SCHUMANN, ROBERT ALEXANDER German musical composer, was born on June 8, 181o, in Zwickau, Saxony, the son of a publisher. He tells us that he began to com pose before his seventh year. At fourteen he wrote an essay on the aesthetics of music and also contributed to a volume edited by his father, entitled Portraits of Famous Men. While still at school in Zwickau he read, besides Schiller and Goethe, Byron (whose Beppo and Childe Harold had been translated by his father) and the Greek tragedians. But the most powerful and permanent of the literary influences exercised upon him, however, was that of Jean Paul Richter. This influence may clearly be seen in his youthful novels Juniusabende and Selene, of which the first only was completed (1826). In 1828 he left school, and after a tour, during which he met Heine at Munich, he went to Leipzig to study law. His interest in music had been stimulated when he was a child by hearing Moscheles play at Carlsbad, and in 1827 by the works of Schubert and Mendelssohn. But his father, who had encouraged the boy's musical aspirations, had died in 1826, and neither his mother nor his guardian approved of a musical career for him. Nevertheless, both at Leipzig and at Heidelberg, whither he went in 1829, he neglected the law for the philosophers, and began composing songs. At Easter 183o he heard Paganini at Frankfurt. In December 183o he returned to Leipzig, taking piano lessons with his old master, Friedrich Wieck. In his haste to acquire a perfect execution he permanently injured his right hand. His ambitions as a pianist being thus suddenly ruined, he began a course of theory under Heinrich Dorn, con ductor of the Leipzig opera. About this time he contemplated an opera on the subject of Hamlet.
The fusion of the literary idea with its musical illustration, which may be said to have first taken shape in Papillons (op. 2), is foreshAdowed in an essay on Chopin's variations on a theme from Don Juan, which appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1831. Here the work is discussed by the imaginary characters Florestan and Eusebius (the counterparts of Vult and Walt in Jean Paul's novel Flegeljahre), and Meister Raro (representing either the composer himself or Wieck) is called upon for his opinion. By the time, however, that Schumann had written Pa
pillons (1831) he had gone a step farther. The scenes and char acters of his favourite novelist had now passed definitely and consciously into the written music, and in a letter from Leipzig (April 1832) he bids his brothers "read the last scene in Jean Paul's Flegeljahre as soon as possible, because the Papillons are intended as a musical representation of that masquerade." In the winter of 1832 Schumann visited his relations at Zwickau and Schneeberg, when the first movement of his symphony in G minor was performed. In Zwickau the music was played at a concert given by Wieck's daughter Clara, then only thirteen. The death of his brother Julius and of his sister-in-law Rosalie in 1833 affected Schumann with profound melancholy. By the spring of 1834, however, he started Die neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, the paper in which appeared the greater part of his critical writings. The journal effected a revolution in the taste of the time, when Mozart, Beethoven and Weber were neglected, and the genius of Chopin and of Berlioz unappreciated.
During the the summer of 1834, Schumann became engaged to Ernestine von Fricken, a girl of sixteen, the adopted daughter of a rich Bohemian, from whose variations on a theme in C# minor Schumann constructed his own Etudes symphoniques. The en gagement was broken off by Schumann, for reasons which have always remained obscure. In the Carnaval (op. Schu mann commenced nearly all the sections with the musical notes signified in German by the letters that spell Asch, the town in which Ernestine was born, which also are the musical letters in Schumann's own name. By the sub-title "Estrella" to one of the sections in the Carnaval, Ernestine is meant, and by the sub-title "Chiarina" Clara Wieck. In the Carnaval Schumann went farther than in Papillons, for in it he himself conceived the story of which it was the musical illustration. On Oct. 3, 1835, Schumann met Mendelssohn at Wieck's house in Leipzig, and his appreciation of his great contemporary was shown with the generous freedom that distinguished him in all his relations to other musicians.