SOURCE: Daverio, John. “Music Criticism in a New Key.” Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Poetic Age,” pp. 105-30. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

[In the following excerpt, Daverio demonstrates how Schumann's criticism reflects his passionate desire to unite music and language.]

A BARRIER AGAINST CONVENTION

In March 1833 Schumann arrived in Leipzig after a four-month stay in Zwickau and nearby Schneeberg, the home of his brother Carl and sister-in-law Rosalie. As noted in the previous chapter, the first movement of his G-minor Symphony was performed at both locations: in Zwickau on 18 November 1832 and in Schneeberg in mid-February of the following year. On returning to Leipzig, Schumann took an apartment with Carl Günther, a law student, in Franz Riedel's Garten, an establishment on the outskirts of the city. He continued to work on his G-minor Symphony (certainly on the last movement, and perhaps also on the second and third as well), the first movement of which was rendered, but only with limited success, at Clara's “grand concert” of 29 April at the Gewandhaus. But at about the same time, which Schumann described as the beginning of his “richest and most active period,” his thoughts turned to a project that would have tremendous consequences not only for his own career but also for the future course of music journalism: the founding of a new journal for music.¹

Unfortunately, a thorough account of the initial stages of Schumann's “richest” phase is hampered by the suspension of his diary for much of the four-year period between March 1833 and October 1837.² Never again would he go for so long without maintaining some record of his daily activities. Hence, for documentary information on the composer's fortunes (and misfortunes) during the mid-1830s, we must rely largely on letters and on the lapidary notices written in Vienna while he was “filled with melancholy” on the evening of 28 November 1838.³

Schumann's abandonment of his diary may be linked to his recent decision to pursue a full-time career as composer, and indeed, shortly after returning to Leipzig in March 1833 he embarked on a variety of compositional projects that no doubt absorbed much of his time and energy. In addition to his attempts to complete the G-minor Symphony, which according to an entry in his Kompositions-Verzeichnis occupied him until May, Schumann finished a second volume of Paganini transcriptions (VI Etudes de Concert after Paganini's Caprices, op. 10) between April and July, and drafted the Impromptus, op. 5, in the remarkably short space of five days in late May.⁴ There is a good chance that many of the other works that were either begun (the “Piano Sonata in Fn minor,” op. 11; the “Piano Sonata in G minor,” op. 22; the “Variations” on Schubert's Sehnsuchtswalzer) or completed (the second version of the Etuden or Exercises on the Allegretto theme from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the final revisions of the Toccata) in 1833 likewise date from the spring and early summer of that year; but as we shall see, it is unlikely that Schumann did much composing from July through early December.⁵ If this is the case, it would mean that following on his only partially successful attempt to establish his credentials as a symphonist, Schumann undertook a systematic exploration of the keyboard genres. As a group, the works of 1833, both projected and realized, constitute a veritable compendium of forms and styles: Schumann's interest in cultivating the larger forms is exemplified by his preliminary work on the Fn-minor and G-minor sonatas; his conflation of variation and character piece by the variations (in free form) on themes of Beethoven and Schubert, and by the Impromptus; his fusion of virtuoso style and pedagogical intent by the Paganini transcriptions. Thus Schumann's turn to the keyboard as a vehicle for his creativity in mid-1833, and his almost total concentration on keyboard music for the remainder of the decade, can be interpreted from two points of view. On the one hand, it allowed him to shore up his compositional skills in the wake of his frustrated attempt at symphonic composition. On the other hand, the piano works of the 1830s comprise more than an episode, a stepping stone on the path toward the symphonies and chamber music of the 1840s;⁶ ranging from the slightest of miniatures to the grandest of designs, they attest to the love of system that characterizes Schumann's creativity from the first to the last.

