Robert Schumann's compositions epitomised romanticism. Gerhard Markson tells Michael Dervan about his plans to celebrate them.

Anyone who's ever studied the piano will have come across the music of Robert Schumann. The early pieces from his Album For The Young of 1848 have found their way into any teaching anthology worthy of mention.

The composer, who is about to be celebrated by Schumannfest, a three-week season led by the conductor Gerhard Markson, described his early piano pieces as "for the most part reflections of my turbulent earlier life when man and musician always strove to express themselves simultaneously; such is the case even now that I have learned to master myself and my art better". And the facts of his life are the stuff of romantic biography.

His pursuit of the love of his life, Clara Wieck, was obstructed at every twist and turn, up to and including legal proceedings, by his prospective father-in-law. The stream of his piano music, accounting for his first 23 opus numbers, turned into an outpouring of songs after it became clear that the young lovers would win the day. Chamber music and larger forms followed - four symphonies, oratorios, an opera - and Clara, one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century, helped bring his music to an international audience.

But disaster, in the form of mental illness, struck when he was at the height of his powers and was working as municipal music director of the city of Düsseldorf. During one concert he continued conducting oblivious to the fact that the performance was over.

He was visited by angels and devils and became so plagued by detailed aural hallucinations - complete compositions that segued one into the other - that he insisted on being committed to an asylum for fear of any harm he might do to his family. A delay in carrying out his wishes led to a suicide attempt. He jumped into the Rhine but was rescued, and he spent the last two years of his life in a private sanatorium in Endenich, outside Bonn, where he died in 1856, at the age of 46.

As a young composer he revolted against what he saw as the dreadful state of musical taste in Germany and the superficial nature of music criticism. Many of the works we now cherish by the great masters of the age were, at the time, overshadowed in popularity by the shallow showmanship of operatic pot-pourris and the vapid virtuosity of uninspiring sets of variations on well-known melodies.

Schumann formed the notion of a Davidsbund, a league or brotherhood of David, made up of members both real and imaginary, who would counter the prevailing philistinism. In 1834, which he described as the most remarkable year of his life, he founded a magazine to further his campaign. In its pages he could "oppose the recent past as an inartistic period with only a notable increase in mechanical dexterity to show for itself; and . . . prepare for and hasten the advent of a new, poetic future". Like Berlioz, he became a crusader not just in the composition of music but also in the criticism of it.

He gave birth to the characters of Florestan and Eusebius, alter egos, the one extrovert and businesslike, as Schumann was in his handling of the affairs of the magazine, the Neue Zeitschrift Für Musik, the other introverted and dreamy. And there was also Master Raro in the centre, a balanced, integrated character whose name embraced that of the composer's great love, Clara, with his own: ClaraRobert.

But Schumann has been plagued with a bad press, not for his piano music or his songs but for his larger works. There is what John Eliot Gardiner has called the myth that he "could neither orchestrate nor translate the poetry of his solo piano music and lieder into full orchestral forms".

Famous conductors, Gustav Mahler among them, have even prepared reorchestrated versions of the four symphonies, to help the unfortunate Schumann out of what they saw as his awkwardness.

The issue, as Markson puts it, is one "that lies on the streets if you talk about Schumann". But he doesn't see Schumann as being a special case in this regard. He does a little touching up himself in the finale of the Second Symphony, but he does something similar in Beethoven's Eroica, and, as he points out, you don't hear anyone talking about Beethoven not being able to orchestrate. Balancing orchestral lines to the best effect is part of what a conductor does, and that's mostly what Schumann needs.

"The second movement of Schumann's First Symphony is a miracle of orchestration, of sound, of poetic lines: you have four rhythms, one on top of the other; the way it is arranged is miraculous.

"The first real romantic character in German music was Schumann. The romantic idiom is to fight, to fail, to suffer and so on. Of course, when Schumann writes a symphony it's not like Beethoven's Eroica or the Ninth Symphony. When we come to Brahms taking on the classical form in his First Symphony, he is at the end of a romantic development, so to speak; Schumann is right smack in the middle of it. I think we should not underestimate the importance of the fact that he was the man who carried the principle of symphonic form into the romantic period.

"You know, I have a suspicion that what people are really disturbed about is that Schumann does not give them security, not even the security of the fight that you have in Beethoven. Beethoven's fight is like Michelango: it's a struggle on such an out-of-this-world level that it gives us security in a certain sense - if such a strong man had these troubles then we can have troubles; it gives us security. Schumann, on the other hand, is one of us. He leaves us with this insecurity; that is the romantic idiom: looking, suffering, not finding but struggling."

