Madame Composer

“I thought I knew Clara Schumann. Sarah Fritz brings us closer to the woman behind the legend, and she is even more remarkable than the myth.” * Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera *“Madame Composer is a revelation and a reckoning — a work of meticulous scholarship and genuine fire that restores Clara Schumann not as a footnote to the men around her but as a central figure: a prodigy, a virtuosa, a composer of radical originality, and the woman who shaped classical music as we know it. Sarah Fritz has cracked open one of music history’s most consequential cover-ups, and she does it with a novelist’s instinct for scene and a historian’s precision. Fritz’s detective work is thrilling. She uncovers, for the first time, the melodies Brahms and Liszt borrowed from Clara and never credited. She doesn’t just restore Clara Schumann to her rightful place; she shows us, note by note, exactly how she was removed from it. The erasure of Clara Schumann is a story about how canons get made and who gets left out. Now, she finally has the biographer she deserves.” * Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman—and Other Heresies *“A gripping, eminently readable biography of the great Clara Schumann and the society she was born into, Madame Composer is at once a celebration of genius and a fierce invective against the structural hurdles that women faced in the world of 19th-century classical music.” – Jennifer Higgie, author of The Mirror and the Palette and The Other Side

Sarah Fritz is a musicologist, mezzo-soprano, and music historian. She has contributed to the New York Times, given pre-concert talks for the Philadelphia Orchestra, and appears in the PBS documentary, Mozart’s Sister.

She runs the Clara Schumann Channel platform, dedicated to educating the public about women composers. Fritz performs with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Symphonic Choir, including an appearance in the choir scene of the movie Maestro.

Fritz teaches on the faculty of the Westminster Conservatory in Princeton, New Jersey.