Probably the most fascinating of the compositions of mid-1833 are those in variation forms. We have already discussed the Etuden/Exercises in the context of Schumann's reception of Beethoven in the spring of 1832. The Variations on the Sehnsuchtswalzer in turn demonstrate a continued engagement with the musical idol of Schumann's youth: Franz Schubert. In “Der Psychometer” (1834), an extraordinary essay about a machine capable of responding to critical questions, Schumann divided waltzes into three categories: head-waltzes, foot-waltzes, and heart-waltzes. The third type “comprises [dances] in the visionary keys of Df and Af, and its fathers appear to be the Sehnsuchtswalzer, evening flowers, twilight shapes, and memories of long-gone youth and a thousand loves.”⁷ Mistakenly attributed to Beethoven when it was published in 1826, the Sehnsuchtswalzer (“Yearning Waltz”) combines Schubert's so-called Trauerwalzer in Af (“Sorrowful Waltz”; No. 2 of the 36 Originaltänze für Klavier, op. 9/D. 365) and the second of three Deutsche for piano, D. 972. A sketch for the composition now in the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin vividly demonstrates Schumann's rethinking of the variation form. Anxious to overcome the sectional nature of the traditional design, he links several of the variations with transitional ritornelli. Furthermore, the titles of the sketch as a whole, Scenes musicales sur un thême connu, and the draft for the fourth movement, Intermezzo, indicate that Schumann was nudging the variation in the direction of the character piece.⁸ Thus it is hardly surprising that although these variations were never published, the opening two-dozen measures or so of the introductory movement to the set found their way into the Préambule of Carnaval.

In the Impromptus sur une Romance de Clara Wieck, composed between 26 and 30 May 1833, Schumann more fully realized his novel conception of the variation idea. In one of several autobiographical sketches, he even suggested that the work “might be seen as a new form of variation,”⁹ a reference, perhaps, to the grounding of the Impromptus in not one, but two themes: the bass theme, a product of Schumann's contrapuntal study in the preceding years and the point of departure for an extended fugato in the unfinished finale of the G-minor Symphony, announced unadorned at the outset of the piece; and the slightly altered version of the melody from Clara's Romance variée, op. 3, with which the bass theme is combined immediately thereafter¹⁰ (Example 3.1). But in a sense, Schumann's recourse to a kind of “double theme” is not so new after all. He would have found ample precedent for the technique in Beethoven's Fünfzehn Variationen mit einer Fuge for piano, op. 35, the so-called “Eroica” Variations of 1802. Even the outward designs of these pieces are similar: both begin with the bass theme alone (followed, in Beethoven's case, with three contrapuntal variations), proceed with the introduction of the melodic theme and an extended series of variations, and close with an impressive fugal finale.¹¹ Still, the more obviously Bachian pedigree of Schumann's variations distinguishes them from Beethoven's. As he wrote in the autobiographical sketch mentioned above, the Impromptus were conceived “as a result of the stimulation” afforded by a steady exposure to Bach's music in the early 1830s. This assertion is further supported by a diary entry of 29 May 1832, where Schumann maintains that the falling-fifth motive C-F-G-C, the opening gesture of the Impromptus' bass theme, came to him after sightreading several of Bach's fugues with Clara.¹² Moreover, the spirit of Bach extends past the character of the bass theme and the contrapuntal gamesmanship of the finale to encompass the body of the variations themselves, witness the subtle use of invertible counterpoint in No. 3, and the treatment of Clara's theme as a migrating cantus firmus in Nos. 4 and 8.

Yet the chief novelty of the variation form as rethought in the Impromptus probably lies elsewhere, in the subsumption of the allusions to Beethoven and Bach under an overriding poetic idea. The work, after all, is the first in a long and impressive series of “Clara” pieces, musical lyrics of personal experience intimately bound up with the young woman destined to play a crucial role in Schumann's life. Schumann summons up Clara's theme (in the second half of No. 1), elaborates it (Nos. 2-4), gradually converts it into a dreamy recollection (a process culminating in No. 11), effaces it (for the bulk of the Finale), and only at the last moment restores it as a fleeting reminiscence in the closing measures of the piece. The composition, in other words, turns on the transformation of Clara's melody into a memory.¹³ Though Schumann draws on time-honored (Beethovenian), even archaic (Bachian) techniques, he places them within the eminently modern context of the cycle of character pieces. Thus the Impromptus certainly count as a musical realization of what we will soon encounter as the historical imperative of Schumann's criticism: the invocation of the past as an inspirational source for a “new poetic age.”

