Robert Schumann shares with Weber the honor of giving the earliest impulse to what may be called the romantic school of music, which has culminated in the operatic creations of Richard Wagner.  Greatly to the gain of the world, his early aspirations as a mere player were crushed by the too intense zeal through which he attempted to perfect his manipulation, the mechanical contrivance he used having had the effect of paralyzing the muscular power of one of his hands.  But this department of art work was nobly borne by his gifted wife, nee Clara Wieck, and Schumann concentrated his musical ambition in the higher field of composition, leaving behind him works not only remarkable for beauty of form, but for poetic richness of thought and imagination.  Schumann composed songs, cantatas, operas, and symphonies, but it is in his works for the piano-forte that his idiosyncrasy was most strikingly embodied, and in which he has bequeathed the most precious inheritance to the world of art.  All his powers were swept impetuously into one current, the poetic side of art, and alike as critic and composer he stands in a relation to the music of the pianoforte which places him on a pinnacle only less lofty than that of Beethoven.

Robert Schumann was born in the small Saxon town of Zwickau in the year 1810, and was designed by his father, a publisher and author of considerable reputation, for the profession of the law.  The elder Schumann, though a man of talent and culture, had a deep distaste for his son’s clearly displayed tendencies to music, and though he permitted him to study something of the science in the usual school-boy way (for music has always been a part of the educational course in Germany), he discouraged in every way Robert’s passion.  The boy had quickly become a clever player, and even at the age of eight had begun to put his ideas on paper.  We are told by his biographers that he was accustomed to extemporize at school, and had such a knack in portraying the characteristics of his school-fellows in music as to make his purpose instantly recognizable.  His father died when Schumann was only seventeen, and his mother, who was also bent on her son becoming a jurist, became his guardian.  It was a severe battle between taste and duty, but love for his widowed mother conquered, and young Robert Schumann entered the University of Leipzig as a law student.  It was with a feeling almost of despair that he wrote at this time, “I have decided upon law as my profession, and will work at it industriously, however cold and dry the beginning may be.”  Previously, however, he had spent a year in the household of Frederick Wieck, the distinguished teacher of music.  So much he had exacted before succumbing to maternal pleading.  At this time he first made the acquaintance of a charming and precocious child, Clara Wieck, who played such an important part in his future life.