9. Autumn 1835-June 1836 This work was written to fulfill Robert’s dream of composing something for Moscheles in homage and consequently dedicated to him. In the autumn of 1835, Robert made Moscheles personal acquaintance who looked at this work (which at the time was originally intended as a concerto without orchestra) and frankly commented that it “did not fulfill the requirements of a concerto thought it possessed the characteristic attributes of a grand sonata in the manner of Beethoven and Weber.” It follows that Robert reformed and renamed this work as a sonata to better suit its character.

Chissell also points out that ‘In subject-matter, however, the Sonata is wholly Clara’s. During its composition Schumann had faced up to the truth of his love for her, and had broken off his engagement with Ernestine, which would account for the music’s tone of high romantic tumult. But more specifically the slow movement is a set of variations on an ‘Andantino de Clara Weick’ bringing her ‘motto’ theme, the falling figure of 5 notes, out into the open…This theme generates the greater part of the sonata. Little else in Robert’s piano music is quite a monothematic as this work.’

Clara’s motto theme of 5 falling notes, C-B-A-G-F Sonata in F minor, Op. 14
10. 1836 Learning from Liszt that plans were afoot to erect a monument of one of his idols, the late Beethoven, Robert composed this work as a means of raising money towards this end.

Accordingly, he was inspired to write in the manner and spirit of Beethoven with deep pathos. The closing of the first movement of the Fantasie contains veiled allusions to a theme taken from Beethoven’s song An die ferne Geliebte which is finally openly stated in the coda as follows:

Musical theme in the coda

Also, it should be noted that at the time when Robert started this work, Clara’s father Weick had forbidden the two lovers to meet and correspond. Thus, this work again served as an echo of Roberts love for Clara. It is unsurprising the words from Beethoven’s song upon which Robert’s theme is based are as follows:

Take them, then, these songs I sang thee
Songs of passion, songs of pain
Let them like an echo tender
All our love call back again.

The first subject has one of the most beautiful versions of Clara’s motto as yet devised: And the melody he liked best (as mentioned by Robert in his letter of 9 June 1839) is a fusion of Clara’s theme and Beethoven’s quotation and grows out of the second subject. According to Liszt, the dedicatee, who played the work for Schumann "It is a noble work, worthy of Beethoven, whose career, by the way, it is supposed to represent.” Fantasia in C major, Op. 17
11. Autumn 1837 This work was written during a time of almost total estrangement from Clara beginning in the autumn of 1837. Nevertheless, a secret engagement was entered upon by Robert and Clara a few months later notwithstanding Weick’s disapproval.

In the rhyme affixed to his first edition could be said to mirror his feelings and thoughts during this time:
Along the way we go are mingled weal and woe
In weal, though glad, be grave
In woe, though sad, be brave.

In the 2 bar ‘Motto von C.W’ which is immediately followed in the melodic minor in the next 2 bars, this could symbolize the ‘weal and woe’ element of the epigraph:

The Davidsbundlertanze or "Dances of the League of David", is an embodiment of the struggle between enlightened Romanticism and musical philistinism. Schumann credited the two sides of his character with the composition of the work (the more passionate numbers are signed F. (Florestan) and the more dreamy signed E. (Eusebius)). The work begins with the 'motto of C.W.' (Clara Wieck) denoting her support for the ideals of the Davidsbund. Davidsbundlertanze, Op. 6
12. April 1838 At a concert in 1834, Robert heard Ludwig Bohner (who in his heyday was as celebrated as much as Beethoven) and was struck by how poverty stricken he looked and like “a lion with a thorn in his foot…he used to jeer at the world with infinite boldness and arrogance, and now the tables are turned upon him”

Robert believed that Ludwig Bohner was the model for the writer, E.T.A. Hoffman’s character Kreisler being "romantic brought into contact with reality". Schumann used the figure to express emotional states in music that is "fantastic and mad." Chissell points out that Robert probably identified with the Kreisler character given that ‘Many were the days, weeks and months when Schumann saw his own life as nothing but a tale of thwarted dreams: in this sense sympathy for Kreisler was inevitable.’

Robert also intended this work to express his feelings to Clara as in his letter to her, he said:

“Play my Kreisleriana very often. A positively wild love is in some of the movements, and your life, and mine, and the way you look.” Kreisleriana, Op. 16
13. 1839 In Robert’s letter to Clara on 7 April 1839, he explains his mood when composing this work:

“I told you about a presentiment I had. It haunted me from the 24th to the 27th of March, while I wsa absorbed in my new composition. There is a passage in it which always kept coming back to me, somebody seemed to be sighing from the bottom of his heart, and saying ‘Ach Gott!’ While I was composing I kept seeing funerals, coffins and unhappy, despairing faces, and when I had finished, and was trying to think of a title, the only one that occurred to me was Leichenfantasie [corpse fantasy]. Isn’t that extraordinary? I was so much moved over the composition that the tears came into my eyes, and yet I did not know why, and there seemed to be no reason for it. Then came Therese’s letter, and everything was at once explained…”

Robert upon receiving news that his brother, Eduard was brother was dying soon after he had completed this composition, changed the collective title of this work to Nachtstucke and did not name the four individual pieces as was his original intention. Nachtstucke, Op. 23
14. 1840
(Year of Song) ‘Schumann’s nearly exclusive concentration on vocal composition in 1840 can be traced to a confluence of pragmatic, personal and artistic factors. His turn to what was probably the most marketable of musical genres and the concomitant search for a more easily understandable style no doubt reflected his desire to attain the financial stability Wieck accused him of lacking. In addition, the lieder of 1840, like many of the earlier piano pieces, were closely interwoven with his feelings for Clara. ‘Much of you is embedded in my Eichendorff Liederkreis’, he wrote to her in May, and the same could justly be said of Myrthen, Frauenliebe und -leben, and the Kerner cycle op.35. Finally, in the lied Schumann would have found an ideal means of fulfilling his longstanding quest for a synthesis of music and poetry.’

