Robert Schumann

Author Code: GRSX

Schumann was a precocious child who began playing piano at the age of six and gave his first public performance when he was eleven. He attended Leipzig University to study law, but music was his real love. He studied piano under Friedrich Wieck from 1830 and eventually married Clara, Wieck's daughter, herself an accomplished pianist. Schumann had envisaged a career as a concert pianist, but permanently damaged the phalanges of his left hand because of a device he had invented to hold the third finger motionless during practice. Thereafter, he devoted himself to composition. His first piano works, the Abegg Variations, date from 1830. After his marriage in 1840, Schumann produced 130 lieder (or songs) during that year alone. He was to go on to produce more than 250 songs, four symphonies, numerous piano works and chamber music. His mental health began to fail him by 1844 and in 1854, in a state of mental depression, he threw himself into the Rhine. Thereafter, he was confined to an asylum until his death in 1856. Schumann was one of the greatest of the Romantics and an outstanding genius in the history of music.