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:This article is about the German composer. For
the German-born French politician, see Robert
Schuman; for the youngest person to go to the
north and south poles, see Robert Schumann
(record-breaker).
Robert Schumann (June 8, 1810 – July 29,
1856) was a German composer and pianist.  He was
one of the most famous Romantic composers of the
first half of the 19th century.  An intellectual
as well an an aesthete, his music, more than any
other composer, reflects the deep personal nature
of Romanticism.  Introspective and often
whimsical, his early music was an attempt to break
with the tradition of classical music
era|classical forms and structure which he thought
too restrictive.  Little understood in his
lifetime, much of his music is now regarded as
daringly original in harmony, rhythm and form
(music)|form.

==Biographical Information ==
===Early life===
He was born on the 8th of June 1810 in Zwickau in
Saxony.  His father was a publisher, and it was in
the cultivation of literature quite as much as in
that of music that his boyhood was spent.  He
himself tells us that he began to compose before
his seventh year. 

At fourteen he wrote an essay on the aesthetics of
music and also contributed to a volume edited by
his father and entitled Portraits of Famous Men.
While still at school in Zwickau he read, besides
Friedrich Schiller|Schiller and Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe|Goethe, George Gordon Byron, Lord
Byron|Byron (whose Beppo and Childe Harold had
been translated by his father) and the Greek
tragedians. But the most powerful as well as the
most permanent of the literary influences
exercised upon him, however, was undoubtedly that
of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter|Jean Paul
Richter. This influence may clearly be seen in his
youthful novels Juniusabende and Selene, of which
the first only was completed (1826).

In 1828 he left school, and after a tour, during
which he met Heine at Munich, he went to Leipzig
to study law.  His interest in music had been
stimulated when he was a child by hearing Ignaz
Moscheles|Moscheles play at Carlsbad, and in 1827
his enthusiasm had been further excited by the
works of Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn. 
But his father, who had encouraged the boy's
musical aspirations, had died in 1826, and neither
his mother nor his guardian approved of a musical
career for him. 

The question seemed to be set at rest by
Schumann's expressed intention to study law, but
both at Leipzig and at Heidelberg, whither he went
in 1829, he neglected the law for the
philosophers, and though—to use his own
words—"but Nature's pupil pure and simple"
began composing songs.
===1830-1839===
The restless spirit by which he was pursued is
disclosed in his letters of the period.  At Easter
1830 he heard Niccolo Paganini|Paganini at
Frankfurt, Germany|Frankfurt.  In July in this
year he wrote to his mother, "My whole life has
been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call
it Music and Law," and by Christmas he was once
more in Leipzig, taking piano lessons with his old
master, Friedrich Wieck. 

In his anxiety to accelerate the process by which
he could acquire a perfect execution he
permanently injured his right hand.  Other
authority states that the right-hand disability
was caused by syphillis medication.  Those who
claim the former state that he attempted a radical
surgical procedure to separate the tendons of the
fourth finger from those of the third (the ring
finger musculature is linked to that of the third
finger, thus making it the "weakest" finger). 
Regardless, his ambitions as a pianist being
suddenly ruined, he determined to devote himself
entirely to composition, and began a course of
theory under Heinrich Dorn, conductor of the
Leipzig opera.  About this time he contemplated an
opera on the subject of Hamlet.

The fusion of the literary idea with its musical
illustration, which may be said to have first
taken shape in Papillons (op. 2), is foreshadowed
to some extent in the first criticism by Schumann,
an essay on Chopin's variations on a theme from
Don Juan, which appeared in the Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung in 1831.  Here the work is
discussed by the imaginary characters Florestan
and Eusebius (the counterparts of Vult and Walt in
Jean Paul's novel Flegeljahre), and Meister Raro
(representing either the composer himself or
Wieck) is called upon for his opinion. 

By the time, however, that Schumann had written
Papillons (1831) he had gone a step further.  The
scenes and characters of his favourite novelist
had now passed definitely and consciously into the
written music, and in a letter from Leipzig (April
1832) he bids his brothers "read the last scene in
Jean Paul's Flegeljahre as soon as possible,
because the Papillons are intended as a musical
representation of that masquerade."

In the winter of 1832 Schumann visited his
relations at Zwickau and Schneeberg, in both of
which places was performed the first movement of
his symphony in G minor, which remains
unpublished.  In Zwickau the music was played at a
concert given by Wieck's daughter Clara
Schumann|Clara, who was then only thirteen.  The
death of his brother Julius as well as that of his
sister-in-law Rosalie in 1833 seems to have
affected Schumann with a profound melancholy. 

