Robert Schumann founds Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik ("New Journal in Music"), first published on April 3, 1834.
An arch-Romantic composer, he publishes most of his critical writings in the Journal, and often lambastes the popular taste for flashy technical displays from figures Schumann perceives as inferior composers.
Schumann campaigns to revive interest in major composers of the past, including Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber, while he also promotes the work of some contemporary composers, including Chopin (who does not like Schumann's work) and Berlioz, whom he praises for creating music of substance.
On the other hand, Schumann will disparage the school of Liszt and Wagner.
He had at the age of fourteen written an essay on the aesthetics of music and contributed to a volume, edited by his bookseller father, titled Portraits of Famous Men.
While still at school in his birthplace of Zwickau, Saxony, he had read the works of the German poet-philosophers Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as Byron and the Greek tragedians.
His most powerful and permanent literary inspiration is Jean Paul, whose influence is seen in Schumann's youthful novels Juniusabende, completed in 1826, and Selene.
Schumann's interest in music had been piqued as a child by the performance of Ignaz Moscheles playing at Carlsbad, and he had developed an interest in the works of Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn later.
His father, however, who had encouraged the boy's musical aspirations, had died in 1826, and neither his mother nor his guardian would encourage a career for him in music.
In 1828, he left school, and after a tour, during which he met Heinrich Heine in Munich, he had gone to Leipzig to study law.
In 1829, his law studies continued in Heidelberg.
During Easter 1830, he had heard Paganini play in Frankfurt.
In July, he wrote to his mother, "My whole life has been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call it Music and Law."
By Christmas he was back in Leipzig, taking piano lessons from his old master, Friedrich Wieck, who assured him that he would be a successful concert pianist.
During his studies with Wieck, Schumann had permanently injured his right hand.
One suggested cause of this injury is that he damaged his finger by the use of a mechanical device designed to strengthen the weakest fingers, which held back one finger while he exercised the others.
Others have suggested that the injury was a side-effect of syphilis medication.
A more dramatic idea is that in an attempt to increase the independence of his fourth finger, he may have carried out a surgical procedure to separate the tendons of the fourth finger from those of the third.
Whatever the cause of the injury, Schumann had abandoned ideas of a concert career and devoted himself instead to composition.
To this end, he had begun a course of theory under Heinrich Dorn, the conductor of the Leipzig opera.
About this time, he had considered composing an opera on the subject of Hamlet.
