A day like today: Schumann
He was a boy who, when he was ten years old, attended a piano concert, and that experience marked him so profoundly, that he kept that program at hand throughout his life. His destiny was clear. Although his parents pressed for him to study law, his life had to be marked by the pentagram.
The character was called Robert Schumann and the world remembers him as a brilliant composer. Although his dream of a great interpreter was frustrated by an excess of his part: to improve his virtuosity, Schumann bound and twisted his fingers in an exaggerated manner, to increase his flexibility. And it reached such an extreme that one of the fingers broke. That injury prevented him from playing the piano again and Schumann limited himself to musical composition.
That frustration was linked to love problems and other long-standing family conflicts. The family of Robert Schumann had a history of depressions and other fatal complications.
Suffering from a deep emotional exhaustion, those mental decompensations made a dent in Robert Schumann, until one day, desperate, he threw himself into the frozen waters of the Rhine, where he was miraculously rescued.
His other years he spent wrapped in a mental fog that allowed little contact with music, locked in a sanatorium.
But that character, silent and unknown, had previously been the romantic composer par excellence of the Germany of his time. And he was born, Robert Schumann, on a day like today: June 8, 1810.
And he was born to stay forever in the world of music; with a proper name in the main billboards of the world.