He composed in all the main musical genres of the time, writing for solo piano, voice and piano, chamber groups , orchestra, choir and the opera. His works typify the spirit of the Romantic era in German music. Schumann was born in Zwickau , Saxony, to an affluent middle-class family with no musical connections, and was initially unsure whether to pursue a career as a lawyer or to make a living as a pianist-composer.
He studied law at the universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg but his main interests were music and Romantic literature. From he was a student of the piano teacher Friedrich Wieck , but his hopes for a career as a virtuoso pianist were frustrated by a worsening problem with his right hand, and he concentrated on composition.
In his writing for the journal and in his music he distinguished between two contrasting aspects of his personality, dubbing these alter egos "Florestan" for his impetuous self and "Eusebius" for his gentle poetic side. Despite the bitter opposition of Wieck, who did not regard his pupil as a suitable husband for her, Schumann married Wieck's daughter Clara in He turned his attention to orchestral music in , completing the first of his four symphonies. In the following year he concentrated on chamber music, writing three string quartets , a Piano Quintet and a Piano Quartet.
During the rest of the s, between bouts of mental and physical ill health, he composed a variety of piano and other pieces and went with his wife on concert tours in Europe. His only opera, Genoveva , was not a success and has seldom been staged since. The following year Schumann's always-precarious mental health deteriorated gravely. He threw himself into the River Rhine but was rescued and taken to a private sanatorium near Bonn , where he lived for more than two years, dying there at the age of During his lifetime Schumann was recognised for his piano music — often subtly programmatic — and his songs.
His other works were less generally admired, and for many years there was a widespread belief that those from his later years lacked the inspiration of his early music. More recently this view has been less prevalent, but it is still his piano works and songs from the s and s on which his reputation is primarily based.
