On 12 September 1851, Robert and Clara Schumann's eleventh wedding anniversary, Robert Schumann began work on a ‘Duo for Pianoforte and Violin’. This work, the Sonata in A minor for Pianoforte and Violin, Op. 105, was the first of an exceptional group of three chamber works to be written in a two-month period of intense creativity, the others being the Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 110 and the Sonata in D minor for Violin and Pianoforte, Op. 121. All three compositions embody the culmination of the composer's ever innovative approach to large-scale musical form, his response to the sonata structures that were the legacy of Haydn, Mozart and particularly Beethoven, and that Schumann, citing the example of Schubert, had always believed must continually be created anew if the cherished forms were to remain viable.

In his reviews of contemporary music in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann had returned often to the principle of the organic unfolding of a large-scale musical work. His ideal was Beethoven's treatment of symphonic form, ‘where in rapid succession the ideas appear [ever] changing and yet are linked through an inner, spiritual bond’. The inner, spiritual bond among ideas is intrinsic to Schumann's earliest published compositions, the cycles of character pieces written for solo piano in the 1830s, in which ‘motto’ themes, fragile, intuitive melodic links, and carefully crafted tonal designs combine in each work to forma whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts.