This chapter explores the centrality of performance and virtuosity within the Schumanns’ engagement with their broader musical world, emphasizing ways in which they navigated cultural currents that, from our vantage point, may seem to be in tension with one another but that in the Schumanns’ day were intertwined. First, I consider how they simultaneously embraced a widespread fascination with cutting-edge approaches to the sound and spectacle of virtuosity and an aesthetics of interiority. Second, I consider how they contributed to the historical idealisation of the musical work and composer even as Clara exemplified performance practices that offered a wide range of ways to tailor and reshape compositions.