Short biography of robert schumann music

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Schumann himself was a fine writer, and he was torn at first over whether to devote himself to words or music. As a young man, he fought to marry the pianist he had fallen in love with, finally taking his future father-in-law to court, and championed the work of other composers. Doctors dissuaded Clara from visiting him, and she was only with him briefly before he died—a subject much conjured by later biographers. 

Legacy

Schumann’s music had an immediate impact on the younger generation of instrumental composers. Johannes Brahms’s music is unimaginable without it; Clara Schumann spent her many years of widowhood promoting her husband’s music through performance and publication.

On returning to it a decade later, he divided it into four conventional movements. Schumann is said to have injured his hand irrevocably while using a contraption to strengthen his fourth finger. On his own request he was sent to a mental hospital at Endenich, near Bonn. Opinions are still divided over what caused Schumann’s mental illness and death.

His song cycles included Frauenliebe und -leben, in which the heroine experiences love, marriage, motherhood and widowhood – an all-too-prophetic vision, as it turned out. Between 1841 and 1842 he wrote three string quartets, a piano quartet and a piano quintet of sheer genius. This was the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and in it he acclaimed the music of Berlioz, Chopin and, much later, the young Brahms.

Schumann was not Wieck’s only pupil. Clara was forbidden to visit him, and she saw him again only when he was on his deathbed. They helped to reinforce Schumann’s culture of reverence for classical music as an elevated art that was profoundly influential in the later Romantic era, not least in the most intimate forms of chamber and piano music, and not only in Germany; French composers such as Georges Bizet and Gabriel Fauré drew naturally on Schumann in such works as Jeux d’enfants and Dolly.

All Schumann’s music is now part of the standard repertory, even the choral and dramatic music for which fashions changed after the 19th century.

Other theories suggest, however, that his incapacity may have been down to mercury poisoning during treatment for syphilis. Although the latter won, he was a perceptive critic.

This they did in 1840, on the day before Clara’s 21st birthday. This last was the dance of a group of idealistic artists and musicians marching against the Philistines. A pianist himself, he wrote for the instrument until the end of his life. When he arranged its publication Clara was furious. And he remains among the best-loved of all 19th-century composers.