Fanny Davies and the Schumann Tradition
In the mid 1990s I interviewed the writer and broadcaster Jeremy Siepmann for a BBC documentary on the Schumann tradition and the recordings left by the pupils of Clara Schumann. Although many pupils of Liszt and Leschetizky left sizeable discographies, only five of Clara Schumann’s pupils recorded, and of that five, only three—Carl Friedberg, Adelina de Lara and Fanny Davies—recorded any of Robert Schumann’s major works. Siepmann was an expert in early piano recordings and our discussion focused on Davies, Friedberg and de Lara. I questioned him about which, if any, of their recordings truly represented the Schumann tradition, and if he thought it possible to reconstruct some elements of Clara Schumann’s own interpretative philosophy from the evidence on the recordings. For Siepmann, the performances that came closest—and perhaps even gave a glimpse of the playing style and technique of Clara Schumann herself—were those left by Fanny Davies.

There is some supporting evidence to suggest that his opinion was more than conjecture. Of all Clara Schumann’s pupils, Fanny Davies probably had the most distinguished career as a performer, and a comment by another pupil, Mathilde Verne, that during her lessons, Davies ‘hung on every word which fell from the lips of Madame Schumann with such passion that I was quite astonished’ suggests an element of hero worship. Siepmann also told me that Marie Schumann, Clara’s elder daughter and teaching assistant, once mistook the playing of Fanny Davies for that of her mother (NB: I am unable to find the source of Siepmann’s anecdote) and Adelina de Lara told Lady Dorothy Mayer that Davies’s playing of the (Bach) Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue was the nearest to Mme Schumann’s interpretation that she had ever heard. Combine this with Dorothy Mayer’s two observations concerning Fanny Davies’ phenomenal memory (‘she sat down at the piano and started to play—Schumann’s ‘Flutenreicher Ebro’ [Spanische Liebeslieder, Op 138 No 5]—which she had not played for a quarter of a century, perhaps very much longer—but it was note-perfect and assured’) and an example from 1925 where Davies stunned Felix Weingartner by playing part of his unpublished first String Quartet, written when they were both students at the Leipzig Conservatorium, and it would suggest that what Fanny Davies heard in her lessons with Clara Schumann she remembered with blue-print accuracy, and possessed the ability of perfect recall. This is also supported by Davies herself who in 1925 wrote a detailed ‘eye­witness’ account of Clara’s performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto at the Leipzig Gewandhaus that she had witnessed almost forty years earlier. Harold C Schonberg’s comment on Fanny Davies that ‘behind her neat, controlled, tasteful playing one can see the specter of Clara’ was possibly more accurate than he imagined.

Fanny Davies was born on the 27 June 1861 to English parents living on Guernsey but as a toddler was sent to live with her aunt, Miss Woodhill, in Birmingham. She began playing the piano at three, picking up pieces by ear and had her first lessons with a local teacher, Miss Welchman, at five. She played in public for the first time at Birmingham Town Hall aged seven (what she played on this occasion isn’t recorded, but as a child Fanny is known to have played Beethoven’s A flat sonata, Op 26, in the same venue) and by nine was studying piano seriously with Charles Flavell and later with Sir Charles Hallé. She also had harmony lessons with Alfred Gaul in Birmingham before enrolling at the Leipzig Conservatorium in 1882 to study piano with Carl Reinecke and composition with Salomon Jadassohn whose students included Grieg, Delius and Busoni. She didn’t stay long with Reinecke and the following year, 1883, transferred to Clara Schumann who from 1878 had been Head of the piano faculty at the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt. This was a turning point in Davies’ life and the two years she spent with Clara Schumann shaped not only her technique, but her entire interpretive approach for the rest of her career. In an interview in the late 1890s Davies described meeting Clara Schumann as ‘the crowning event of my student life’:

To her all my gratitude is due. She helped me, encouraged me, enlightened me, bestowed upon me the most blessed of virtues—perseverance. Without her guiding and invigorating influence, study might have been a toil, as it was, the learning of music was rendered a labour of love.

Of Clara as a person, Davies said that ‘Madame Schumann had one of the sweetest natures I have ever known’:

Her gentle patience and unwavering solicitude were only excelled by her genial, tranquil charm of manner. I made rapid progress under her tuition and learnt all that has been of boundless value to me in after years.

It appears that her year was Reinecke might not have been very successful, and she later confessed to Mathilde Verne that before studying with Clara Schumann ‘I hardly had any technique at all!’

Davies returned to England in 1885 for her concerto debut at a Crystal Palace Orchestral Concert on 17 October (one source states 16th) playing Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto conducted by August Manns, making her solo debut on 16 November when she appeared at a St James’ Hall Monday Popular concert playing Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, and partnering an unnamed quartet (possibly the Joachim) in Schumann’s Piano Quintet. Her work as a collaborative artist was to continue throughout her career and during the 1885/6 season she appeared in six concerts as soloist and collaborative pianist with Joachim and Piatti at the St James’ Hall—Monday and Saturday ‘Pops’—and on 15 April 1886 gave her first concert with the Philharmonic Society playing William Sterndale Bennett’s Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 9. Her Berlin debut followed on 15 November 1887, partnering Joachim—who by then had become a friend and mentor—and she was back in Leipzig for recitals and her first concerto appearance with the Gewandhaus Orchestra on 5 January 1888, again playing Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto, conducted by her former teacher Carl Reinecke.

