Robert Schumann Robert Schumann Robert Schumann (; 8 June 181029 July 1856) was a German composer and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. Schumann left the study of law, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. His teacher, Friedrich Wieck, a German pianist, had assured Schumann that Robert could become the finest pianist in Europe, but a hand injury ended this dream. Schumann then focused his musical energies on composing. In 1840, after a long and acrimonious legal battle with Wieck, who opposed the marriage, Schumann married Wieck's daughter
Michael Wieck had become a vast graveyard of rubble. Of the 316,000 people who had lived there before the war, perhaps 100,000 remained, and Wieck estimated that about half of these were to die of hunger, disease, or maltreatment before the last Germans were allowed (or forced) to leave in 1949-50. The Soviet authorities declined to recognize the few surviving German Jews in Königsberg as victims of the Nazis, and initially treated all German-speakers as enemies. Wieck's incarceration in a Soviet prison camp near Königsberg-Rothenstein, and the story of how he and his parents barely managed to eke out an existence thereafter