Schumann's own Flegeljahre, his late teenage years—around the years 1827 to 1829—reflect his absorption of Jean Paul's prose style much more obviously in his writings than in his music. His earliest compositions—a choral setting of Psalm 150, some songs, and several symphonic movements among them—are tentative experiments with recognized genres. His teacher, Johann Gottfried Kuntzsch, was a church organist whose tastes were traditional. However, the novel attempt, Juniusabende und Julitage, together with several short-story attempts and an autobiographical sketch, reproduces Jean Paul's descriptive, digressive, at times overwrought manner surprisingly well. There is no corresponding tendency in the young Schumann's compositions until the end of his Zwickau days, and particularly after his initial move to Leipzig. Only a few moments in these youthful, often fragmentary works betray any unconventionalities that could be compared on any level to Jean Paul's style. Harald Krebs has noted that an unfinished piano quartet in C minor contains rhythmic complexities—what Krebs refers to as “metric dissonances”—that foreshadow the works to come, particularly the Intermezzi. On the whole, however, Schumann's earliest musical works betray an earnest, post-Classical style.

However, the young composer's musical preferences show a less conservative bent after his departure from Zwickau. In the first years of Schumann's independence, he began to write copiously about Jean Paul in his letters and diaries, but another figure also looms large there: Franz Schubert.