Robert Schumann, born in 1810, was a German Romantic composer renowned particularly for his lieder, piano music, and orchestral music. Many of his best-known piano pieces were written for his wife, the pianist and composer Clara Schumann. He began his piano studies at the age of six, though there was significant family pressure to pursue a career in law instead of working on his musical talents. In 1831, he suffered a career ending injury to his right hand which served to solidify his course as a composer rather than a virtuoso performer. 

Written during a time of great personal upheaval, Schumann’s second symphony took over a year to complete. Schumann suffered numerous mental breakdowns and used this composition to channel some of the auditory hallucinations he had been suffering. He wrote in a letter to Felix Mendelssohn “Drums and trumpets have been sounding in my mind for some time now.” Herbert Glass says of this inspiration:

“The “drums and trumpets” referred to earlier serve as the motto-fanfare (in C) that opens the Symphony and reappears near the end of it, the composer’s grandest orchestral conception: a score begun in confidence with a heroic opening movement and the whiplash scherzo, followed by the yearning, ecstatic adagio, and a triumphant finale, “in which I am myself again,” Schumann wrote, referring to the fact that he had suffered another nervous seizure and a period of creative inertia after completing the Adagio. He was indeed a confident, masterful self for a brief time – less than a year – thereafter, after which the darkness would again begin to close in around him.”