In his own music criticism he invented two people, one impulsive and one quiet, and let them argue with each other. Those two names later turned up signed on his compositions.
Schumann was born in 1810 in Zwickau, Saxony, where his father ran a bookshop and publishing house. He grew up among books, and what he really wanted as a young man was to write novels. He went to Leipzig to read law and barely attended a lecture; the time went on the piano and on writing.
In his early twenties he decided to become a pianist and moved into his teacher Wieck's household to practise. A few years later something went wrong with his right hand — one finger would no longer obey — and that road closed. He turned to composition, and did something few composers did: in 1834 he founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and wrote the criticism himself.
Two invented characters lived in that magazine: Florestan, impulsive and outward, and Eusebius, inward and dreaming. Schumann had them argue about the same piece, and that was his review. The two names later appear in his own scores, signed under different passages of the same work.
He fell in love with his teacher's daughter Clara. Wieck fought it fiercely; the couple took him to court and married in 1840. That year Schumann wrote well over a hundred songs — the year has been called his year of song ever since.
In 1854 he threw himself from a bridge into the Rhine, was pulled out by boatmen, and entered the asylum at Endenich. He died there in 1856, aged forty-six.
Schumann's works tend to be assembled out of small pieces — a dozen or more miniatures of a minute or two, each with its own name, and the whole thing only makes sense played through. He rarely writes the kind of long single arc other composers reach for.
The most audible fingerprint is the inner voice: melody on top, bass at the bottom, and a middle layer that never stops moving. That middle layer is usually where he is actually saying something.
He also likes putting the accent where it does not belong, so you cannot quite count the beat — it sounds like someone who keeps coming in half a word early.
