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Even now, 150 years after the death of Robert Schumann in a mental hospital in Endenich, fresh views about the nature of his art are still appearing. His marriage to the pianist Clara Wieck<\/a><\/strong> dominates accounts of his life; mental illness, too, plays its troubling role. Let’s take a deeper look at the troubled life and freqiently transcendent music of this great German composer.<\/p> But Robert Schumann was not only a turbulent genius; he was a forward-thinking intellectual, wielding a literary pen as sharp as his musical one, with which he championed younger composers, especially Brahms<\/a><\/strong>, and helped to burnish the reputation of others such as Chopin<\/a><\/strong> and Mozart<\/a><\/strong>. Fusing literary and musical thinking was central to his philosophy.<\/p> He was born in 1810 in Zwickau, the son of a publisher. Initially, the young Schumann erred between writing and composing for a living. When he decided, despite early studies in law, to become a musician, he lodged with his piano teacher, Friederich Wieck, in Leipzig and there met Wieck\u2019s small daughter, Clara, a child prodigy pianist. <\/p>Who was Robert Schumann?<\/h2>
When was Schumann born?<\/h2>