air.--The "Neue Zeitschrift"
and its Mission.--The Davidsbund.--Peculiar Style of Schumann's
Writing.--He moves to Dresden.--Active Production in Orchestral
Composition.--Artistic Tour in Holland.--He is seized with
Brain Disease.--Characteristics as a Man, as an Artist, and as a
Philosopher.--Mme. Schumann as her Husband's Interpreter.--Chopin
a Colaborer with Schumann.--Schumann on Chopin again.--Chopin's
Nativity.--Exclusively a Piano-forte Composer.--His _Genre_ as Pianist
and Composer.--Aversion to Concert-giving.--Parisian Associations.--New
Style of Technique demanded by his Works.--Unique Treatment of the
Instrument.--Characteristics of Chopin's Compositions.

I.

Robert Schumann shares with Weber the honor of giving the earliest
impulse to what may be called the romantic school of music, which has
culminated in the operatic creations of Richard Wagner. Greatly to the
gain of the world, his early aspirations as a mere player were crushed
by the too intense zeal through which he attempted to perfect his
manipulation, the mechanical contrivance he used having had the
effect of paralyzing the muscular power of one of his hands. But this
department of art work was nobly borne by his gifted wife, _nee_ Clara
Wieck, and Schumann concentrated his musical ambition in the higher
field of composition, leaving behind him works not only remarkable for
beauty of form, but for poetic richness of thought and imagination.
Schumann composed songs, cantatas, operas, and symphonies, but it is in
his works for the piano-forte that his idiosyncrasy was most strikingly
embodied, and in which he has bequeathed the most precious inheritance
to the world of art. All his powers were swept impetuously into one
current, the poetic side of art, and alike as critic and composer he
stands in a relation to the music of the pianoforte which places him on
a pinnacle only less lofty than that of Beethoven.

Robert Schumann was born in the small Saxon town of Zwickau in the
year 1810, and was designed by his father, a publisher and author
of considerable reputation, for the profession of the law. The elder
Schumann, though a man of talent and culture, had a deep distaste for
his son's clearly displayed tendencies to music, and though he permitted
him to study something of the science in the usual school-boy way (for
music has always been a part of the educational course in Germany), he
discouraged in every way Robert's passion. The boy had qu