After completing the Impromptus, Schumann both continued with works-in-progress (the second volume of Paganini transcriptions) and moved on to newer projects (the Fn-minor Sonata), but the events of summer 1833 brought his composing to a standstill. During July and August, he suffered from an attack of malarial fever, his recovery no doubt slowed by heavy and persistent drinking (the Vienna précis of 1838 refers to “champagne nights” before the onset of malaria and to a “dissolute life” shortly thereafter).¹⁴ Then on 2 August his brother Julius (who, together with Eduard, had continued to manage the family book business in Zwickau) died at the age of twenty-eight from tuberculosis. But the death in mid-October of his favorite sister-in-law, Rosalie, a victim of the same disease from which Schumann was slowly recovering, took him over the edge. His first major neurotic spell, again as described in the Vienna précis, was characterized by the onslaught of anxiety and depression:

The night of 17-18 October [1833]—the most frightful of my life—
          Rosalie's death just before
At this point, a crucial segment of my life begins.
The tortures of the most dreadful melancholy from October until De-
          cember—
I was seized by an idée fixe: the fear of going mad.(15)

Of the various accounts of Schumann's illness, the closest in time to the episode itself is a letter to his mother of 27 November. According to this document, the psychological symptoms detailed above were accompanied by a number of physical disturbances as well: “I felt like hardly more than a statue, without cold or warmth. … Violent congestion of the blood, unspeakable fear, loss of breath, [and] momentary loss of consciousness alternate rapidly, although now less so than in past days. If you had any inkling of this numbing of the spirit through melancholy, then you would forgive me for not writing.” While Schumann noted some improvement in his condition at this time, he remained so “shy and timid” that he was afraid to fall asleep without someone else in his room (in September he had moved to a fifth-floor apartment at Burgstrasse 21, located near the center of town), and shared lodgings with his former roommate, the “fundamentally good-hearted” Günther; nor did he have the courage to travel alone to Zwickau, “for fear that something might happen to me.” He adds a heartrending plea: “My mother, really love me! Because I'm often close to madness when I think of Julius and Rosalie. …”¹⁶ A letter to Clara written a little over four years later sheds further light on the causes and nature of Schumann's disturbance. There he attributes the “gloom” that enveloped him in the latter half of 1833 not only to the deaths of his brother and sister-in-law, but also to the “disappointments experienced by every artist when things don't go as swiftly as he had imagined,” to the realization, in other words, that the road to fame and fortune as a composer would be an arduous one. Indeed, the less than enthusiastic reception of the first movement of his G-minor Symphony would have fed into Schumann's recognition of this fact. Horrified by the thought that he might be losing his senses—“the most dreadful of heaven's punishments”—and fearful that this thought might lead him “to lay a hand” on his life, Schumann sought medical advice. His doctor, however, failed to acknowledge the seriousness of his patient's complaint, ascribing it to adolescent malaise and little more: “Find yourself a woman,” Schumann was told, “she'll cure you in a flash.”¹⁷

Although Schumann's bout with mental illness was triggered by the deaths of two of his closest relatives, it occurred at the culmination of a period marked by physical and emotional decline. Debilitated by malarial fever and over-indulgence in alcohol, and dejected by his failure to launch a brilliant career as composer, Schumann easily lapsed into a condition whose psychological symptoms comprised intense depression, fear of madness, generalized panic, and suicidal thoughts, and whose physical consequences involved inflammation (“congestion of the blood”), shortness of breath, and numbness in the limbs.¹⁸ The first of three more-or-less evenly spaced and progressively worsening episodes (the others flared up in 1844 and 1854) Schumann's near breakdown in the autumn of 1833 should have set off a warning bell. Tragically, few were willing to listen, nor were those who did competent to act.

