The 19th-century German composer Robert Schumann (1810–1856) is beloved for his music evoking romantic love, as in the song cycle “Dichterliebe,” and the love of children and childhood, as in the piano work “Kinderszenen.” There are also many pieces by Schumann which sound at times like they are teetering on the brink of madness; his life sadly ended with a period of insanity, following a failed suicide attempt. The passionate relationship between Schumann and his wife, Clara, a noted pianist and talented composer in her own right, have attracted a wide range of admirers. The rock star Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, have repeatedly read in public from the love letters between Schumann and Clara.

If a veteran rocker can be bewitched by the Schumann persona, then it is only natural that John Worthen, a London-born emeritus professor of D.H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham, should have been equally seduced. Mr. Worthen has published a series of solid volumes on Lawrence, followed by a dense study of early romantic literature, “The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802” (2001). He has now produced “Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician” (Yale University Press, 496 pages, $40), cautioning in the book’s preface that he will “leave analysis of [Schumann’s] music to those qualified to undertake it.” Indeed, there is remarkably little discussion of Schumann’s music here, with a focus instead on details of the relationship with Clara. Schumann’s young daughter Eugenie, who last saw her father when she was two years old, wrote a memoir of him around 80 years later, discounting Schumann’s lifelong multitude of mental and physical ailments. Instead, Eugenie claimed that she remembered her father as “healthy,” with a “healthy spirit,” as reflected in his life and work. Mr. Worthen agrees, reiterating over and over like a tendentious schoolmaster that Schumann was “proud, obstinate, determined.”

A biographer may argue anything, if assertions are backed up by persuasive evidence. Literary-minded books on composers by nonmusicians, such as the German poet and novelist Peter Härtling’s volumes inspired by Schubert, can be revelatory. Yet this presumes an immersion in the same literature which inspired the composer. Mr. Worthen tends to interpolate inapposite and anachronistic examples from English literature, such as lines by the 20th-century British poet Philip Larkin, cited because, according to Mr. Worthen, Larkin and Schumann shared a “terror of death.” When Schumann was taken to the madhouse, he was handed a bouquet of flowers by Clara, which he distributed to asylum employees. Mr. Worthen interprets this as a conscious reference by Schumann to Ophelia’s mad scene in Act 4, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” an unlikely notion under the circumstances.

A contrarian stance toward rival biographers can be productive, but Schumann has benefited from stimulating previous biographies, especially Peter Ostwald’s psychoanalytic “Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius” (1987), offset by John Daverio’s well-documented, if duller “Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age” (1997). Mr. Worthen tirelessly wrestles with previous writers, often without any proof for new assertions involving Schumann’s suicide attempt by jumping in a river: “Diving headlong is not, anyway, the way people go into the water to drown themselves. They slip in feet first.” Who says so — Virginia Woolf?

More problematically, the Schumann couple’s overt anti-Semitism — Robert wrote to Clara about their mutual friend Mendelssohn: “Jews remain Jews … don’t put yourself out too much” — is soft-pedaled by Mr. Worthen with the understatement, “Neither of them liked Jews much.” There is puzzlingly idle speculation about Schumann’s works: We are told that the composer would have mastered the musical genre of works for chorus and orchestra had he produced five or six of them instead of only three. And although Schumann only wrote one opera, producing a “second or third” might have “developed his feeling for the form.”

Despite its welcome research on the Robert-Clara relationship, “Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician” plainly demands the antidote of listening to the music itself on CD. The German cellist Alban Gerhardt’s new recording of Schumann’s Cello Concerto on Hyperion; Schumann’s piano works played by the Bulgarian pianist Anna Stoytcheva on Gega and Tashkent-born Evgenia Rubinova on EMI Classics, and his Sonatas for Violin and Piano played by the dynamic Korean-American violinist Jennifer Koh. Or for historically minded listeners, the splendid BBC Legends series of CDs with performances by the pianists Annie Fischer, Myra Hess, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, and Sviatoslav Richter. Any of these artists convey — more than any contentious biographical squabbling — why Schumann’s music still offers ever-immediate emotion and delight.

Mr. Ivry last wrote for these pages on Pierre Corneille and Richard Wilbur.