SCHUMANN, ROBERT. (b. Zwickau, Germany June 8 1810. d. Endenich, Germany, July 29 1856)
SchumannΓÇÖs music reflects the feeling of the German Romantic writers Hoffmann and Jean Paul Richter, and also of their English contemporaries, Scott and Byron.
Throughout his life he suffered from nervous problems, sometimes hearing angels singing or being tormented by imagined hellish cacophony. His composition was interrupted by several breakdowns, and he finally died in a mental hospital where he'd been confined for nearly two and a half years, after a suicide attempt.
His only completed opera, Genoveva was unsuccessful, partly because of his lack of feeling for the stage. His lieder, choral works and orchestral music, however, brought him public approval, and when Mendelssohn opened a conservatory in Leipzig in 1843, he was engaged as a professor. Unfortunately, his nervousness made him as diffident a teacher as he was later a conductor.
As a student in Leipzig himself, in 1828, Schumann first met Clara Wieck, the daughter of his piano teacher. In 1839, when Clara was twenty, her father opposed their marriage with an action in the courts. The resultant stress almost dried up Schumann's creative ability. When the case was dismissed, his relief found an outpouring in composition. Nearly half his total Lied output, including the great song-cycles, date from this one year.
His subsequent marriage to Clara was marred by its frustration of her own career as a brilliant pianist, and by his temperament. These stressful elements in their life together seem to have found release in his passionate songs, many of which express contradictory longings and the juxtaposition of love and death.
