190. The Career of Schumann.—Although at the outset of the period Schumann was an unknown quantity, the rapidity of his development and his work both as critic and as composer revealed him as a significant romantic force. Hence, though with some distortion of chronological truth, he may well be cited at once as an exponent of the spirit of the time.
In him, as in his close contemporary Mendelssohn, came out, as never before, the value of general culture in union with musical genius. His mind was broadly educated and his outlook upon music was not simply that of the executive artist. He had gifts as an original thinker and a forcible writer. His location at Leipsic put him in touch with the intellectual movements of the age. Though his work as composer was late in maturing, was imperfect in detail, and was not at once appreciated, he yet represented his time in important regards. He now seems to have been greater than his contemporaries knew. At all events, he merits careful consideration as a noble illustration of what was happening in the musical world.
Robert Schumann (d. 1856) was born in 1810 at Zwickau, a Saxon manufacturing
town, the son of a bookseller, author and translator, his mother being
a doctor's daughter, hardly her husband's equal in culture. From his
father he derived a strong taste for reading, skill in writing and a useful
knowledge of the book-trade. From his mother came a marked sensibility
and sentimentality, which showed itself in all the five children, of whom he
was the youngest, and developed in them all into some degree of mental unbalance.
His early education was desultory. He was extremely vivacious, a
universal favorite and a leader among his fellows. At 7 he had already shown
musical aptitude, liberally fostered by his father. Before he was 12 he had
read much music, had organized a school-boy orchestra, had essayed composition,
and was locally noted as a pianist, though he had had no good instruction.
About 14 his character suddenly changed to decided dreaminess and reticence.
He became a devotee of the mystic writer Richter ('Jean Paul') and indulged
in much imaginative fantasy. At 16 he lost his father, and his mother
determined to make him a lawyer. She sent him to Leipsic to study, but
there he became so much engaged in music, with lessons from the sterling
teacher Wieck, with eager enthusiasm for Schubert's works, and with some social
vogue as an improviser, that at 20 he was transferred to Heidelberg and then
sent on a trip to Italy. At length, however, what he humorously called 'the
twenty-years' war' ended in his mother's consent that he should take music as
a life-work.
In 1830 he returned to Leipsic, and sought under Wieck and other teachers to repair the defects of his early training. His initial ambition was to become a piano-virtuoso, and he began such strenuous practice, aided by a device to
