The Romantic era-a time of soaring melodies and outsize personalities-spawned numerous tormented souls who burst onto the scene like shooting stars, produced exquisite art, then plunged rapidly into insanity, illness or an early demise, spent by their own glorious flames.
Two of the greatest such figures are celebrating their 200th anniversaries this year: Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), a lyrical genius whose impeccably crafted music was marked, as Franz Liszt noted, by a "deep melancholy"; and Robert Schumann (1810-1856), whose sense of fantasy overwhelmed his art and, ultimately, his mind.
