Robert Schumann was an unlikely candidate to become one of music’s most influential and enduring figures. The son of a bookseller and translator, Schumann had developed into a talented poet in his teens, and he toyed with pursuing a literary career until he committed to music with a dream of becoming a virtuoso composer/performer. Those writing skills came in handy when his overzealous practicing soon left him with a chronically injured hand and no clear career path besides music journalism.

What Schumann lacked in raw talent, he made up for in tenacity. Like the Biblical underdog King David, he fought to protect art music in its purest forms from the crass “Philistines” of music; he battled for years for the right to marry his beloved Clara, the daughter of his disapproving old piano teacher; he stretched out of the comfort zone of piano music to master songwriting, orchestral music and chamber music; and through it all, he navigated a lifetime of bipolar episodes and other debilitating symptoms that today might be diagnosed as schizophrenia.

In 1844, during one of his worst mental health breakdowns, his symptoms included insomnia, depression, phobias, paranoia and a constant ringing in the ears. He wrote virtually no music for a year, and could no longer depend on sheer intuition to keep his ideas flowing. He later wrote in a diary, “I used to compose almost all of my shorter pieces in the heat of inspiration. … Only from the year 1845 onwards, when I started to work out everything in my head, did a completely new manner of composing begin to develop.”

Schumann turned his attention to symphonies for the first time since his 1841, the year he wrote his first two symphonies and several other orchestral works in a rapid burst. He may have been partly drawn to the task after hearing the long overdue premiere of Franz Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, a monumental work that Schumann had personally rescued from oblivion. Days later he began sketching his own symphony in the same key of C-major, which debuted in Leipzig in 1846, and which was published the next year as Schumann’s Symphony No. 2.

The Second Symphony opens with a hymn-like prelude, establishing a noble tone that continues into the fast body of the movement, thanks in part to the ceremonial snap of the many “dotted” rhythms—i.e. alternating long and short notes, a hallmark of grand overtures and royal music from centuries past. The Scherzo comes second, built around a playful theme in perpetual motion that keeps tumbling down the shaky footing of a particularly slippery harmony (a diminished-seventh arpeggio to be precise) and clambering back up.

One key to Schumann’s renewed musical vigor was formal counterpoint, following a deep dive into the music of J. S. Bach that helped pull him out of his depression. That influence is especially evident in the Adagio espressivo slow movement, which evokes those quintessential Bach arias that throb with drawn-out suspensions and delayed resolutions spinning out over an unyielding bass line.

The finale gets halfway through its triumphant valediction (again filled with those regal dotted rhythms) before it pauses to introduce a tender new theme that quotes a song by Beethoven from the cycle An die ferne Geliebte. The gist of the original song is that music is a conduit for love that bridges any distance, and Schumann had already quoted it once before in a piano piece he wrote while pining for Clara.

Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings

Flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, strings