Robert Schumann's music is not romantic and irrational Träumerei; the history of the aesthetics of genius in the Romantic era is not the history of Schumann's Romantic music or aesthetics. The latter history begins in the literature Schumann read all his life, and continues in his music. To understand the history of Schumann's music, however, we need to approach it through the life, the literature, the poetry and the philosophy.

The literature in the life

Robert Schumann's aesthetics needs to be understood as a process of enculturation within an educated and cultured bourgeoisie, in terms of social history, and – as one of lifelong appropriation and reification of art, literature and music – in terms of developmental psychology. The premises of the former are to be found partly in the protestant ethic that Schumann inherited first and foremost from his father and grandfather. Schumann's father, himself the son of an evangelical (Lutheran) clergyman, was a businesslike and hardworking publisher-bookseller and an author of scholarly and bellettristic works, with a reputation that went beyond the bounds of Zwickau or Saxony. Friedrich August Gottlob Schumann was a member of what had at last come to be recognized in Germany from the 1790s onwards as the educated, cultivated middle classes, comprising government officials; judges; university professors; schoolteachers; private tutors; protestant clergy; and university-educated professionals such as physicians, pharmacists, advocates and notaries; as well as self-employed artists, writers and journalists.