By the spring of 1834, however, he had
sufficiently recovered to be able to start Die
neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the paper in which
appeared the greater part of his critical
writings.  The first number was published on the
3rd of April 1834.  It effected a revolution in
the taste of the time, when Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Carl Maria von
Weber were being neglected for the shallow works
of men whose names are now forgotten.  To bestow
praise on Frederic Chopin and Hector Berlioz in
those days was to court the charge of eccentricity
in taste, yet the genius of both these masters was
appreciated and openly proclaimed in the new
journal.

Schumann's editorial duties, which kept him
closely occupied during the summer of 1834, were
interrupted by his relations with Ernestine von
Fricken, a girl of sixteen, to whom he became
engaged. She was the adopted daughter of a rich
Bohemian, from whose variations on a theme
Schumann constructed his own Etudes symphoniques.
The engagement was broken off by Schumann, for
reasons which have remained obscure.

In the Carnaval (Schumann)|Carnaval (op. 9, 1834),
one of his most genial and most characteristic
pianoforte works, Schumann commenced nearly all
the sections of which it is composed with the
musical notes signified in German by the letters
that spell Asch (A, E-flat, C, and B, or
alternatively A-flat, C, and B), the town in which
Ernestine was born, which also are the musical
letters in Schumann's own name.  By the sub-title
"Estrella" to one of the sections in the Carnaval,
Ernestine is meant, and by the sub-title
"Chiarina" Clara Wieck.  Eusebius and Florestan,
the imaginary figures appearing so often in his
critical writings, also occur, besides brilliant
imitations of Chopin and Niccolo
Paganini|Paganini, and the work comes to a close
with a march of the Davidsbündler-- the league of
the men of King David|David against the
Philistines in which may be heard the clear
accents of truth in contest with the dull clamour
of falsehood.  In the Carnaval Schumann went
farther than in Papillons, for in it he himself
conceived the story of which it was the musical
illustration. 

On the 3rd of October 1835 Schumann met
Mendelssohn at Wieck's house in Leipzig, and his
appreciation of his great contemporary was shown
with the same generous freedom that distinguished
him in all his relations to other musicians, and
which later enabled him to recognize the genius of
Brahms when he was still obscure.

In 1836 Schumann's acquaintance with Clara Wieck,
already famous as a pianist, ripened into love,
and a year later he asked her father's consent to
their marriage, but was met with a refusal.  In
the series Fantasiestücke for the piano (op. 12)
he once more gives a sublime illustration of the
fusion of literary and musical ideas as embodied
conceptions in such pieces as Warum and In der
Nacht.  After he had written the latter of these
two he detected in the music the fanciful
suggestion of a series of episodes from the story
of Hero and Leander. 

The Kreisleriana, which he regarded as one of his
most successful works, was written in 1838, and in
this the composer's realism is again carried a
step further.  Johannes Kreisler|Kreisler, the
romantic poet brought into contact with the real
world, was a character drawn from life by the poet
E. T. A. Hoffmann (q.v.), and Schumann utilized
him as an imaginary mouthpiece for the recital in
music of his own personal experiences.  The
Phantasie in C (op. 17), written in the summer of
1836, is a work of the highest quality of passion.
 With the Faschingschwank aus Wien, his most
pictorial work for the piano, written in 1839,
after a visit to Vienna (during which he
discovered a previously unknown symphony by
Schubert), this period of his life comes to an
end.

As Wieck still withheld his consent to their
marriage, Robert and Clara at last dispensed with
it, and were married on the 12th of September at
Schonefeld, Germany|Schönefeld near Leipzig.

===1840-1849===
The year 1840 may be said to have yielded the most
extraordinary results in Schumann's career.  Until
now he had written almost solely for the
pianoforte, but in this one year he wrote about a
hundred and fifty songs.  Schumann's biographers
represent him as caught in a tempest of song, the
sweetness, the doubt and the despair of which are
all to be attributed to varying emotions aroused
by his love for Clara.  Yet it would be idle to
ascribe to this influence alone the lyrical
perfection of such songs as Frühlingsnacht, Im
wunderschönen Monat Mai and Schöne Wiege meiner
Leiden. 

His chief song-cycles of this period were his
settings of the Liederkreis of J. von Eichendorff
(op. 39), the Frauenliebe und -leben|Frauenliebe
und Leben of Chamisso (op. 42), the Dichterliebe
of Heine (op. 48) and Myrthen, a collection of
songs, including poems by Goethe, Ruckert, Heine,
Byron, Burns and Moore.  The songs Belsatzar (op.
57) and Die beiden Grenadiere (op. 49), each to
Heine's words, show Schumann at his best as a
ballad writer, though the dramatic ballad is less
congenial to him than the introspective lyric.  As
Grillparzer said, "He has made himself a new ideal
world in which he moves almost as he wills."

