It is well known that Clara Schumann was educated by her father Friedrich Wieck who published his pedagogical essay Clavier und Gesang in 1853. What is less known is that Clara Schumann was not only trained as a pianist, but also as a singer. Furthermore, she had a deep affinity to singers throughout her life. Her own singing competence, her singendes Spiel and the dialogue between Clavier und Gesang – piano and song – which characterized her programme, is also reflected in the piano arrangements of Clara Schumann’s songs.

80 percent of Clara Schumann‘s playbills in her complete collection of concert programmes (Robert-Schumann-Haus Zwickau) include vocal participation of solo singers, choirs or actors. The question is to which extent Clara Schumann used to accompany these vocal contributions herself on the piano. Only rarely are other accompanists named on the concert playbills, but evidence from concert reviews suggests that these vocal contributions normally served as rests for the solo pianist. Sometimes separate accompanists are named in the concert reviews. In orchestral concerts it was usually the conductor who accompanied solo songs on the piano, not the solo pianist. The Popular Concerts in St. James’s Hall in London were chamber concerts, which had a regular accompanist who was labelled as „conductor“ though there was no orchestra participating. These accompanists sometimes also performed with instrumentalists, e. g. basso continuo music from the 18th century or piano reductions of orchestral concerts.

The present thesis investigates the music and career of Jeffrey Lewis (born 1942). The thesis is broadly divided into three sections. First is an account of the composer’s life, told mainly through an overview of his works, but also through a sketch of his early years in South Wales, his studies in Cardiff, Darmstadt, Kraków and Paris, his academic career in Leeds and Bangor, and his subsequent early retirement from academia. There follows a more detailed study of six works from the period 1978 – 1985, during which certain features of Lewis’s musical language came to the fore, perhaps most notably a very individual and instantly recognisable use of modal language. After an Epilogue, the thesis concludes with an Appendix in the form of a Catalogue in which all Lewis’s known compositions are listed, together with details of performances, broadcasts and recordings. Lewis’s music often plays with our temporal expectations; the close interrelationship between texture, structure, harmony and melody, and its effect upon our perception of the passage of time, are explored in the main analyses. These are conducted partly by means of comparison with other works by Lewis or his contemporaries. Memoria is examined in relation to a similarly tranquil score, Naaotwá Lalá, by Giles Swayne. The following chapter discusses the extra-musical inspiration for Epitaph for Abelard and Heloise, whose relationship to Tableau is then explored in the next. The difficulties of creating a large-scale structure that unifies the work’s various harmonic elements are also investigated. The analysis of Carmen Paschale considers it in relation to Lewis’s other choral music, whilst the final analytical chapter compares and contrasts two three-movement works, the Piano Trio and the Fantasy for solo piano. Lewis’s melodic writing in the Piano Trio is discussed in relation to that of James MacMillan, and the origins of the first movement of Fantasy in Oliver Knussen’s Sonya’s Lullaby are explored. In the Epilogue, the possible reasons for Lewis’s current neglect are explored, various influences on Lewis’s musical thinking are laid out, and his achievements are assessed.