Program Architecture
The cycle was thematic rather than chronological. Jacob rejected a simple progress narrative in which Clara Schumann’s early virtuosity existed merely as a prelude to a small group of mature masterworks.
Volume I: The Young Virtuoso I
The opening program introduced the childhood and adolescent piano works through which Clara first entered public musical life.
Volume II: The Young Virtuoso II
The second program continued the early concert works, emphasizing formal ambition and the public pianist-composer identity already present in the music.
Volume III: The Private Music
This volume gathered romances, character pieces, sonata writing, and later solo works around intimacy, memory, and compressed emotional form.
Volume IV: Counterpoint and Study
Preludes, fugues, exercises, and pedagogical writing placed Clara’s contrapuntal knowledge and teaching labor at the center of a complete concert.
Volume V: In Company
The chamber program included the G-minor Piano Trio, the Romances for violin and piano, and other surviving collaborative repertoire.
Volume VI: The Voice I
The first song program paired recurring singers with Jacob at the piano and treated the Lieder as dramatic collaborations rather than miniatures between instrumental works.
Volume VII: The Voice II
The second song program completed the surviving solo-vocal catalog and allowed different singers to bring contrasting textual and musical readings to the cycle.
Volume VIII: Many Voices
Clara’s choral and ensemble writing formed the center of the eighth concert, expanding the residency beyond the pianist-centered image most often attached to her career.
Volume IX: Clara the Interpreter I
The first interpreter program presented arrangements and transcriptions as evidence of analytical listening, technical invention, and authorship expressed through another composer’s material.
Volume X: Clara the Interpreter II
The second interpreter program completed the surviving arrangements and transcriptions and incorporated her cadenzas and editorial work. The program notes identified the nature of her contribution to every item rather than flattening arrangement, transcription, editing, and composition into one credit.
Volume XI: At the Orchestra
The orchestral program centered the Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7, alongside the surviving orchestral repertoire and relevant versions for larger forces.
Volume XII
The final volume documented the closing concert of the cycle.
Physical and Digital Releases
Every concert became a separate digital volume through Tessitura after Jacob approved its lightly mastered recording. No fixed turnaround was promised. The rolling release allowed listeners to follow the residency without requiring Jacob to promote a new volume on a medically rigid schedule.
The cycle became one of Tessitura’s foundational releases and established the imprint’s classical identity in public: archival seriousness without institutional stiffness, transparent production practice, and a schedule that treated accessibility as part of professional infrastructure. Fifth Bar’s ownership allowed Jacob to preserve the single-concert recording policy, delay a volume when he needed more time to approve it, and issue the physical editions without a parent label demanding a fixed completion date.
The initial physical release used CD rather than vinyl because of the cycle’s length. Two limited versions appeared:
- The archival edition contained the complete recordings and a substantial clothbound book with essays, full credits, program reproductions, and facsimile manuscript material where rights permitted.
- The artist’s edition added removable score leaves, reproductions of rehearsal annotations, tactile and embossed design elements, and stricter numbering.
In 2062, a numbered twenty-fifth-anniversary vinyl edition honored the project as a defining achievement while Jacob was alive and able to participate in its framing. After his death in 2083, a memorial vinyl repress added new contextual essays without presenting the old performance as newly corrected, improved, or rediscovered.
Reception
The cycle was widely described as a landmark in Clara Schumann performance and recording. Its most immediate practical effect was a rise in programming beyond the familiar concerto, trio, and romances. Performers and institutions used the recordings as an entry point into her songs, contrapuntal music, arrangements, and editorial labor.
The one-concert-per-volume policy also became influential. Critics contrasted its disclosed, lightly mastered performances with classical releases built from invisible repair edits. Jacob’s approach did not reject production; it made the production history part of the record.
Coverage of the residency repeatedly revived the “prodigy” framing that had followed Jacob since he performed Beethoven’s Op. 111 at eighteen. At thirty, as a recent DMA graduate undertaking a complete Clara Schumann cycle, he was again described as a young genius rather than as an experienced working musician. Other coverage fixated on his seizures, migraines, and protected schedule as evidence of heroic endurance. Jacob disliked both frames, which displaced the project onto his age or body when its subject was Clara Schumann.
Legacy
‘’In Her Own Name’’ became one of Jacob’s defining classical projects. It joined his signature Beethoven and Bach recordings while demonstrating a different kind of ambition: not mastery of one canonical monument, but sustained attention to a musician whose authorship had been divided into supposedly major and minor forms of work.
The cycle’s long-term influence rested in that refusal to divide the catalog. Later complete-work projects cited its inclusion of arrangements, transcriptions, cadenzas, and editorial labor, while disability-conscious presenters cited the full-season residency as evidence that a major event could retain artistic continuity without demanding a punishing fixed timetable.
Related Entries
Related Entries: Jacob Keller – Biography; Jacob Keller – Career and Legacy; Clara Keller; Elliot Landry; Tessitura; Fifth Bar Records; Alice Tully Hall; Lincoln Center; Juilliard School; In Her Own Name: Complete Clara Schumann Cycle; In the Quiet: The Clara Schumann Sessions; Live in Berlin: Variations & Violence