Musgrave presents Schumann as a practical musician vitally influencing an emerging musical world through many creative facets.

Michael Musgrave is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of London, Visiting Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music, and serves on the Graduate Faculty of the Juilliard School, New York. His field of research is nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German music and English concert life in the same period. His many books include The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (1995), The Cambridge Companion to Brahms (1999), A Brahms Reader (2000) and, with Bernard D. Sherman, Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style (2003), with a CD of historical recordings: this won the 2003 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Best Research in Recorded Classical Music.

Preface: inherited images; 1. A favourable upbringing: Zwickau, 1810-28; 2. Undirected student: Leipzig and Heidelburg, 1828-30; 3. A career in music: Leipzig, 1830-5; 4. The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Clara and new horizons: Leipzig, 1835-40; 5. Married life: Leipzig, 1840-4; 6. Growing ambitions: Dresden, 1844-50; 7. Triumph and decline: Düsseldorf, 1850-4; 8. The end: 1854-6; Perspective and legacy; Further reading.