Schiller's play, a Romantic treatment of a classical theme, is full of Sturm und Drang (storm and stress), and this, as well as the overall gloominess, is captured in Schumann's setting. It opens with a brief bombast, and then the strings dominate the orchestration in a melancholy, meditative theme that depicts the curse on the family (the slow buildup of tension and use of this theme could be considered a precursor to the fate motif in Bizet's Carmen.) Even under the long legato passages, there are slithering phrases that make it clear that this relative peace is merely an interlude, and after its conclusion, the music becomes still stormier, almost disjointed, with exchanges between the brass and strings that almost suggest a literal storm. It ends with a furious depiction of the fight between the two brothers and their deaths.

It was not received well; the audience did not applaud it at all and the newspaper's review criticized both the orchestra's playing and Schumann's conducting, though the score itself was treated slightly more gently. Schumann himself was relatively unperturbed by this failure, saying in a letter to Richard Pohl, the young librettist for Des Sängers Fluch, and eventually influential music critic, who had suggested the idea of an opera based on the play, that while he had expected more enthusiasm, he had grown accustomed to audiences not understanding his works at first, particularly the more substantive ones, and later gave the score to Brahms as a birthday present. The plan for an opera, like many of his other ambitious ideas for the musical stage (such as his later proposed great oratorio on Martin Luther, also with a libretto by Richard Pohl), never came to fruition, and this was the only result.

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