In Widmung from Myrthen, in homage of Clara, Robert uses the melody from Schubert’s “Ave Maria” in the postlude and the sweetness, the doubt and the despair of these songs to the varying emotions are considered by his biographers to be aroused by his love for Clara and the uncertainties of their future together.

After the strain of Robert and Clara’s long and contentious courtship, they finally married on 12 September 1840 and this consummation, led to a great outpouring of lieder with his chief song-cycles including Liedekreis which were his settings of Joseph von Eichendorf’s nature inspired works and Frauenliebe und-leben of Chamisso about the tale of a woman’s love, marriage, childbirth and widowhood. Myrthen, Op. 25 Widmung

Liederkreis, Op. 39 In der Fremde

Frauenliebe und-leben, Op.42
15. 1841
(The Symphonic Year) Clara very much encouraged Robert to try his hand in the symphonic genre. In 1840, she had wrote in their joint diary that:
“It would be best if he composed for orchestra. His imagination cannot find enough scope with the piano, and his music is all orchestral in feeling. My greatest wish is for him to compose for orchestra – that is his field. May I succeed in leading him to it.”
Robert started work proper on his first symphony in January 1841 around the end of winter and the beginning of spring and also inspired by a ‘spring poem’ by Bottger, It is small wonder that it is also known as the “Spring” Symphony. Robert told Spohr:
“It was inspired, if I may say so, by the spirit of spring which seems to possess us all anew every year, regardless of our age. The music is not intended to describe or picture anything specific, but I am convinced that spring shaped the form it has taken.” Symphony No. 1 in B flat major ‘Spring Symphony’, Op. 38

Sketches for several movements of Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 52

16. 1842 (Chamber Music Year) In 1842, Robert’s First Symphony Op. 38 was performed in Bremen and Hamburg where he and Clara were invited. The symphony was only received politely but Clara’s playing was critically acclaimed. Upset by his inferior role during this tour, he did not accompany his wife to Coppenhagen where she continued to perform and instead went back to Leipzig in such despair at her absence that he could not compose, drowning his sorrows in ‘beer and champagne’ although he studied the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Clara’s return stimulated a creative wave in the form of chamber music.
As a critic, Schumann made two principal demands of the prospective composer of string quartets. First, the ‘proper’ quartet style should avoid ‘symphonic furore’ and aim rather for a conversational tone in which ‘everyone has something to say’. Secondly, the composer must possess an intimate knowledge of the genre’s history, but should strive to produce more than mere imitations of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. It follows that his chamber works were composed along these lines.
Robert’s Piano Quintet in F Major became one of his best known and admired works. In fact Berlioz who listened to a performance of this work in early 1843 gave his generous approval to it. Three String Quartets, Op. 41 in
1. A minor
2. F major
3. A major

Piano Quintet in E flat major, Op. 44

Piano Quartet in E flat major, Op. 47
17. 1843 (The Oratorio Year) Robert’s friendship with Bottger was enabled him to consult the writer to help him (from as early as December 1840) to write a libretto for an opera based on Thomas Moore’s Lalla-Rookh. As the result was more suited for an oratorio, Robert proceeded along this line instead. Although the text was completed by January 1842, he only began work sometime in February in 1843 and completed and revised it by September 1843.

‘Writing to Carl Kossmaly on 5 May 1843, Schumann claimed to be engaged in the creation of ‘a new genre for the concert hall’. The Peri lives up to this epithet on several counts. In the first place, the work effects a fusion of the sacred and secular realms, with the semi-human, semi-divine Peri herself providing an emblem for the 19th-century artist. Second, the deft transitions between the oratorio’s individual numbers, no less than the balanced disposition of narrative, lyric and dramatic elements, ensures a previously unmatched degree of continuity on the large scale. A delicate web of melodic recurrences contributes to the same end. Finally, Schumann avoided a merely formulaic setting of the narrative portions of the text by means of what he called ‘Rezitativischer Gesang’, a flexibly declaimed vocal line supported by a motivically rich orchestral texture.’ Paradise and the Peri, Op. 50 Excerpt of the Finale
18. 1845 Robert’s illness was progressing and after spending the first half of 1844 on tour with his wife in Russia, he suffered from persistent nervous prostration upon his return to Dresden. ‘As soon as he began to work, he was seized with fits of shivering and an apprehension of death, experiencing an abhorrence for high places, for all metal instruments (even keys), and for drugs. Schumann's diaries also state that he suffered perpetually from imagining that he had the note A5 sounding in his ears.’
His state of unease and neurosis is reflected in this work where his mental state of exhaustion, obsession and depression which however optimistically ends in triumph, Beethoven style. Symphony in C major, Op. 61
19. 1845 As a means of relaxation from his feelings of stress, Robert spent many happy hours studying counterpoint with Clara and composed fugues as a form of relaxation from the demands of composing in the more complex orchestral genres. Four Fugues, Op. 72

Six Fugues on the name of Bach, Op. 60