Robert Schumann

📍Hauptmarkt 5, 08056 Zwickau, Saxony, Germany

“I was born Robert Alexander Schumann on the 8th of June 1810 in Zwickau, a Saxon city known for textiles and for the writer Jean Paul, whom my father published and who was my first literary hero. My father August was a bookseller and publisher with genuine literary culture, and the Zwickau house was full of books and music. I was equally drawn to literature and music as a child, and spent my adult life trying to reconcile them — the literary imagination and the musical form. I went to Leipzig to study law, began studying piano seriously under Friedrich Wieck, fell in love with his daughter Clara, and after a long legal battle married her in 1840. The Zwickau childhood, the literary father, the equal pull of words and music — these were the conditions that produced a composer unlike any other.”

Sources: Ostwald, P. Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius (1985), Northeastern University Press; Daverio, J. Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age (1997), Oxford University Press