For the next four decades Fanny Davies enjoyed a highly distinguished and critically acclaimed European career as a touring concert artist, playing to great success in Rome and at the Birmingham Festival in 1889. She played to Queen Victoria at Balmoral on 22 October 1892, and regularly for many of the Crowned Heads of Europe before 1914; she toured Germany in 1893 (playing Op 110 at the Beethovenhaus Bonn Festival, substituting at short notice for an indisposed Teresa Carreño); a series of chamber concerts in Vienna featuring Brahms’ Clarinet Trio and Clarinet Sonatas with Richard Mühlfeld in 1894/5 (many attended by Brahms himself whom Davies met earlier on his regular visits to Frau Schumann and who was by then a close friend); concerto appearances with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1895; concerts in Milan in 1895 and again during the 1904/5 season; the Bergamo Festival in 1897; Paris recital debut in 1902; appearing regularly at the Lamoureux and Colonne Concerts between 1903 and 1905; and touring Germany again in 1907 with the tenor, Gervase Elwes. Between 1911 and the start of World War 1, Davies also collaborated with Pablo Casals—whom she met at the London home of Edward Speyer—on a series of chamber concerts, and her association with Casals and the Barcelona Orchestra continued after the war, appearing with them during the 1923 season as soloist in Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto and the Brahms B flat.

From about 1920, Fanny Davies began a long partnership with the Bohemian String Quartet, giving many concerts with them in Prague and the UK, becoming fascinated with Czech music and counting President Edvard Beneš as a friend. As a mark of esteem, in 1931, Fanny Davies was awarded a Civil List Pension of £90 from King George V—one of very few musicians ever to receive such a gift. She died in London on 1 September 1934 aged 73. She never married, but the 1890s interview mentions that ‘Miss Davies is living with a dear lady, who to judge from appearances acts as mother, sister and friend’. She and her unnamed companion lived in St John’s Wood and each summer ‘the ladies take themselves to the Swiss mountains, and there in the tranquility of a peaceful village, they roam about, discarding—for a brief period—their customary studies and enjoy nature’s harmonies’.

As a personality, Fanny Davies was warm and gregarious, she had the gift of friendship and knew practically every major musician in Europe. Her studio was a meeting place for artists, writers and musicians and her friend, Lady Mayer wrote that ‘Fanny was never pompous and had a lively sense of the ridicu­lous. She looked so stately, and she was very dignified … on the platform. That was one side of her. The other side was quirky, whimsical and exuberant. She loved colour and she loved life’. She was clearly a dedicated career musician who took her work very seriously but knew how to enjoy life and friendships away from the piano—perhaps the very definition of a life well lived.

As a pianist Fanny Davies had a huge and extensive repertoire which in 1913 consisted of 32 concertos and at least 450 solo works. At the core was Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, some Chopin—including the F minor concerto—and she was also one of the first pianists to include keyboard works by William Byrd and other Tudor composers in her recitals. She gave early London performances of pieces by Debussy, Scriabin, Suk, Sgambati, Granados and Albéniz and in the 1890s championed new music by Brahms, giving the UK premieres of the Op 116 and Op 117 piano pieces, the D minor Violin Sonata, Op 108, with Joachim and the Op 120 Clarinet Sonatas and Op 114 Clarinet Trio with Mühlfeld. She also gave the World premieres of Dame Ethel Smyth’s Op 7 Violin Sonata with Adolf Brodsky in Leipzig in 1887, and Elgar’s Concert Allegro, Op 46, in 1901—a work dedicated to her.

Recordings
Fanny Davies made her first recordings for the Welte-Mignon reproducing piano roll system in Freiburg around 1907 (some of these rolls have recently been successfully digitized and transferred), but she made no gramophone records until a series of Schumann recordings for the Columbia Graphophone Company between June 1928 and December 1930 when she was already in her late 60s. Her first sessions took place on 15/16 June 1928 when she recorded the Schumann Piano Concerto, Op 54, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra† conducted by Ernest Ansermet—making his conducting debut on record. (†So titled on the discs, but the RPO was only founded in 1946, and this almost certainly refers to the Orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society, an occasional grouping of players drawn from London’s orchestras and other freelance musicians.) The two sessions seem to have gone smoothly with first and second takes used for all the published sides, issued on the Columbia Black label 9000 series in the UK in March 1929. Her next session in October 1928—this time for the Kinderszenen, Op 15—produced no published sides, but the work was successfully repeated at her fourth session on 2 February 1929 and issued, this time on the blue ‘Celebrity’ series, in October 1929. In sessions five to ten—June 1929 to January 1930—Davies recorded the Fantasiestücke, Op 12, the Romance in F sharp major, Op 28 No 2, Scherzo-Canon, Op 56 No 5, and the Davidsbündlertänze, Op 6. Unfortunately, nothing was published from these sessions and no test pressings appear to have survived. These are probably the most important ‘lost’ Schumann recordings and it’s to be hoped that some of the test pressings might have survived—somewhere. Her final session for Columbia took place on 10 December 1930, this time, successfully re­making the Davidsbündlertänze. Davies omits numbers 3, 7, 15 & 16 from the set, possibly to reduce timings to fit on six rather than eight sides. For some reason, this recording—possibly her finest—was never issued in the UK but was available briefly in the USA, which seems strange as Davies never per­formed in the USA and was probably unknown to most American audiences.

