Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann (1810–1856) was a writer who became a composer — he studied law in Leipzig before abandoning it for music, and the literary sensibility never left his work. He founded and edited the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, one of the most important music journals in Europe, and used it as a vehicle for his opinions (which were fierce), his enmities (also fierce), and his enthusiasm for the music of the future. The journal made him famous, and his music bears the mark of someone who thought about music as a form of literature.

His piano works are structured around literary programs and hidden meanings: the Carnaval is built from musical ciphers of the letters of his hometown and his first love; the Kreisleriana is named after E.T.A. Hoffmann's fictional Kapellmeister; the Davidsbündlertänze alternates between two personalities — 'Florestan' and 'Eusebius' — that Schumann said represented the opposing forces in his own nature. He was aware of what he was doing and said so in the journals, which is unusual frankness from the Romantic era.

He met and fell in love with Clara Wieck, the daughter of his piano teacher Friedrich Wieck and herself one of the greatest pianists of the century. When her father blocked the engagement, Schumann took the case to court and won. They married in 1840 — he was 30, she was 21 — and produced eight children and a sustained artistic partnership. His mental health declined from his late 30s; the last two years of his life were spent in a private asylum near Bonn, with Clara managing his legacy and championing his music for decades after his death.

StyleRomantic piano poetry with literary structure. Short-breathed melodic lines, cross-rhythms, the feeling of a private interior world. Piano works of unusual intimacy; orchestral works (the Spring Symphony, the Piano Concerto) of unexpected directness.

Listen: Carnaval, Op. 9, or Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood). Then the Piano Concerto in A minor — the first movement is one of the great things in Romantic music.