University Musical Encyclopedia
by Louis Charles Elson (9781458990020)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ROBERT SCHUMANN TN a letter to his mother, written at the age of - twenty, Schumann describes hie life as having been so far "a twenty years' war between prose and poetry." The poetry we may take to have been supplied spontaneously by his own personality, the prose to have been partly forced upon him by circumstances and partly inherited from his parents. Except for a strain of truly Teutonic sentimentality, his mother appears to have been a completely commonplace person; his father, a prosperous bookseller, was a man of some culture, not without an appreciation of music, but with no ability in that direction and a greater leaning toward the drier paths of literature. Robert Alexander Schumann, fifth son of the family, was born at Zwickau, Saxony, June 8, 1810. The first eighteen years of his life were spent at home. He received a good general education, and an unrestricted browsing on the pasturage of his father's store of books imbued him with a strong taste for poetry and transcendental ethics in general and a fervid admiration for Jean Paul Richter's works in particular. At the same time his musical predilections very early made themselves evident. He began to play the piano when six years old, and a little later found one of his chief delights in themanagement of amateur musical performances, at which his earliest efforts in composition met with a ready hearing. His father sympathized with his tastes, and gave them all the encouragement in his power. It was even proposed that he should have musical instruction from Weber, then kapellmeister at Dresden, but the arrangement in some way fell through. He enjoyed, however, a fairly adequate musical training at Zwickau, and had his father's life been prolonged the young musician's course of instruction would probably ...

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