Robert Schumann

Schumann stands among the foremost composers of the nineteenth century as the very model of a Romantic musician whose existence and output perfectly captured that aesthetic ideal. Though he felt ill at ease with expansive designs such as the symphony and the concerto, certain passages within his examples of those forms still reveal striking loveliness; instead he poured his lyric gifts most completely into lieder and compact keyboard miniatures. That singular gift for rendering the most subtle, inward, and sometimes transient movements of feeling appears vividly in the song cycle Dichterliebe after Heinrich Heine as well as in the piano sets Phantasiestücke, Kinderszenen, and Waldszenen. As observers have long noted, he achieved the rare fusion of music and poetry that the Romantics themselves proclaimed the highest aim of art.

His father, a bookseller, nurtured both his musical and literary inclinations. At ten Robert began piano lessons; in 1828 he entered the University of Leipzig to study law, yet music, philosophy, and the city’s taverns soon claimed far more of his attention than jurisprudence. He also took instruction from the noted Leipzig pedagogue Friedrich Wieck. Mental instability ran in the family, and Schumann, who almost certainly endured manic depression, confronted the threat of insanity with the characteristically Romantic mixture of dread and allure. A habitual philanderer and heavy drinker, he pursued a mode of life that only intensified his psychological difficulties. His ambition to perform as a concert pianist collapsed when partial paralysis afflicted his right hand; while popular accounts long attributed the damage to obsessive use of a finger-strengthening contraption, later evidence suggests mercury poisoning contracted during treatment for syphilis.

He therefore turned to composition and musical journalism, helping to establish the influential Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and winning early notice for his prescient advocacy of Chopin. Numerous essays adopt the form of conversations among members of the “League of David,” a band of youthful idealists battling the “Philistines,” and are led by his fictional alter egos “Florestan” and “Eusebius,” meant to embody the ebullient and introspective sides of his own temperament. The abrupt emotional shifts that mark his scores likewise mirror his turbulent inner world. Wieck’s gifted daughter Clara matured into a brilliant pianist and fell in love with Schumann, to her father’s dismay. After protracted legal struggle the couple secured permission to wed in 1840, one day before Clara’s twenty-first birthday.

During these months Schumann composed with feverish intensity. Whenever a musical idea seized him he worked until exhaustion, devoting himself for a time to a single genre; 1841 became a celebrated “year of songs” in which he brought the Romantic song cycle to its highest point. He essentially created the concise, poetic, programmatic piano piece and produced such works in remarkable abundance throughout the later 1830s. In the following decade, partly at Clara’s prompting, he attempted larger forms; his four mature symphonies remain in the repertory, yet the opera Genoveva proved unsuccessful. He occupied several institutional posts, including a professorship at the newly founded Leipzig Conservatory and, later, the post of municipal music director in Düsseldorf, though neither appointment met with notable achievement. On 27 February 1854 he leaped into the icy Rhine; rescued, he entered an asylum of his own accord. Intermittent clarity gave way to steady decline, and he died there in 1856, most likely from tertiary syphilis.