This is a true love story and influenced the storyline and choreography of Schumann: a love story.
Robert Schumann wrote many poems to Clara. This poem below and the history of their courtship inspired the creation of this film:
"Florestan, der wilde, Eusebius, der milde, Tränen und Feuer, Nimm sie zusammen - Beide sind in mir".
Florestan, the wild, Eusebius, the mild, Tears and Fire, Take them together - Both are in me.

This poem is part of one of the classic real-life love stories of the romantic era. Robert and Clara Schumann are artists as closely linked in music as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are in literature. Clara was among the foremost European pianists of the nineteenth century, and both as a woman and a performer, she inspired many of Schumann's important piano works of this time, among them the F-sharp minor Sonata, the Fantasy op.17, the G minor Sonata op.22 (composed at the time of this poem), and the Davidsbündlertänze, culminating eventually in the great year of song in 1840.

Their love story began properly in 1835, when Clara Wieck was sixteen years old, the daughter of Schumann's former piano teacher Friedrich Wieck. By the end of the year, her father had discovered their secret trysts and became implacably opposed to the match, which grew in strength through stolen meetings and voluminous correspondence during 1837-1840. Wieck engaged in a long campaign to separate the pair, dispatching Clara on concert tours, even threatening to disinherit her, preventing their marriage until September 1840. At the time Schumann wrote this poem, he was better known as a music critic than a composer, whilst she was a pianist with an international reputation, especially in Paris and Vienna. Wieck's reservations regarding Schumann were not wholly without justification, but his behaviour became increasingly erratic and deranged. In 1840 the composer was forced to take Wieck to court for slander; he won the case, allowing him to finally marry Clara against her father's wishes.

Schumann appears to mention the present verses in his diary for 13 November 1838 "I was overcome with the urge to write little poems which I could not stop", and culminated in the "Kleine Verse" dated 14 and 15 November, which he sent to Clara. Nevertheless, the final version, included by Clara in her "Brautbuch" (now at the Robert-Schumann-Haus in Zwickau). The manuscripts are written on the same decorative paper, showing a troubadour singing to his beloved. Schumann described himself as a 'troubadour' kneeling before his beloved in a letter of 19 September, a time of enforced separation: he stuck in Vienna, Clara giving concerts in Dresden and Leipzig, and a tour of Paris being planned by her father. In this poem Schumann declares himself: "Ich knieend eine Ring ihr dar!".
The two finally married in September 1840; it was the resolution of this yearning that inspired Schumann's remarkable outpouring of songs composed in that year.

The image shows one of Robert Schumann's autographed love-poems written for Clara Wieck during their courtship, November 1838.
PROVENANCE:
Provenance: Eugenie Schumann, Clara's youngest daughter; Sattler Family by descent; Gerhard Sattler, Zurich (1971); Sotheby's London, 28 November 1986, lot 638.
3 pages, 8vo (c.15.5 x 10cm), on decorative stationary, coloured and gilt, showing a troubadour serenading a lady [Vienna, probably 13 November 1838], blue morocco gilt folder and slipcase, lettered "Robert Schumann Gedicht Ms."), minor creasing and browning, rust-staining to edges from old paper-clips.