As Schumann indicated to his mother in November 1833, his “return to life came about only gradually, through hard work.”¹⁹ Much of this hard work centered around the “musikalische Zeitschrift” (“musical journal”) that he listed in his diary under “Plans” as early as 8 March of the same year.²⁰ By late June, a group of like-minded individuals had clustered around Schumann, its members including the theologian and pianist Julius Knorr, Ernst Ferdinand Wenzel (then a philosophy student and fellow pupil of Wieck's), the deaf painter, journalist, and composer Johann Peter Lyser, the music critics Ernst August Ortlepp and Gustav Bergen, Schumann's old friend Willibald von der Lühe, the philosopher Johann Amadeus Wendt, and Ludwig Ferdinand Stolle, a writer for Karl Georg Herlosssohn's Der Komet.²¹ During the early part of the summer, the group met at Friedrich Hofmeister's music shop, but by late in the year, it assembled for informal, weekly meetings at the Kaffeebaum, a pub owned and operated by Andreas Poppe, where Schumann was a regular customer. Gustav Jansen provides a colorful picture of Schumann's direction of the proceedings: “When he sat at his usual place at the head of the table, with the indispensable cigar in his mouth, he never had to ask for a fresh glass of beer; he had arranged that it would be brought to him without even a nod, as soon as the innkeeper or waiter noticed that his glass was empty.”²² United in their displeasure over the current musical scene that was dominated by the frivolous strains of Italian opera in the theatre, and by the facile but vapid stunts of virtuoso pianists such as Herz and Hünten in the concert hall and salon, Schumann and his friends determined to publish a journal whose “tone and coloring … would be more varied than that of similar enterprises.” Above all, it was their highminded intention “to erect a barrier against convention,” but, as Schumann wrote to his mother on 28 June 1833, the venture would also provide him with the “definite social standing” for which he, as an artist with an “undefined position,” had long craved.²³ (The establishment of the journal in 1834 allowed Schumann to describe himself as a Musikgelehrter [musical scholar] on the new passport he acquired at that time).²⁴ Thus from the start, Schumann's career as a journalist was marked by a blend of idealism and practicality.

There can be little doubt that the preparatory work for the founding of the journal—and the moderation of his alcohol consumption—set Schumann on the path to recovery from the neurotic episode of late October and November 1833; immediately after sketching out the events of his traumatic autumn in the Vienna précis, he added: “Sobriety. Journalistic activities. The idea of the Davidsbündler further developed.”²⁵ Moreover, Schumann associated his decisive “return to life” with one individual more than any other. The last entry for 1833 in the précis reads: “Then in December, Ludwig Schunke, like a star.”²⁶ Soon this extraordinarily gifted young pianist became his most treasured companion. Schumann's description of his newly found confidant in a letter to his mother dated 19 March 1834 brims over with superlatives: “[Schunke] is a splendid fellow and friend, who always takes hearty pleasure in striving for and accomplishing the most beautiful and the best. A patch of blue often brings more pleasure than an entirely clear sky; I could do without all my friends for the sake of this one.”²⁷ At about the same time, the pair decided to share an apartment, Schunke perhaps participating in the “frequently dissolute life style” into which Schumann again slipped in the spring of 1834.²⁸ Within months, however, the young artist was gravely ill; and although his doctor gave him “only one more winter to live,” he didn't manage to survive for even that brief a period. Schunke died on 7 December 1834 at the age of twenty-four, a victim of tuberculosis.²⁹

While Schumann's friendship with Schunke was cut painfully short, it was not without artistic consequences for both young men. Schunke's Variations concertantes on Schubert's Trauerwalzer, for example, were probably inspired by Schumann's variations on the Sehnsuchtswalzer (both works, incidentally, were dedicated to Henriette Voigt, the wife of a prominent Leipzig merchant, an excellent pianist, and a warm supporter of Schumann since late in 1833). In acknowledgment of his friend's superior gifts as a piano virtuoso, Schumann dedicated his Toccata in its final form to Schunke. The latter, in turn, dedicated his Sonata in G Minor, op. 3, whose first movement, like the Toccata, aims to mediate technical display and contrapuntal textures, to “son ami R. Schumann.” Schumann closed this circle of homages with a review (actually more of a poetically colored eulogy) of the composition, culminating in the following account of Schunke's rendition of his sonata:

Ludwig sat more or less in front of the piano, as if transported there by a cloud; without knowing quite how, we were drawn into the stream of this work, unknown to any of us—I still see everything before me, the fading light, the walls silent, as if listening, friends gathered round, hardly daring to breathe, Florestan's pale face, the Master [Raro] deep in thought, and Ludwig in the center, who like a sorcerer held us in a magical ring.

