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Legacy

Schumann had considerable influence in the nineteenth century and beyond. Those he influenced included French composers such as Fauré and Messager, who made a joint pilgrimage to his tomb at Bonn in 1879, Bizet, Widor, Debussy and Ravel, along with the developers of symbolism. Cortot maintained that Schumann's Kinderscenen inspired Bizet's Jeux d'enfants (Children's Games, 1871), Chabrier 's Pièces pittoresques (1881), Debussy's Children's Corner (1908) and Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose, 1908).

Elsewhere in Europe, Elgar called Schumann "my ideal", and Grieg's Piano Concerto is heavily influenced by Schumann's. Grieg wrote that Schumann's songs deserved to be recognised as "major contributions to world literature", and Schumann was a major influence on the Russian school of composers, including Anton Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky. The latter, though critical of the orchestration, said that Schumann's symphonic works, as well as the chamber music and piano pieces, revealed "a whole new world of musical forms".

Although Brahms said that all he had learned from Schumann was how to play chess, other composers in German-speaking countries whose music shows Schumann's influence include Mahler, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg. More recently, Schumann has been an important influence on the music of Wolfgang Rihm, who has incorporated elements of Schumann's music into chamber works (Fremde Szenen I–III, (Foreign Scenes, 1982–1984)) and his opera Jakob Lenz (1977–1978). Other twentieth and twenty-first century composers drawing on Schumann have included Mauricio Kagel, Wilhelm Killmayer, Henri Pousseur and Robin Holloway.

During the second half of the nineteenth century there developed what became known as the " War of the Romantics ". Schumann's successors including Clara and Brahms, together with their supporters such as Joachim and the music critic Eduard Hanslick, were seen as the proponents of music in the classic German tradition of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann. They were opposed by the adherents of Liszt and Wagner, including Draeseke, Hans von Bülow (for a time) and in his capacity as a music critic Bernard Shaw, who were in favour of more extreme chromatic harmonies and explicit programmatic content. Wagner declared that the symphony was dead. By the turn of the century critics such as Fuller Maitland and Henry Krehbiel were treating the output of both factions with equal regard.

In 1991 the first volume of a complete edition of Schumann's works was published. A supposedly complete edition had been published between 1879 and 1887, edited by Clara and Brahms, but it was not complete: apart from inadvertent omissions the two editors deliberately suppressed some of Schumann's later music as they believed it had been affected by his declining mental health. In the 1980s the University of Cologne set up a research department with the aim of locating all the composer's manuscripts. This led to the New Schumann Complete Edition which comprises 49 volumes and was completed in 2023.

Schumann's birthplace in Zwickau is preserved as a museum in his honour. It hosts chamber concerts and is the focus of an annual festival commemorating him. The International Robert Schumann Competition for Piano and Voice was launched in Berlin in 1956, and later moved to Zwickau. Among the winners have been the pianists Dezső Ránki, Yves Henry and Éric Le Sage and the singers Siegfried Lorenz, Edith Wiens and Mauro Peter. In 2009 the Royal College of Music in London inaugurated the Joan Chissell Schumann Prize for singers and pianists.

In 2005 the German federal government launched the online Schumann Network in collaboration with cultural institutions in Zwickau, Leipzig, Düsseldorf and Bonn. The site aims to offer the public the most comprehensive coverage of the life and works of Robert and Clara Schumann.