Robert Schumann

Born

8 June 1810, Zwickau, Germany

Died

29 July 1856, Endenich, near Bonn, Germany

Life

Schumann was born in Zwickau, in Saxony, on 8 June 1810. He studied piano in Leipzig with Friedrich Wieck, and so met Wieck's daughter Clara, then nine years old. An injury to his right hand ended his hopes of a career as a pianist, and he turned to composing and to writing about music: he helped found the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1834 and edited it from 1835.

In 1840 he married Clara Wieck, by then a celebrated pianist, and many of his best-known piano pieces were written for her. The couple lived in Dresden from late 1844, and in 1850 he became music director in Düsseldorf. After a suicide attempt in 1854 he was taken to a private hospital in Endenich, near Bonn, where he died on 29 July 1856.

Why play Schumann

Schumann wrote real music about childhood, and some of it for children to play. Scenes from Childhood, Op. 15, is 13 short pieces composed in about a month in early 1838; it includes the famous Träumerei, which his diary says he wrote on 24 February 1838, and Of Foreign Lands and Peoples.

The Album for the Young, Op. 68, is 43 short pieces from 1848. It began with pieces for the seventh birthday of his eldest daughter Marie, on 1 September 1848. It starts as gently as the Melody and grows into favourites like The Wild Rider and The Happy Farmer.

When Schumann lived