Born in Zwickau, Germany, in 1810, Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann was a German composer, pianist, and music critic of the early Romantic era who composed in all the main musical genres of his time. His works typify the spirit of German Romantic music.

Schumann was born in 1810 in Zwickau, Saxony, to an affluent middle-class family. Initially torn between law and music, he studied law at Leipzig and Heidelberg but his real interests lay in music and Romantic literature. From 1829 he studied piano with Friedrich Wieck, but a worsening problem with his right hand ended his hopes of a virtuoso career, and he concentrated on composition.

His early works were mainly piano pieces, including Carnaval, Davidsbundlertanze, Fantasiestucke, Kreisleriana, and Kinderszenen (1834-1838). In 1834 he co-founded the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik and edited it for a decade. In his writing and music, he distinguished two contrasting aspects of his personality: 'Florestan' for his impetuous self and 'Eusebius' for his gentle poetic side.

Despite the bitter opposition of Wieck, Schumann married his daughter Clara in 1840. In the years immediately following, he composed prolifically: first songs and song cycles including Frauenliebe und Leben and Dichterliebe, then his first symphony in 1841, followed by three string quartets, a Piano Quintet, and a Piano Quartet in 1842.

In 1850 he moved to Dusseldorf as the city's director of music, but his shyness and mental instability made the position untenable, and he resigned after three years. In 1853 the Schumanns met the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms, whom Schumann praised in an article in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik.

The following year, his always-precarious mental health deteriorated gravely. He threw himself into the Rhine but was rescued and taken to a private sanatorium near Bonn, where he spent more than two years before dying on July 29, 1856, at the age of forty-six.