After Schunke had finished, Florestan offered words of high praise: “You are a master of your art, especially when you play. Verily, the Davidsbündler would be proud to count such an artist as yourself among their number.”³⁰

When Schumann wrote this piece in 1835, the Davidsbund, his band of crusaders against philistinism in contemporary musical life, was still relatively new to the reading public. The group made its official debut in Der Davidsbündler, an article published in three installments in Der Komet between 7 December 1833 and 12 January 1834, during just the period, that is, that Schunke entered Schumann's life “like a star.”³¹ A fanciful blend of imaginative prose, critical commentary, and aphorisms attributed to Florestan, Eusebius, Raro, and other members of the Davidsbund (Hofmeister and Bergen), Der Davidsbündler brought together a cast of characters and a constellation of ideas about the nature of writing on art that had occupied Schumann for some time. To review what we have already detailed in Chapter 2: on 8 June 1831, his twenty-first birthday, Schumann decided to give his friends “more beautiful and fitting names”; a week later, many of these same friends appeared as characters in Die Wunderkinder, the projected “musical novel” in which Schumann intended to thematize the complex interplay of art and life; on 1 July of the same year, Florestan the Improviser, one of the protagonists in Die Wunderkinder, was joined by Eusebius; in a fragmentary tale possibly dating from the same time (like the later essay, titled Der Davidsbündler), Schumann and some of his “friends” from the 8 June diary entry took up the same theme broached in Die Wunderkinder: the need for the creative genius to recognize the fine line between ideality and reality; on 7 December, Florestan and Eusebius appeared in print for the first time as the two principal critical voices in Schumann's review of Chopin's Opus 2; and by May of the following year, Die Wunderkinder had been rechristened as Florestan.³² To be sure, some of these strands appear to trail off into nothingness; Schumann's “musical novel,” for instance, never materialized. But in the essay for Der Komet published in late 1833 and early 1834, personal confession, a poetic reshaping of reality, and critical awareness found a meeting point in the Davidsbündler idea.

By the mid-1830s, the notion of an artist-band primed to ward off philistinism was hardly new. As early as 1800, Friedrich Schlegel exhorted his colleagues to follow the example of the “medieval merchants” and “unite in a Hansa to defend themselves.”³³ Similarly, at the heart of E. T. A. Hoffmann's “serapiontic” principle was a brotherhood of poetic individuals firm in their opposition to a world dominated by shallow tastes (it is probably no accident that Schumann had read Hoffmann's Die Bergwerke zu Falun, one of the tales in his Serapionsbrüder, less than a month before hitting upon the idea for Die Wunderkinder).³⁴ Nor were precedents lacking for actual artist associations united by this principle: witness the intellectual fraternity/sorority comprised of the Schlegel brothers and their wives, Novalis, and Schleiermacher, all of them contributors to the Athenäum, the short-lived journal (1798) whose contents represent the ideological core of early Romanticism; or, to cite a more specifically musical example, Carl Maria von Weber's Harmonische Verein, the statutes for which include the provision that “since the world is inundated with so many bad works, often upheld only by authorities and by wretched criticism, we are obliged to expose them and warn about them.”³⁵ Groups such as the Ludlamshöhle in Vienna (founded 1817) and the satirically oriented and fancifully named Tunnel über der Spree in Berlin (founded 1827) counted both musicians and literati among their members and met regularly to discuss the latest happenings in the world of art. Clearly the Litterarischer Verein of Schumann's teenage years in Zwickau belongs to the same tradition. In Leipzig's Tunnel über der Pleisse, which met weekly and often sponsored literary and musical entertainments, Schumann would have found a direct model for his Davidsbund. Interestingly enough, several of the members of the Leipzig Tunnel—Wieck, Lühe, Lyser—became collaborators on or contributors to Schumann's Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.³⁶

