Robert Schumann

By Barbara Meier

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) was the quiet one, the tormented genius. A serious illness prevented him from becoming a pianist, but he fell in love with Clara, the daughter of his teacher Friedrich Wick and married her in 1840. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy appointed him lecturer in composition at the conservatory in Leipzig in 1843. A year later the couple moved to Dresden. Then in 1950, he became Musical Director of the city of Düsseldorf. Bis his demons followed him wherever he went and he tried to kill himself jumping into the Rhine four years later. He died two years later in a sanatorium.

In September 1840 Robert Schumann gave his wife an album for her birthday. This was to be the diary of their marriage, and in it they were to record their thoughts on 'household and marriage', on their own compositions and those of other artists, but also comments and requests 'where a word alone is not enough'. Clara had signed a set of statues, as a 'devoted wife', one of which was that they would each make entries in the diary, on alternate weeks. Robert had written of the 'greatest happiness'.




Barbara Meier has written widely on composers such as Mahler, Strauss and Schoenberg. Her biography of Giuseppe Verdi was published in the Life&Times Series (Haus Publishing) in May 2003.