Robert Schumann
German Romantic poet-composer whose piano and song cycles are peerless
1810
1856
German
Romantic
Carnaval, Dichterliebe, Piano Concerto in A minor
Early life
Robert Schumann was born on 8 June 1810 in Zwickau, Saxony, the son of a bookseller and publisher. He grew up surrounded by literature and showed early gifts for both music and writing. At eighteen he enrolled as a law student at the University of Leipzig, but spent most of his time studying piano with Friedrich Wieck and attending concerts. He soon abandoned law entirely to pursue a career as a concert pianist. This ambition was permanently curtailed when he injured his right hand — by most accounts through use of a mechanical device intended to strengthen the fourth finger — leaving him unable to perform at a professional level.
Career and major works
Schumann redirected his energies towards composition and music journalism. In 1834 he founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a journal he edited for a decade, in which he championed Chopin, Berlioz, and the young Brahms while attacking musical philistinism with wit and passion. His piano works of the 1830s — including Papillons (1831), Carnaval (1835), the Symphonic Études (1834), Kreisleriana (1838), and the Fantasy in C major (1836) — are among the crowning achievements of Romantic piano literature, characterised by literary imagination, poetic intimacy, and rapid shifts between contrasting alter egos he named Florestan and Eusebius. In 1840, the year of his long-contested marriage to Clara Wieck (Friedrich's daughter and one of the foremost pianists of the century), Schumann composed some 140 songs, including the cycles Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und -leben. He subsequently turned to orchestral music — four symphonies, the Piano Concerto in A minor (1845), and the Cello Concerto (1850) — and chamber music of great distinction.
Musical style and legacy
Schumann's music is characterised by lyrical warmth, harmonic richness, rhythmic complexity (particularly his love of syncopation and cross-rhythms), and a literary sensibility that links his art inseparably to the world of Romantic poetry. His mental health deteriorated seriously in his later years; in 1854 he attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine and was subsequently confined to an asylum in Endenich, where he died on 29 July 1856.