In all of these artist associations, we encounter precedents for the features that characterized Schumann's Davidsbund: the use of pseudonyms (Weber's Harmonische Verein, the Ludlamshöhle, the Leipzig Tunnel), the production of humorous essays or feuilletons (the Berlin Tunnel), the organization around a journal (the Athenäum group). Yet there is at least one important respect in which Schumann's Davidsbund differs from other comparable groups. If Hoffmann's Serapionsbrüder was a sheer product of the author's imagination, and if the Berlin and Leipzig Tunnels were firmly rooted in reality, then the Davidsbund came about at the juncture of both imagination and reality. It was this feature that Schumann had in mind when, in the Introduction to his collected writings (1854), he described the group as “more than a secret society.” The Davidsbund, he went on to explain, “runs like a red thread through [my] journal, uniting poetry and truth [“Dichtung und Wahrheit”] in a humorous manner.”³⁷ The group was not only the mouthpiece through which Schumann and his colleagues expressed their opinions on the state of the contemporary musical scene, it was, in addition, the central theme, the “red thread,” around which their journalistic undertaking was organized. Moreover, Schumann's allusion to Goethe's autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, points to the higher truth born of poetic expression toward which he and his associates aspired. The path to their goal led through fact and fantasy, realism and idealism, the poetry of an imagined utopia and the prose of everyday life. These oppositional pairs commingle at every level in the pages of the Neue Zeitschrift. Consider even the names of the “members” of the Davidsbund as they appear in the journal. Some are pseudonyms for actual individuals (“Walt”—the pianist Louis Rakemann; “Serpentinus”—the song composer and critic Carl Banck; “Fritz Friedrich”—J. P. Lyser; “Chiara,” “Chiarina,” or “Zilia”—Clara Wieck; “Juvenalis”—Willibald von der Lühe; “Sara”—Sophie Kaskel, a pianist and student of Adolph Henselt; “F. Meritis”—Mendelssohn; “Jeanquirit”—Stephen Heller; “St. Diamond”—Anton von Zuccalmaglio; and, of course, “Florestan-Eusebius-Raro” for Schumann's double nature and its synthesis into a single being);³⁸ others, in contrast, are at least partly fictional (“Hector,” “Ambrosia,” “Beda”).³⁹ The procedure of assigning such pseudonyms stems directly from Schumann's decision, on his twenty-first birthday, to give his friends “more beautiful and more fitting names”; Lühe and Clara already appear at that point as “Rentmeister Juvenal” and “Cilia,” respectively.⁴⁰ Thus through the medium of the Davidsbund, Schumann found a means of transforming this confessional practice into a critical one, of converting “poetry” into “truth.”

Soon after the members of Schumann's band made their public debut in Herlosssohn's Komet, preparations for the appearance of the Neue Zeitschrift went into high gear. On 19 March 1834, Schumann announced confidently to his mother: “Apart from the advantages for my intellectual development, I believe a great success is in store.” The contract establishing the journal was drafted exactly a week later. Titled the Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift für Musik, and thus emphasizing its origination in a city known throughout the German lands as a center for liberal thought,⁴¹ the journal was slated to appear twice weekly. Its editorial board, in whose hands the contract vested chief control, was comprised of Knorr, Schumann, Schunke, and Wieck, while Christian Hartmann, a local book-dealer, served as publisher.⁴² In addition, the document included stipulations for the payment of the editors (10 thalers for the first 500 copies sold), the annual subscription price (2 thalers), an honorarium for Julius Knorr, who at first acted as editor-in-chief (25 thalers quarterly), weekly meetings of the editorial staff, and the nullification of the contract if, after a year, 500 subscribers could not be found.⁴³

On 3 April 1834, a little over a year after Schumann first seriously considered launching a musical journal, the first issue of the Neue Zeitschrift appeared. Its prospectus, printed as the lead item in the issue, promised much: “theoretical and practical articles,” “belletristic pieces” (short tales on musical subjects), “critiques of the imaginative products of the present,” “miscellanies” (passages on musical subjects culled from the writings of figures such as Goethe, Jean Paul, Heine, and Novalis), accounts of musical life by correspondents in the chief European musical centers, and a chronicle devoted to announcements of significant musical events. As time would tell, Schumann's journal by and large lived up to this promise. So too did it live up to its title as a fundamentally “new” journal for music. Not only did its independence from an established music-publishing firm (unlike the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, the Berliner Allgemeine Musikzeitung, Cäcilia, and Iris, the journalistic arms of Breitkopf und Härtel, Schlesinger, Schott, and Trautwein, respectively) ensure an impartial critique of the musical scene, it aimed at and often achieved an all-encompassing view of that scene. With representatives in Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Naples (not to mention a healthy interest in the musical goings-on in Poland, Hungary, Belgium, and even the United States and South America), the journal provided a breadth of coverage unparallelled by any of its competitors. As Schumann wrote in the 1834 prospectus: “Whoever wants to investigate the artist should visit him in his workshop. It also seemed necessary to create a medium that would stimulate him to have an effect, beyond that of his direct sphere of influence, through the printed word.”⁴⁴ Universal in content and scope, the Neue Zeitschrift did indeed provide just such a medium.