Of course, Schumann is nothing if not contradictory, and as well as what Markson calls the "fragile, intimate, romantic" side to him, there's also a direct pragmatism, reflected, as he points out, in the assertive, straight-down-the-line start to the Third Symphony.

Markson muses on the fact that conductors who criticise Schumann's orchestration may not have paid enough attention to the composer's piano music. The interpretative solutions are often revealed in the responses of a pianist, and, on top of that, the shaping and rubato that are called for are actually extremely demanding of a conductor's technique.

Markson's delight in the subject causes him to haul out score after score to give examples, rattling out the modulation of rhythmic shapes as he might do in demonstrative mode during rehearsal.

Some of the negative responses to Schumann's music, suggests Markson, have been tied to our knowledge of his mental problems. The patterns of Schumann's mood swings suggest very clearly that he was a manic-depressive, but the final breakdown seems to have had an independent cause, now believed to have been tertiary syphilis - the hand injury that disabled him as a pianist has also been linked to this.

Dr Franz Richarz of the Endenich sanatorium where Schumann died reported him in 1855, the year before his death, as "jotting down all sorts of things, many of them melancholy in content, e.g., 'In 1832 I contracted syphilis and was cured with arsenic' ". Markson, however, feels that Schumann has to be taken whole and entire and that without his obsessions, elations and depressions his music would have had to be radically different. The fragility of the man treading the fine line is essential to his appeal.

Following his Bruckner cycle, which paired the symphonies with music by French composers from Debussy up to Messiaen and Boulez, Markson has found some unusual companions for his three-week Schumannfest. Yes, there's some extra Schumann, the ever-popular Piano Concerto and the very rarely heard Violin Concerto. But, he says, "I think we ought to always do more. So we have an Irish composer on Schumann, Seóirse Bodley's new Metamorphoses On The Name Schumann, and a German composer on Schumann, Reinhard Febel's Sphinxes, this latter not so much because I'm German but because Schumann was German.

"Then, interesting thing, we have Igor Markevitch's Petite Suite D'Après Schumann." Markevitch, Diaghilev's last protégé, gave up composing quite early and turned to conducting - and was, in fact, Markson's conducting guru. "Why would a Russian composer who had just become famous with a piece called Icare write something on Schumann? Well, it was practical. He had been asked to write a ballet, he was a pianist himself and he was a chameleon. He was Russian, but when he died he was an Italian citizen, a French citizen and he spoke seven languages. He wrote a Schumann piece with a lot of wit and French charm. It's really something special.

"And then I found this piece linking Schumann and Brahms, Variations By Brahms On A Theme Of Schumann, that the conductor Roberto Benzi orchestrated." The theme, says, Markson, "is apparently the last melodic invention Schumann had before he stopped composing, and Brahms picked up on it and wrote piano variations on it".

Schumann had broken a long silence as a critic and commentator to write about the young Brahms. Musing over the great talents of the age, he wrote: "It seemed to me, who followed the progress of these chosen ones with the greatest interest, that . . . a musician would inevitably appear to whom it was vouchsafed to give the highest and most ideal expression to the tendencies of our time, one who would not show his mastery in a gradual development but, like Athena, would spring fully armed from the head of Zeus. And he has come, a young man over whose cradle Graces and Heroes stood watch. His name is Johannes Brahms."

His most famous accolade was bestowed two decades earlier, when he had greeted the emergence of Chopin with the line: "Hats off, gentleman: a genius." He was writing about Chopin's Op 2, the now rarely heard Variations On La Ci Darem La Mano, at a time when both Chopin and Schumann were 21.

Back on Schumann, Markson sums up the issue for the conductor. "With Schumann we have to make clear to the audience that we are not selling perfection, but we are selling something that's part of us. This is the typical romantic. It's not the titanic struggle of a Beethoven. It's a human struggle. To do it in a way that people understand, suffer with it, or are happy with it, or are fulfilled, that's the major challenge."

As Michael Steinberg once colourfully put it, the symphonies are "problematic, risky, utterly personal, stunningly original, inspired, ever fresh and awaiting our delighted rediscovery".

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's Schumannfest, with Gerhard Markson, begins on Friday at the National Concert Hall, Dublin. It continues each Friday evening until May 14th. The opening programme, including the première of Seóirse Bodley's new work, will also be performed in Cork on Thursday