Schumann married Clara against her father's bitter will
Robert Schumann (1810–1856) wrote poetic piano cycles and songs at the heart of early Romanticism. A Zwickau bookseller's son, he wavered between law and music before piano study with Friedrich Wieck. In 1840 he married Wieck's daughter Clara despite fierce paternal opposition.
Schumann was the fifth and youngest child of August Schumann, a Zwickau bookseller, lexicographer and publisher who earned well from German translations of Cervantes, Scott and Byron. Robert, his favourite, roamed the family library, and Jean Paul became his lifelong literary idol. He began piano with the local organist at seven, but after his father's death in 1826 his mother steered him toward law. At Leipzig his roommate claimed he never attended a lecture; he moved to Heidelberg in 1829, toured Italy and fell for Rossini's operas.
His virtuoso dreams died with a creeping paralysis in his right hand, whose cause is still uncertain; allopathy, homeopathy and electric treatment all failed, though the ailment did spare him military service because he could not fire a rifle. By 1832 he had turned to composing. His Opus 1 hid a musical cryptogram, turning the name of an almost certainly imaginary Countess Abegg into the notes of its theme, a trick he used again and again. He invented two alter egos, stormy Florestan and dreamy Eusebius, and from 1835 edited the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, filling it with pseudonymous friends he called the League of David.
The 1830s produced his great piano cycles, among them Carnaval, Kreisleriana and Kinderszenen. In 1840, overcoming the fierce resistance of his teacher Friedrich Wieck, he married Wieck's daughter Clara and poured out songs, including Dichterliebe. He tackled the symphony in 1841, chamber music in 1842 with three string quartets and a piano quintet, and later an opera, Genoveva, which flopped.
A post as Düsseldorf's music director from 1850 went badly, since shyness and mental instability hampered his work with the orchestra, and he resigned after three years. In 1853 he hailed the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms in print. The next year he threw himself into the Rhine, was rescued, and spent his last two-plus years in a sanatorium near Bonn, dying at 46. Mahler, Debussy, Ravel and Tchaikovsky all drew on his example.
Source: Robert Schumann