Yet it was not until long afterwards that he met
with adequate recognition.  In his lifetime the
sole tokens of honour bestowed upon Schumann were
the degree of Doctor by the University of Jena In
1840, and in 1843 a professorship in the
Conservatorium of Leipzig. 

Probably no composer ever rivaled Schumann in
concentrating his energies on one form of music at
a time.  At first all his creative impulses were
translated into pianoforte music, then followed
the miraculous year of the songs.  In 1841 he
wrote two of his four symphonies.  The year 1842
was devoted to the composition of chamber music,
and includes the pianoforte quintet (op. 44), now
one of his best known and most admired works. In
1843 he wrote Paradise and the Pen, his first
essay at concerted vocal music. 

He had now mastered the separate forms, and from
this time forward his compositions are not
confined during any particular period to any one
of them.  In Schumann, above all musicians, the
acquisition of technical knowledge was closely
bound up with the growth of his own experience and
the impulse to express it. 

The stage in his life when he was deeply engaged
in his music to Goethe's Faust (1844-1853) was a
critical one for his health.  The first half of
the year 1844 had been spent with his wife in
Russia.  On returning to Germany he had abandoned
his editorial work, and left Leipzig for Dresden,
Germany|Dresden, where he suffered from persistent
nervous prostration.  As soon as he began to work
he was seized with fits of shivering, and an
apprehension of death which was exhibited in an
abhorrence for high places, for all metal
instruments (even keys) and for drugs.  He
suffered perpetually also from imagining that he
had the note A sounding in his ears.  In 1846 he
had recovered and in the winter revisited Vienna,
travelling to Prague and Berlin in the spring of
1847 and in the summer to Zwickau, where he was
received with enthusiasm, gratifying because
Dresden and Leipzig were the only large cities in
which his fame was at this time appreciated.

To 1848 belongs his only opera, Genoveva (op. 81),
a work containing much beautiful music, but
lacking dramatic force. It is interesting for its
attempt to abolish the recitative, which Schumann
regarded as an interruption to the musical flow. 
The subject of Genoveva, based on Johann Ludwig
Tieck|Tieck and Hebbel, was in itself not a
particularly happy choice; but it is worth
remembering that as early as 1842 the
possibilities of German opera had been keenly
realized by Schumann, who wrote, "Do you know my
prayer as an artist, night and morning?  It is
called 'German Opera.'  Here is a real field for
enterprise . . . something simple, profound,
German."  And in his notebook of suggestions for
the text of operas are found amongst others:
Nibelungen, Lohengrin and Till Eulenspiegel. 

The music to Byron's Manfred is pre-eminent in a
year (1849) in which he wrote more than in any
other.  The insurrection of Dresden caused
Schumann to move to Kreischa, a little village a
few miles outside the city.  In the August of this
year, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary
of Goethe's birth, such scenes of Schumann's Faust
as were already completed were performed in
Dresden, Leipzig and Weimar, Germany|Weimar,
Liszt, as always giving unwearied assistance and
encouragement.  The rest of the work was written
in the latter part of the year, and the overture
in 1853.

===After 1850===
From 1850 to 1854 the text of Schumann's works is
extremely varied.  In 1850 he succeeded Ferdinand
Hiller as musical director at Düsseldorf; in
1851-1853 he visited Switzerland and Belgium as
well as Leipzig.  In January 1854 Schumann went to
Hanover, where he heard a performance of his
Paradise and the Peri. 

Soon after his return to Düsseldorf, where he was
engaged in editing his complete works and making
an anthology on the subject of music, a renewal of
the symptoms that had threatened him before showed
itself.  Besides the single note he now imagined
that voices sounded in his ear.  One night he
suddenly left his bed, saying that Schubert and
Mendelssohn had sent him a theme which he must
write down, and on this theme he wrote five
variations for the pianoforte, his last work. 

On February 27, 1854 he threw himself into the
Rhine.  He was rescued by some boatmen, but when
brought to land was determined to be quite insane.
 He suffered from syphilis that had not been
properly treated and had developed into its
tertiary stage. He was taken to a private asylum
in Endenich near Bonn, Germany|Bonn, and remained
there until his death on July 29, 1856.  He was
buried at Bonn, and in 1880 a statue by A.
Donndorf was erected on his tomb. 

From the time of her husband's death, Clara
devoted herself principally to the interpretation
of her husband's works, but when in 1856 she first
visited England the critics received Schumann's
music with a chorus of disapprobation.  She
returned to London in 1865 and continued her
visits annually, with the exception of four
seasons, until 1882; and from 1885 to 1888 she
appeared each year.   She became the authoritative
editor of her husband's works for Breitkopf and
Härtel.  She and her good friend, Johannes Brahms
destroyed many of Schumann's later works that they
thought to be tainted by his madness. See Clara
Schumann.

==Compositions==
*List of compositions by Robert Schumann.
*: