Arnold Schoenberg: guilty as charged? Is it just to blame him for all that’s wrong with modern music? Independent And: The madness of art: “Robert Schumann spent the last two and a half years of his life
wretchedly incarcerated in a mental asylum. The composer’s
psychiatric condition had never been robust and his fate has
been considered an accident waiting to happen by those who
shake their heads over the angular themes and complex
harmonies in his later works or the gloom of the Manfred
overture.

Generations later, an American academic has taken up his
cause, contending that this was a brutal and unnecessary fate
for a man who was not so much deranged as depressed.
Schumann was not only denied his freedom, but at times even
denied the paper on which to compose. He confronted that
most horrifying of fates: being the one sane man in a house of
the mad. ” The Times of London