Robert Schumann, quintessential romantic dilaceration (Zerrissenheit), devoted his artistic creativity to the fusion of music, literature and philosophy. From traditional German legends he draws ispiration Genoveva (1848), an overture whose music, written almost on the spur of the moment , impressed by Hebbel's tragedy, outlines in "poematic" from the unfathomable female character. These are difficult years in which irreversible psychic decline begins;to his wife Clara he dedicates Hermann und Dorothea (1851) , from Goethe's poem of the same name, based on actual historical events. In this work love and war (suggested by the quotation from the Marseillaise), are but a mirror of the lacerating duality of his soul. Shortly before the suicide attempt in the Rhine, Schumann composed Die Braut von Messina (1851), from Schiller's play, an overture described as "theatrical" that identifies Beethoven's Fidelio as the ideal precursor. In 1953, during a long convalescence, he read Goethe's Faust and captivated produced his last orchestral page, Transfiguration of Faust, which would later become the overture zu Szenen aus Goethe's Faust. Severe psychopathology here becomes a centrifugal drive that flows into maniac compositional drafts: these last works, a theater of the monsters and obsessions of a dissociated psyche, sublimate the unity of man and artist, making Schumann an immortal composer.