59 Facts About Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann composed in all the main musical genres of the time, writing for solo piano, voice and piano, chamber groups, orchestra, choir and the opera.

Robert Schumann studied law at the universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg but his main interests were music and Romantic literature.

Robert Schumann was a co-founder of the in 1834 and edited it for ten years.

Robert Schumann turned his attention to orchestral music in 1841, completing the first of his four symphonies.

Robert Schumann threw himself into the River Rhine but was rescued and taken to a private sanatorium near Bonn, where he lived for more than two years, dying there at the age of 46.

Robert Schumann's other works were less generally admired, and for many years there was a widespread belief that those from his later years lacked the inspiration of his early music.

Robert Schumann had considerable influence in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Robert Schumann was a major influence on the Russian school of composers, including Anton Rubinstein and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, in the Kingdom of Saxony, into an affluent middle-class family.

At the age of six Robert Schumann went to a private preparatory school, where he remained for four years.

Robert Schumann was not a musical child prodigy like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Felix Mendelssohn, but his talent as a pianist was evident from an early age: in 1850 the printed a biographical sketch of Schumann which included an account from contemporary sources that even as a boy he possessed a special talent for portraying feelings and characteristic traits in melody:.

From 1820 Robert Schumann attended the Zwickau Lyceum, the local high school of about two hundred boys, where he remained till the age of eighteen, studying a traditional curriculum.

August Robert Schumann died in 1826; his widow was less enthusiastic about a musical career for her son and persuaded him to study for the law as a profession.

Musically, he discovered the works of Franz Schubert, whose death in November 1828 caused Robert Schumann to cry all night.

Robert Schumann was greatly taken with Rossini's operas and the of the soprano Giuditta Pasta; he wrote to Wieck, "one can have no notion of Italian music without hearing it under Italian skies".

Robert Schumann persuaded her to ask Wieck for an objective assessment of his musical potential.

Wieck's verdict was that with the necessary hard work Robert Schumann could become a leading pianist within three years.

Robert Schumann had by now come to regard himself as having two distinct sides to his personality and art: he dubbed his introspective, pensive self "Eusebius" and the impetuous and dynamic alter ego "Florestan".

Robert Schumann tried all the treatments then in vogue including allopathy, homeopathy, and electric therapy, but without success.

Robert Schumann completed further sets of small piano pieces and the first movement of a symphony.

Robert Schumann and Ernestine became secretly engaged, but in the view of the musical scholar Joan Chissell, during 1835 Robert Schumann gradually found that Ernestine's personality was not as interesting to him as he first thought, and this, together with his discovery that she was an illegitimate, impecunious, adopted daughter of Fricken, brought the affair to a gradual end.

Robert Schumann felt a growing attraction to Wieck's daughter, the sixteen-year-old Clara.

Robert Schumann was her father's star pupil, a piano virtuoso emotionally mature beyond her years, with a developing reputation.

Robert Schumann had watched her career approvingly since she was nine, but only now fell in love with her.

Robert Schumann's feelings were reciprocated: they declared their love to each other in January 1836.

Robert Schumann expected that Wieck would welcome the proposed marriage, but he was mistaken: Wieck refused his consent, fearing that Robert Schumann would be unable to provide for his daughter, that she would have to abandon her career, and that she would be legally required to relinquish her inheritance to her husband.

Professionally the later years of the 1830s were marked by an unsuccessful attempt by Robert Schumann to establish himself in Vienna, and a growing friendship with Mendelssohn, who was by then based in Leipzig, conducting the Gewandhaus Orchestra.

In 1838 Robert Schumann visited Schubert's brother Ferdinand and discovered several manuscripts including that of the Great C major Symphony.

Ferdinand allowed him to take a copy away and Robert Schumann arranged for the work's premiere, conducted by Mendelssohn in Leipzig on 21 March 1839.

Robert Schumann inspired Schumann in his composing career, encouraging him to extend his range as a composer beyond solo piano works.

Robert Schumann gladly accepted both, although the resumed relationship with his father-in-law remained polite rather than close.

The tour was an artistic and financial success but it was arduous, and by the end Robert Schumann was in a poor state both physically and mentally.

Robert Schumann had been passed over for the conductorship of the Leipzig Gewandhaus in succession to Mendelssohn, and he thought that Dresden, with a thriving opera house, might be the place where he could, as he now wished, become an operatic composer.

Robert Schumann added a slow movement and finale to the 1841 Phantasie for piano and orchestra, to create his Piano Concerto, Op.

Hall comments that in retrospect it can be seen that Robert Schumann was fundamentally unsuited for the post.

Robert Schumann continued to compose prolifically, and reworked some of his earlier works, including the D minor symphony from 1841, published as his Fourth Symphony, and the 1835 Symphonic Studies.

Brahms had recently written the first of his three piano sonatas, and played it to Robert Schumann, who rushed excitedly out of the room and came back leading his wife by the hand, saying "Now, my dear Clara, you will hear such music as you never heard before; and you, young man, play the work from the beginning".

Hall writes that Brahms proved "a personal tower of strength to Clara during the difficult days ahead": in early 1854 Robert Schumann's health deteriorated drastically.

Robert Schumann remained there for more than two years, gradually deteriorating, with intermittent intervals of lucidity during which he wrote and received letters and sometimes essayed some composition.

Robert Schumann died at the sanatorium aged 46 on 29 July 1856, the cause of death being recorded as pneumonia.

The late-nineteenth century composer Felix Draeseke commented "Robert Schumann started as a genius and ended as a talent".

Robert Schumann's first published work, the Abegg Variations, is in the latter style.

Robert Schumann's self-references include both the impetuous "Florestan" and the poetic "Eusebius" elements he identified in himself.

Robert Schumann wrote more than 300 songs for voice and piano.

Robert Schumann acknowledged that he found orchestration a difficult art to master, and many analysts have criticised his orchestral writing.

Hall comments that Robert Schumann's orchestration has subsequently been more highly regarded because of a trend towards playing the orchestral music with smaller forces in historically informed performance.

Robert Schumann revised it ten years later and published it as his Fourth Symphony.

Robert Schumann experimented with unconventional symphonic forms in 1841 in his Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Op.

Robert Schumann composed six overtures, three of them for theatrical performance, preceding Byron's Manfred, Goethe's Faust and his own Genoveva.

Robert Schumann composed a substantial quantity of chamber pieces, of which the best-known and most performed are the Piano Quintet in E major, Op.

Robert Schumann's ensemble became the template for later composers including Brahms, Franck, Faure, Dvorak and Elgar.

Dahlhaus comments that after this Robert Schumann avoided writing for string quartet, finding Beethoven's achievements in that genre daunting.

Robert Schumann maintained that they all approached the work with a preconceived idea of what an opera must be like, and finding that Genoveva did not match their preconceptions they condemned it out of hand.

Unlike the opera, Robert Schumann's secular oratorio was an enormous success in his lifetime, although it has since been neglected.

Pianists for other recordings of Robert Schumann have included Gerald Moore, Dalton Baldwin, Erik Werba, Jorg Demus, Geoffrey Parsons, and more recently Roger Vignoles, Irwin Gage and Ulrich Eisenlohr.

Robert Schumann had considerable influence in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Grieg wrote that Robert Schumann's songs deserved to be recognised as "major contributions to world literature", and Robert Schumann was a major influence on the Russian school of composers, including Anton Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky.

Robert Schumann's successors including Clara and Brahms, together with their supporters such as Joachim and the music critic Eduard Hanslick, were seen as the proponents of music in the classic German tradition of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann.

In 1991 the first volume of a complete edition of Robert Schumann's works was published.