Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann was a German composer, pianist and music critic of the early Romantic era, born in Zwickau in Saxony, who composed in all the main musical genres of his time. He studied law at Leipzig and Heidelberg and piano with Friedrich Wieck from 1829, but a worsening problem with his right hand turned him to composition, and in 1834 he co-founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which he edited for ten years. In 1840 he married Wieck's daughter Clara against her father's bitter opposition, then wrote song cycles such as Dichterliebe and, in 1841, the first of his four symphonies. In 1854 he threw himself into the Rhine and died two years later in a sanatorium near Bonn.