By Schumann's account, the project got off to an auspicious start; on 2 July he boasted to his mother that 300 of the requisite 500 subscribers had been found. But the same letter likewise makes clear that within months of the journal's founding, Schumann was shouldering most of the editorial responsibilities. “I must dedicate my whole energy to the journal,” he stated emphatically, “one can't depend on the others. Wieck is always on tour, Knorr is ill, [and] Schunke doesn't handle a pen very well.”⁴⁵ What's more, strife had already broken out among the ranks; in a probable reference to late spring 1834, the Vienna précis alludes to “arguments with Wieck and the other editors.” Further disagreements, coupled with Schunke's death in December, led to the “complete dissolution of the entire circle” by the end of the year.⁴⁶ The files of Heinrich Conrad Schleinitz, a lawyer retained by Hartmann late in 1834, help us to fill in some of the gaps regarding the near collapse of the venture. Hartmann took advantage of a dispute with Knorr (who wanted to print an infamatory declaration against Wieck in spite of the publisher's objections) to stage a kind of palace coup. Hoping to make the Neue Zeitschrift into a more conventional publication and thereby increase sales, Hartmann sought out legal counsel in an attempt to gain editorial control over the journal. His plans were foiled, however, by Schumann's return to Leipzig in mid-December from a more than month-long stay in Zwickau and nearby Asch. By the day before Christmas, Schumann had negotiated a new contract (which he may have drafted himself), thereby acquiring sole ownership of the journal for 350 thalers payable to Hartmann. Within a week, he found a new publisher, the book-dealer Wilhelm Ambrosius Barth.⁴⁷ Alluding to his resolution of the crisis in the 1854 Introduction to his collected writings, Schumann spoke of the takeover of the journal by “the visionary of the group, who up to then had spent less of his time with books than in a dreamy reverie at the piano.”⁴⁸ Yet Schumann's actions in December 1834 demonstrate that this visionary could be a shrewd businessman when the need arose, and also that he well knew how to put his spotty legal training to good use when the survival of his journal was at stake. Not surprisingly, the reorganization of the journal's directorship further exacerbated the already strained relations among some of the Davidsbündler. A particularly unpleasant episode ensued with Knorr, who threatened to take legal action over the payment of 25 thalers owed him for his (less than efficiently executed) editorial work in the last quarter of 1834. But on 20 July 1835, the day before he was scheduled to appear in court, Schumann settled the matter through Schleinitz.⁴⁹

The first issue of the newly constituted journal appeared on 2 January 1835. While Schumann was certainly interested in preserving an image of continuity for his readers, subtle changes in focus indicate his equally strong desire both to broaden and to sharpen the original intent of the undertaking. Previously titled the Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift für Musik, the journal was henceforth issued simply as the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the elimination of Leipziger probably geared to ward off suspicions of parochialism. In the same spirit, Schumann added two cities, Prague and Weimar, to the list of centers whose musical activities would be regularly covered and struck the clause from the April 1834 prospectus concerning the journal's “special emphasis on reviews of piano compositions.” And as we will see, Schumann's New Year's editorial for the January 1835 issue brought into relief the philosophical underpinnings of the Davidsbund's critical program.

While Schumann's activities in 1834 were dominated by his work for the Neue Zeitschrift, the same year brought important developments in his personal life. The founding of the journal in April roughly coincides with his meeting Ernestine von Fricken, a young woman from Asch (a village on the Bavarian-Bohemian border) whom the Wiecks had met after one of Clara's performances in Plauen, and who came to Leipzig for piano lessons with Wieck beginning on 21 April 1834. (Although Schumann did not know it at the time, she was the illegitimate daughter of Captain I. F. von Fricken, who adopted her only on 12 December 1834). According to the Vienna précis, Schumann's relationship with Ernestine intensified so rapidly over the course of the summer that by September they were engaged; visits to her hometown followed in October and December.⁵⁰

Little wonder, then, given his all-consuming efforts on behalf of the Neue Zeitschrift and the complications in his private life, that Schumann's compositional productivity slackened considerably in 1834. A set of piano variations on Chopin's Nocturne, op. 15 no. 3 (preserved, in a fair copy, through the middle of the fifth variation) occupied him late in the year, but was never seen through to publication.⁵¹ Intermittent work on the Fn-minor Sonata is likewise a possibility. The remainder of what little composing Schumann did manage was associated with Ernestine (the dedicatee of the Allegro, op. 8) and her father. While in Zwickau in December, he began on Carnaval, its celebrated three- and four-note “themes,” or “Sphinxes,” as Schumann called them, derived from the letters ASCH. At the same time, he set to work on the Etudes Symphoniques, an extended cycle of variations on a theme by Captain von Fricken.⁵² But in the months before, the writerly side of Schumann's creativity surely had the upper hand.

