Another excerpt from J.D. Landis's Longing:

As they were packing for the move to Dusseldorf, he [Robert Schumann] wrote a story in his children's Book of Memories.

The fish were bored with being forever in the water. 'Outside,' they said, 'the hot sun is shining, and everything looks beautiful and green. But we are deprived of all that, here in the water.' So they decided to drink the whole pond dry. They drank and drank. The water got lower and lower. Supreme was their joy when they found themselves on dry land with the hot sun shining beautifully down upon them. But their happiness did not last long. They became weaker and more lifeless from moment to moment. There was not a drop of water left in which to live their lives as fish. The sun shone brightly. They died in agony.

"What is the point of this story?" asked Clara.
"That all should keep to their element."
"And what is our element?"
"Wherever we are not."

Landis's Schumann is definitely always out of his element. And he remains elusive (who he really was, why he went 'mad', what drove his passion for music) throughout the narrative and, I imagine, throughout his life.

And another bit, taken from the section during which he boarded with a consumptive friend:

"He had discovered that the more music he wrote, the less inclined he was to speak . . . He sometimes felt that music resented language and did everything possible to annihilate it. Given music's greater precision, beauty, and expressiveness, Robert thought it would be the other way around. But language paid its humble respects to music by struggling valiantly yet futilely to describe it, the equivalent of trying to sing about mathematics. Music, in the meantime, obliterated words, thoughts, meaning itself. It rolled through one's blood and brain with an ecstatic pitilessness."

This war between language and music seems, to me, odd. As a poet, I usually associate language with music. But I found it fascinating to discover some of the interesting obsessions that grew in Schumann's mind.