“Once again I must remind the recording companies that Miss Fanny Davies is alive and that she plays Schumann a great deal better than Cortot ever will.”
(Compton MacKenzie, Gramophone April 1928

Adela Verne (1877-1952)
The remaining tracks on this CD contain the four sides made by Adela Verne for Columbia in 1917; a big-boned Chopin A flat Polonaise, Three Cuban Dances by Cervantes, and Moszkowski’s La Jongleuse. She played the Cervantes and Moszkowski as programmed ‘encores’ after a performance of the Schumann Concerto in the Albert Hall on 17 March 1918, possibly to coincide with the release of the record. (An early example of ‘merch’ marketing? One can only imagine the Columbia banners and signed copies of the new disc on sale in the foyer!)

Adela Verne (originally Würm) was born in Southampton 27 February 1877 to German parents, the youngest of four sisters, all pianists: Marie (who retained the family name Würm and later returned to Germany), Alice and Mathilde. All had strong connections to Clara Schumann, Marie and Mathilde both studying with Clara in Frankfurt, and sister Alice having lessons with Clara’s daughter, Marie. Biographical information on Adela is sketchy and contradictory. Depending on the source, she was a pupil of Clara and Marie Schumann, or Mathilde and Paderewski, or Mathilde alone; she made her London debut in 1891 or 1898; gave the first London performance of Brahms Piano Concerto No 2 etc—unravelling the facts is not easy!

What is undisputed is that Adela was a genuine prodigy and on the limited evidence of her recordings, a superb pianist with a glorious sound and a big technique. As a young child she did have a handful of lessons with Marie Schumann when she visited the UK with her mother, and may even have been heard by Clara herself, but there is no evidence that she had any lessons with her. Marie Schumann did offer to take Adela back to Germany for lessons, but her family thought that Adela was too young to go. Apart from three months in Paris with an unnamed ‘famous professor’ Adela’s principal teacher appears to have been her elder sister, Mathilde, who also taught Solomon, Moura Lympany, Harold Samuel and later, Adela’s son, John Vallier. Adela did meet Paderewski as a child—she played for him at the Erard showrooms in London—and later developed a friendship with him, but he probably offered her practical professional advice and interpretative suggestions rather than formal lessons.

Mathilde Verne mentions that Adela played the Tchaikovsky Concerto with Sir August Manns at one of the smaller Crystal Palace concerts when she was fourteen, which would have been around 1891, but her official debut appears to have been two solo recitals at the St James’s Hall in December 1896, followed by her concerto debut with the Grieg Concerto at the Queen’s Hall on 1 May 1897. She did play the Tchaikovsky Concerto at a Queen’s Hall Prom on 14 October 1897, and on 4 June 1898—again at Queen’s Hall—played three concertos back-to-back: Chopin 1, Saint-Saëns 2 and the Mozart E flat for two pianos with her sister, Mathilde. She wasn’t the first to play the Brahms B flat in England (that honour probably goes to Frederick Dawson), but Adela was the first to play it at a Prom concert on 13 October 1905 (which was described as a ‘Proms premiere’), and she may also have given the first UK performance of Franck’s Symphonic Variations at another Prom concert on 23 October 1902. From then on, Adela Verne became a regular fixture in British musical life.

Adela was clearly a feisty and adventurous sort, travelling to America, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, and Chile (crossing the Andes on a mule) amongst others, arranging concerts herself in small theatres and towns without a prior schedule or publicity. She even took a flight from the USA to Canada at a time when planes were made of canvas and hickory, and the price of the ticket included a life insurance policy. The chapter on Adela in Mathilde Verne’s autobiography Chords of Remembrance charts some of her many scrapes and adventures but needs to be approached with a little caution. Mathilde paints Adela as a sort of pianistic Amelia Earhart and it reads like a 1930s movie fanzine, a weird mixture of hyperbole, wide-eyed idolatry and hero-worship combined with a hint of jealousy.

Adela Verne was often billed as the ‘greatest woman pianist of her age’—quite an epithet—and it’s a pity she recorded too little to make the case adequately, but what we have is very impressive. She could have recorded into the LP age and was still regularly performing and broadcasting in the 1950s but died in London on 5 February 1952, a few weeks short of her 75th birthday, while preparing for her first recital in the newly built Royal Festival Hall.

Jonathan Dobson © 2025