As a boy, Robert Schumann could sit at the piano, look at a friend, and improvise a portrait so accurate that the room burst out laughing. This deep dive follows the composer from his father August’s bookshop in Zwickau, filled with translations of Byron, Scott, and Cervantes, through years of law school he barely attended, to the mysterious paralysis of his right hand that ended his hopes of becoming a touring virtuoso.

The episode explains how that injury turned him inward, toward criticism and composition, and how he invented the alter egos Florestan and Eusebius, hid words in his music using German note names, and fought a four-year court battle against his teacher Friedrich Wieck to marry Clara. It closes with his failed post in Düsseldorf, his discovery of the 20-year-old Brahms, his 1854 suicide attempt in the Rhine, and his final years in an asylum.

• Desperate 1830s treatments for his hand, from electricity to plunging his arm into animal carcasses
• Carnaval built on the notes A, E-flat, C, B, spelling the hometown of his first fiancée Ernestine
• Composing by genre: 150-plus songs in 1840, symphonies in 1841, chamber music and the piano quintet in 1842
• Clara’s sacrifice as touring star, performer of his works, and mother of seven surviving children
• Why doctors kept Clara away for over two years until days before his death at 46, and the ongoing debate over his diagnosis