From beginning to end, Robert Schumann carved his professional music path through resistant territory. Growing up in a literary household, he was surrounded by books - his father was a literary scholar and a book collector - and young Robert realized his first creative impulses in the world of letters. Drawn particularly to lyric poetry, he organized a literary club with his teenage friends. In his mid-20s and into his 30s he was the editor of, and wrote extensively for, the music journal Neue Zeitschrift für die Musik [New Journal of Music).

Having had some piano lessons, Schumann was unhappily engaged in law studies at the University of Heidelberg when he begged his widowed mother's approval of a bold plan: if his piano professor Friedrich Wick would consent, Robert Schumann proposed to become a concert artist and perhaps, even, a composer.

The next segment of Schumann's rocky path is well-known: how he left Heidelberg, studied with Professor Wieck, fell in love with his piano teacher's talented daughter, permanently injured his hand, and won the love of Clara Wieck who became his muse and wife for the remainder of his short life. For Clara he wrote most of his extensive body of piano works - solo pieces and a concerto, as well as chamber music and dozens of magnificent songs for voice and piano. Despite his late start, Schumann's ambitions were ultimately successful, thanks to dogged determination and his impeccable, intuitive taste in music and its aesthetics. 

Schumann tended to compose in waves, concentrating largely on one genre at a time. First, the piano phase, when he composed most of his important works for the instrument. During the year 1840 alone, in the euphoria of his passion for Clara - and combining his love for lyric poetry with his newfound skill as composer for piano - he wrote 168 Lieder, solo songs with piano accompaniment. In the year following their marriage, when Clara's career as a concert pianist kept her away from home, Schumann undertook a private study of the great works of chamber music, especially the string quartets of Mozart and Beethoven. Once again, in one year, 1842, he turned out a remarkable body of work: three string quartets, a piano quartet, a piano quintet, and this piano trio.

The piano trio lay on the shelf for several years. In 1849 Schumann took it out for revision and in 1850 published it with the title Phantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces). Although these pieces do not have a specific literary component, they would not exist without Schumann's passion for German lyric poetry. The aesthetics of the poet and philosopher Novalis (G. P. F. von Herdenberg, 1772-1801) were particularly influential on Schumann's approach to the structures and effects of music. The Phantasiestücke suite exemplifies what would come to be regarded as the essence of the German Romantic approach to composition – striving for expression beyond formal structures, reverence for nature and its mysteries, and the power of language and letters to shape music.