The music of the German composer and critic Robert Alexander Schumann (1810-1856) made a significant impact on the burgeoning romantic movement in its rhythmic novelty and harmonic and lyrical expressiveness.

Robert Schumann created no intrinsically new forms, but he infused them with a personal subjectivity and emotional intensity that transformed an inherited classical tradition into the quintessence of romantic experience. Much of his music is characterized by literary allusions and autobiographical references, which are "nothing more than delicate directions for performance and understanding" added to the music to indicate the composer's poetic intent. Yet he was not averse to experimenting with the contrapuntal devices of a J. S. Bach or the symphonic structures of a Beethoven. He thus stands midway between the conservatives and ultraprogressives of the 19th century.

Schumann was born at Zwickau on June 8, 1810, the youngest of the five children of Friedrich Schumann, a bookseller and...