‘In the dizzying realm of the intermezzo’

Schumann's name has been and probably always will be inextricably linked with the piano. When in July 1830, at the age of twenty, he decided once and for all to pursue a career in music, it was as a pianist that he hoped to make his mark. In accordance with what had long been the case among performing artists, this entailed the production of a substantial portion of the repertory that he would be presenting in both private and public venues. During the course of the previous years Schumann had already tried his hand at composing for a variety of media. The breadth of his early forays into composition is evident in the pieces, not all of them completed, to which the young and largely untrained composer assigned the opus numbers ‘I’ through ‘V’: a setting of Psalm 150 for vocal soloists, piano and orchestra (Op. I, 1822) (Anh. I10); eleven Lieder, some on texts by Schumann himself (Op. II, 1827–8) (Anh. M2); a set of eight polonaises for piano, four hands, conceived under the spell of Schubert (Op. III, 1828) (Anh. G1); a fragmentary set of variations for piano on a theme by the musically gifted Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia (Op. IV, 1828) (Anh. G2); and a piano quartet in C minor (Op. V, 1828–9) (Anh. E1).