4 in D minor - as well as Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and a Fantasie in A minor for piano and orchestra. The following year, in a mood of celebration, he turned to the orchestra. First came the "year of song." Anticipating marriage in a decidedly lyrical state of mind, Schumann focused his pent-up emotion on vocal music, composing nearly 140 songs in 1840, most of them in the anxious months before August, when the marriage permission suit he and Clara had filed against her father was decided in their favor. Schumann's marriage to her - which took place a year after he prevailed in a lawsuit against her father - resulted in an enormous creative outpouring. During this time, he befriended Chopin and Mendelssohn.īy 1840, Clara Wieck, 20, was a distinguished pianist and had been in the public eye for more than a decade. Among his own important works of the decade were the majority of the pieces that established his reputation as a composer for the piano: Carnaval, the Davidsbündler Tänze, the Symphonic Etudes, the Fantasy in C, Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), Kreisleriana, and others. In 1834 he founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, turning it into a platform for his philosophizing on the music of the past and present and for notices and analyses of new works. Simultaneously, he developed into quite a capable composer. Gradually, Schumann let go of the dream of keyboard virtuosity and became active as a critic, for which he was, during his lifetime, as well known as he was for his music. Under stress, he drank and smoked heavily and suffered his first bouts of depression. He fought with Wieck over his training and his relationship with Clara, which Wieck opposed. Fortunately, he would not need to be a virtuoso - because he married one. The problem may have resulted from his use, over Wieck's objection, of a splint contraption to strengthen the hand, or from mercury poisoning related to the treatment of syphilis, which he probably contracted in his teens. Despite incessant practice, he never became the virtuoso pianist he hoped to be, owing to a "numbness" in the middle finger of his right hand. In 1830, Schumann opted out of law and resumed his studies with Wieck. He developed a consuming interest in the music of Schubert, which opened a window on his own creative yearnings. He spent his time reading Jean Paul Richter and soon became a piano student of (and border with) Friedrich Wieck, whose daughter Clara, then nine, he would eventually marry. His father had stipulated that for Robert to receive his inheritance he had to take a three-year course of study at the university level, and the next year Schumann enrolled as a law student at the University of Leipzig. When he was 16 his father died and in the same month his sister committed suicide. He continued to develop as a pianist and wrote novels. He began piano lessons at seven, and studied Latin and Greek in school in Zwickau, developing a keen interest in literature and in writing as he entered his teens. Schumann's bookseller father was also a novelist and translator of Walter Scott and Byron highly nervous, he married a violently passionate woman, and Schumann was brought up in an environment both literary and unstable. He did his best work when younger, in small forms: piano pieces and songs. His life ended early and miserably with a descent into insanity brought on by syphilis. Severely affected by what was most likely bipolar disorder, he achieved almost superhuman productivity during his manic periods. A quirky, problematic genius, he wrote some of the greatest music of the Romantic era, and also some of the weakest. Robert Schumann was a German composer and critic born in Zwickau on June 8, 1810.
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