Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 54

As a young man Schumann had diffuse interests, but in music his ambitions centred chiefly on the piano. His teacher and future reluctant father-in-law Friedrich Wieck promised Schumann's widowed mother that her son could become one of the foremost pianists of the day, if he were to apply himself assiduously to technical practice and to the kind of theoretical study that seemed foreign to the young man's temperament.

After leaving school Schumann enrolled as a law student at the University of Leipzig, moving the following year to Heidelberg, which seemed more to his social and musical taste. Here he continued to try his hand as a composer, and it was in these years that he attempted the composition of his first piano concertos, which were never finished.

It was only after his marriage to Clara Wieck in 1840, an alliance that had been the subject of protracted litigation on t