Town Hall & Market around 1830

Leipzig is the city of Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Wagner, Mendelssohn and the famous Gewandhaus and its orchestra. It was also the birthplace of Clara Schumann (1819), and the city where Robert Schumann lived from 1830-1844. Leipzig has been one of Germany’s major trading cities and commercial centres for over 500 years, and still holds an international trade fare every spring.

Goethe studied law in Leipzig in 1765; later, in his play Faust, he described the city as "little Paris".
Schiller stayed in Leipzig for the summer of 1785 where he began writing his famous ode "An die Freude" (Ode to Joy).
Bach came to Leipzig in 1723 where he worked as director of church music at St Thomas' until his death in 1750.
Mendelssohn became conductor of the celebrated Gewandhaus Orchestra at Leipzig in 1835, where he not only raised the standard of orchestral playing but made Leipzig the musical capital of Germany. Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann were among his friends at Leipzig. In Mendelssohn 1843 founded the conservatory of music where, together with Schumann, he taught composition.
Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813, and later enrolled at Leipzig University. His Symphony in C Major was performed at the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts in 1833.
Clara Schumann was born in Leipzig in 1819. She made her concert debut in the Gewandhaus at the age of 9.

Robert Schumann moved to Leipzig from Zwickau in 1828 to begin his law studies. The following year he moved to Heidelberg where he hoped a change of surroundings would stimulate his diminishing enthusiasm for law, but in 1830 he returned to Leipzig, resolved to change his career, and started serious musical studies with Friedrich Wieck. By now he had abandoned all thoughts of becoming a lawyer. It was in Wieck's house that he fell in love with his teacher's daughter, Clara, whom he eventually married in 1840. The couple spent the first four years of their married life in Leipzig before moving to Dresden in 1844. At that time Leipzig was becoming one of the most important musical centres in Germany. It was already the home of the famous music publishers Breitkopf and Härtel, and the revival of interest in the music of Bach was beginning to put Leipzig on the world map. Concerts by the Gewandhaus orchestra already had a distinguished reputation, and the Conservatory of Music was founded in 1843 by Mendelssohn who appointed Schumann to teach piano and composition. It was in Leipzig that Schumann first met Liszt, although the initial friendship was soon to deteriorate as the disparate characters and music of the two men proved too difficult for either to accommodate. Much of Schumann's best music dates from these Leipzig years: the great song cycles of 1840, inspired by his love for Clara, the first two symphonies, three string quartets, the piano quartet and the piano quintet.

Despite these musical successes, Schumann suffered two physical breakdowns during this period, the second of which occurred during a concert tour to Russia with Clara. Eventually forced to resign his teaching duties at the Conservatory, he decided that a complete change of scene and climate was required, and in December 1844 Robert and Clara left Leipzig for good and moved to Dresden.