structural:summarization, linguistic:translation, structural:scholar_edition
Orchestral

Schumann acknowledged that he found orchestration a difficult art to master, and many analysts have criticised his orchestral writing. Conductors including Gustav Mahler, Max Reger, Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer and George Szell have made changes to the instrumentation before conducting his orchestral music. The music scholar Julius Harrison considers such alterations fruitless: "the essence of Schumann's warmly vibrant music resides in its forthright romantic appeal with all those personal traits, lovable characteristic and faults" that make up Schumann's artistic character. Hall comments that Schumann's orchestration has subsequently been more highly regarded because of a trend towards playing the orchestral music with smaller forces in historically informed performance.

After the successful premiere in 1841 of the first of his four symphonies the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung described it as "well and fluently written... also, for the most part, knowledgeably, tastefully, and often quite successfully and effectively orchestrated", although a later critic called it "inflated piano music with mainly routine orchestration". Later in the year a second symphony was premiered and was less enthusiastically received. Schumann revised it ten years later and published it as his Fourth Symphony. Brahms preferred the original, more lightly-scored version, which is occasionally performed and has been recorded, but the revised 1851 score is more usually played. The work now called the Second Symphony (1846) is structurally the most classical of the four and is influenced by Beethoven and Schubert. The Third Symphony (1851), known as the Rhenish, is, unusually for a symphony of its day, in five movements, and is the composer's nearest approach to pictorial symphonic music, with movements depicting a solemn religious ceremony in Cologne Cathedral and outdoor merrymaking of Rhinelanders.

Schumann experimented with unconventional symphonic forms in 1841 in his Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Op. 52, sometimes described as "a symphony without a slow movement". Its unorthodox structure may have made it less appealing and it is not often performed. Schumann composed six overtures, three of them for theatrical performance, preceding Byron 's Manfred (1852), Goethe 's Faust (1853) and his own Genoveva. The other three were stand-alone concert works inspired by Schiller's The Bride of Messina, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea.

The Piano Concerto (1845) quickly became and has remained one of the most popular Romantic piano concertos. In the mid-twentieth century, when the symphonies were less well regarded than they later became, the concerto was described in The Record Guide as "the one large-scale work of Schumann's which is by general consent an entire success". The pianist Susan Tomes comments, "In the era of recording it has often been paired with Grieg's Piano Concerto (also in A minor) which clearly shows the influence of Schumann's". The first movement pitches against each other the forthright Florestan and dreamy Eusebius elements in Schumann's artistic nature – the vigorous opening bars succeeded by the wistful A minor theme that enters in the fourth bar. No other concerto or concertante work by Schumann has approached the popularity of the Piano Concerto, but the Concert Piece for Four Horns and Orchestra (1849) and the Cello Concerto (1850) remain in the concert repertoire and are well represented on record. The late Violin Concerto (1853) is less often heard but has received several recordings.