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Robert Schumann
1810 – 1856
Although Schumann was no child prodigy, he went on to become one of the most important composers of the 19th century and is recognised as such 200 years after his birth.
Life and Music
- Schumann's early musical progress was unremarkable. He was 10 before he began piano lessons and, despite his increasing enthusiasm for composition and a passion for Romantic literature, he toed the family line by enrolling as a law student at Leipzig University in 1828.
- Contacts with the musical world convinced Schumann that this was where his future lay. Most importantly he met the Wieck family, taking a particular shine to their nine-year-old prodigy daughter, Clara, whom he would marry some 12 years later.
- After witnessing that most charismatic of virtuosos, Paganini, he set his heart on becoming a concert pianist.
- After an ailment in his right hand proved incurable, Schumann was forced to concentrate solely on composition, something for which the musical world can be eternally grateful.
- Schumann co-founded one of the most influential musical publications, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. He wrote many of the articles himself, using the pseudonyms Florestan and Eusebius, the former an outward-going, robust figure, the latter subdued and introspective.
- In 1840 Schumann married Clara Wieck despite her father's blistering opposition. Between March and July, Schumann composed five of the most treasured of all song cycles - the two Liederkreis collections (Opp. 23 and 39), Dichterliebe, Myrthen and Frauenliebe und-lieben - as part of a remarkable outpouring of more than 140 songs.
- Schumann then turned his attention to multi-instrumental composition, producing the Piano Concerto, Piano Quintet and Symphonies Nos. 1, 2 and 4.
- Following the Cello Concerto and Rhenish Symphony (both 1850), there was a marked decline in Schumann's creative powers and his ability to keep a hold on reality.
- He met the young Brahms and predicted a successful future for him, but time was slipping away. Following a paralytic attack, which left his speech impaired, his hallucinatory periods increased in intensity and in 1854 he attempted to drown himself in the Rhine. For many years the cause of Schumann's illness was uncertain, but the most likely diagnosis is tertiary syphilis.
- He spent the last two years of his life in an asylum where his condition gradually worsened, his constant convulsions causing great distress to those (including the devoted Brahms) who visited him. He finally succumbed on 29 July 1856.
Did you know?
When Schumann developed an ailment in his right hand that proved incurable, the story was that he devised a finger-strengthening contraption which collapsed, leaving him crippled. It's more likely that he was receiving mercury treatment for syphilis!
