The basic facts of Schumann's life suggest a life in disarray. Born into the Sehnsucht-driven world of German Romanticism, he is torn between disciplines. He begins the study of law out of a sense of filial duty but then follows his instinct when he turns to music, though never letting go of two other great passions, literature and poetry. Even as a committed musician, however, he veers between the roles of performer, composer and critic. It is to take a self-inflicted hand injury to free him to compose in earnest, and all urgency. Although endowed with an astonishing capacity to produce very great quantities of music in very short spans of time, he suffers periods of total or near-total creative standstill. These extremes of feverish, splendidly productive activity and exhausted, self-doubting arrest testify to a creative modus operandi that is not only intense, impulsive and at times difficult to live with, but which later observers have felt inclined to identify as ‘manic-depressive’. Some critics have also noted that Schumann's works themselves evince these characteristics, and his highly contrastive compositional style still incites puzzlement, if not consternation. Structurally speaking, Schumann cultivated with his seeming free-associated pieces the musically relatively new and disorientating art of brevity, discontinuity and contradiction. They develop from eccentric, spectral and ‘poetic’ early works to more conventional but nonetheless intricate and introvert late works.