It is obviously impossible in the brief space of the present booklet to
offer more than the sketchiest outline of Robert Schumann’s short life
but amazingly rich achievement. Together with Haydn and Schubert he was,
perhaps, the most completely lovable of the great masters. It is hard,
moreover, to think of a composer more strategically placed in his epoch
or more perfectly timed in his coming. Tone poet, fantast, critic,
visionary, prophet—he was all of these! And he passed through every
phase, it seemed, of romantic experience. The great and even the
semi-great of a fabulous period of music were his intimates—personages
like Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Moscheles, Ferdinand David, Hiller,
Joachim, Brahms. He won the woman he loved after a bitter struggle
against a tyrannical father-in-law. He created much of the world’s
greatest piano music, many of its loveliest songs, four great
symphonies, superb chamber compositions and a good deal else which, even
today, is insufficiently known or valued. A poetic critic, if ever there
was one, he proclaimed to a world, still indifferent or uncertain, the
greatness of a Chopin and a Brahms. His physical and mental decline was
a tragedy even more poignant than Beethoven’s deafness or the madness of
Hugo Wolf. His life story is, in point of fact, vastly more complex and
many-sided than the following handful of unpretentious and unoriginal
pages suggest. These will have served their purpose if they induce the
reader to familiarize himself more fully with the colorful and endlessly
romantic pattern of Schumann’s vivid life and grand accomplishment.