Robert Schumann

Born in Zwickau in 1810 to a middle-class family with no music background, Schumann drifted between law school and the piano, studying with Friedrich Wieck until a worsening hand problem ended his hopes as a virtuoso. He poured himself into composition instead, writing Carnaval, Kinderszenen, and the rest of the major piano works between 1834 and 1838, and co-founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, where he split his critical voice between impetuous "Florestan" and gentle "Eusebius." In 1840 he married Wieck's daughter Clara over her father's bitter opposition, then spent the next years in a surge of output: songs and cycles, four symphonies, chamber music. By 1850 he moved to Düsseldorf as music director, but his shyness and fragile mental state made the job untenable. In 1854 he threw himself into the Rhine, was pulled out, and spent his last two years in a sanatorium near Bonn, dying in 1856 at 46.