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Rh suddenly ruined, he determined to devote himself entirely to composition, and began a course of theory under Heinrich Dorn, conductor of the Leipzig opera. About this time he contemplated an opera on the subject of Hamlet.

The fusion of the literary idea with its musical illustration, which may be said to have first taken shape in Papillons (op. 2), is foreshadowed to some extent in the first criticism by Schumann, an essay on Chopin's variations on a theme from Don Juan, which appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1831. Here the work is discussed by the imaginary characters Florestan and Eusebius (the counterparts of Vult and Walt in Jean Paul's novel Flegeljahre), and Meister Raro (representing either the composer himself or Wieck) is called upon for his opinion. By the time, however, that Schumann had written Papillons (1831) he had gone a step farther. The scenes and characters of his favourite novelist had now passed definitely and consciously into the written music, and in a letter from Leipzig (April 1832) he bids his brothers &ldquo;read the last scene in Jean Paul's Flegeljahre as soon as possible, because the Papillons are intended as a musical representation of that masquerade.&rdquo; In the winter of 1832 Schumann visited his relations at Zwickau and Schneeberg, in both of which places was performed the first movement of his symphony in G minor, which remains unpublished. In Zwickau the music was played at a concert given by Wieck's daughter Clara, who was then only thirteen. The death of his brother Julius as well as that of his sister-in-law Rosalie in 1833 seems to have affected Schumann with a profound melancholy. By the spring of 1834, however, he had sufficiently recovered to be able to start Die neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the paper in which appeared the greater part of his critical writings. The first number was published on the 3rd of April 1834. It effected a revolution in the taste of the time, when Mozart, Beethoven and Weber were being neglected for the shallow works of men whose names are now forgotten. To bestow praise on Chopin and Berlioz in those days was to court the charge of eccentricity in taste, yet the genius of both these masters was appreciated and openly proclaimed in the new journal.

Schumann's editorial duties, which kept him closely occupied during the summer of 1834, were interrupted by his relations with Ernestine von Fricken, a girl of sixteen, to whom he became engaged. She was the adopted daughter of a rich Bohemian, from whose variations on a theme in C# minor Schumann constructed his own Études symphoniques. The engagement was broken off by Schumann, for reasons which have always remained obscure. In the Carnaval (op. 9 = 1834), one of his most genial and most characteristic pianoforte works, Schumann commenced nearly all the sections of which it is composed with the musical notes signified in German by the letters that spell Asch, the town in which Ernestine was born, which also are the musical letters in Schumann's own name. By the sub-title &ldquo;Estrella&rdquo; to one of the sections in the Carnaval, Ernestine is meant, and by the sub-title &ldquo;Chiarina&rdquo; Clara Wieck. Eusebius and Florestan, the imaginary figures appearing so often in his critical writings, also occur, besides brilliant imitations of Chopin and Paganini, and the work comes to a close with a march of the men of David against the Philistines in which may be heard the clear accents of truth in contest with the dull clamour of falsehood. In the Carnaval Schumann went farther than in Papillons, for in it he himself conceived the story of which it was the musical illustration. On the 3rd of October 1835 Schumann met Mendelssohn at Wieck's house in Leipzig, and his appreciation of his great contemporary was shown with the same generous freedom that distinguished him in all his relations to other musicians, and which later enabled him to recognize the genius of Brahms when he was still obscure.

In 1836 Schumann's acquaintance with Clara Wieck, already famous as a pianist, ripened into love, and a year later he asked her father's consent to their marriage, but was met with a refusal. In the series Phantasiestücke for the piano (op. 12) he once more gives a sublime illustration of the fusion of literary and musical ideas as embodied conceptions in such pieces as

&ldquo;Warum&rdquo; and &ldquo;In der Nacht.&rdquo; After he had written the latter of these two he detected in the music the fanciful suggestion of a series of episodes from the story of Hero and Leander. The Kreisleriana, which he regarded as one of his most successful works, was written in 1838, and in this the composer's realism is again carried a step farther. Kreisler, the romantic poet brought into contact with the real world, was a character drawn from life by the poet E. T. A. Hoffmann (q.v.), and Schumann utilized him as an imaginary mouthpiece for the recital in music of his own personal experiences. The Phantasie (op. 17), written in the summer of 1836, is a work of the highest quality of passion. With the Faschingsckwank aus Wien, his most pictorial work for the piano, written in 1839, after a visit to Vienna, this period of his life comes to an end. As Wieck still withheld his consent to their marriage, Robert and Clara at last dispensed with it, and were married on the 12th of September at Schönefeld near Leipzig.

The year 1840 may be said to have yielded the most extraordinary results in Schumann's career. Until now he had written almost solely for the pianoforte, but in this one year he wrote about a hundred and fifty songs. Schumann's biographers represent him as caught in a tempest of song, the sweetness, the doubt and the despair of which are all to be attributed to varying emotions aroused by his love for Clara. Yet it would be idle to ascribe to this influence alone the lyrical perfection of such songs as &ldquo;Frühlingsnacht,&rdquo; &ldquo;Im wunderschönen Monat Mai&rdquo; and &ldquo;Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden.&rdquo; His chief song-cycles of this period were his settings of the Liederkreis of J. von Eichendorff (op. 39), the Frauenliebe und Leben of Chamisso (op. 42), the Dichterliebe of Heine (op. 48) and Myrthen, a collection of songs, including poems by Goethe, Rückert, Heine, Byron, Burns and Moore. The songs &ldquo;Belsatzar&rdquo; (op. 57) and &ldquo;Die beiden Grenadiere&rdquo; (op. 49), each to Heine's words, show Schumann at his best as a ballad writer, though the dramatic ballad is less congenial to him than the introspective lyric. As Grillparzer said, &ldquo;He has made himself a new ideal world in which he moves almost as he wills.&rdquo; Yet it was not until long afterwards that he met with adequate recognition. In his lifetime the sole tokens of honour bestowed upon Schumann were the degree of Doctor by the University of Jena in 1840, and in 1843 a professorship in the Couservatorium of Leipzig. Probably no composer ever rivalled Schumann in concentrating his energies on one form of music at a time. At first all his creative impulses were translated into pianoforte music, then followed the miraculous year of the songs. In 1841 he wrote two of his four symphonies. The year 1842 was devoted to the composition of chamber music, and includes the pianoforte quintet (op. 44), now one of his best known and most admired works. In 1843 he wrote Paradise and the Peri, his first essay at concerted vocal music. He had now mastered the separate forms, and from this time forward his compositions are not confined during any particular period to any one of them. In Schumann, above all musicians, the acquisition of technical knowledge was closely bound up with the growth of his own experience and the impulse to express it. The stage in his life when he was deeply engaged in his music to Goethe's Faust (1844-1853) was a critical one for his health. The first half of the year 1844 had been spent with his wife in Russia. On returning to Germany he had abandoned his editorial work, and left Leipzig for Dresden, where he suffered from persistent nervous prostration. As soon as he began to work he was seized with fits of shivering, and an apprehension of death which was exhibited in an abhorrence for high places, for all metal instruments (even keys) and for drugs. He suffered perpetually also from imagining that he had the note A sounding in his ears. In 1846 he had recovered and in the winter revisited Vienna, travelling to Prague and Berlin in the spring of 1847 and in the summer to Zwickau, where he was received with enthusiasm, gratifying because Dresden and Leipzig were the only large cities in which his fame was at this time appreciated.

To 1848 belongs his only opera, Genoveva, a work containing much beautiful music, but lacking dramatic force. It is