HISTORY, POETRY, AND MUSIC CRITICISM

Writing in 1838, Schumann called the year 1834 “the most important in my life.”⁵³ No doubt its importance was closely linked with the founding of the Neue Zeitschrift, the refinement of the Davidsbündler idea, and the cultivation of a brand of music criticism quite unlike that encountered in any of the other journals of the day. The designation of Schumann's writings, in the title of this chapter, as music criticism “in a new key” is justified by two features in particular. In the first place, although Schumann's knowledge of the facts of music history was quite limited, especially before 1840, he had already as a young law student in Heidelberg evolved a philosophy of history, a systematic framework for the evaluation of temporally discrete cultural phenomena.⁵⁴ This historical outlook pervades his writings at practically every turn. Second, Schumann was keenly aware of an obvious problem posed by the concept of music criticism itself, namely, its employment of a verbal medium to describe and evaluate tonal events. His highly idiosyncratic, but always engaging “poetic” criticism emerged as a response to this dilemma.

Nowhere did Schumann articulate his philosophy of music history more clearly than in his New Year's editorial for the 2 January 1835 issue of the Neue Zeitschrift, the lead essay in the first issue of the journal to appear under his sole editorship:

In the short period of our activity, we have acquired a good deal of experience. Our fundamental attitude was established at the outset. It is simple, and runs as follows: to acknowledge the past and its creations, and to draw attention to the fact that new artistic beauties can only be strengthened by such a pure source; next, to oppose the recent past as an inartistic period, which has only a notable increase in mechanical dexterity to show for itself; and finally, to prepare for and facilitate the advent of a fresh, poetic future.⁵⁵

According to this scheme, the past is a nurturing source for the present; the present a site of imperfection; and the future a poetic age toward which the imperfect present should aspire. Past, present, and future are not so much discrete categories as they are mutually interdependent phases in a teleological sequence. Schumann's care in designating these phases underscores the point. He does not refer to the past as Vergangenheit, a term implying definitive closure, finality, even death, but rather as die alte Zeit (the bygone age), thus implying that the past should continue to inform the present. It is rather the present, or at least those aspects of the musical present concerned with “mechanical dexterity” and little more, that Schumann designates as die letzte Vergangenheit (the recent past). Born under the star of death, the “inartistic” products of those who cater to the fad for empty virtuosity are doomed to oblivion. And to highlight the parallels between past and future, Schumann altered “junge, dichterische Zukunft” (fresh, poetic age) to read “neue, poetische Zeit” (new, poetic age) in the 1854 collected edition of his writings.⁵⁶ Only the past (“die alte Zeit”) and the future are “ages,” Zeiten, while the present is continually consumed by the fleeting moment.⁵⁷

We may thus think of Schumann's view of music history as a “triadic” one. On 16 August 1828, he writes: “Love the past, act in the present, and fear the future. In this way a beautiful harmony, a powerful triad comes into being.” Speaking through Eusebius in the Denk- und Dichtbüchlein of 1834, he takes the notion of temporal succession as harmonic construct a step further, and emphasizes the transitional function of the present: “Triad=[historical] epochs. The [interval of a] third, as present, mediates the past and future.”⁵⁸ In this, Schumann's philosophy of history discloses an affinity with the outlook of the Jena Romantics in general and Friedrich Schlegel in particular. For Schlegel, too, criticism must be firmly grounded in a historical framework. And Schlegel's ideas, like Schumann's, derive their unity from the tripartition of this framework, which comprises a body of revered, “classical” texts, a critique of contemporary conditions, and a “redemptive” phase in the future.⁵⁹

Schumann's tripartite scheme allowed him to view music history not as an undifferentiated continuum, but far more as a series of interlocking periods. Though he hardly subscribed to a rigid opposition of “classic” and “romantic” phases—much less to the crass notion that romanticism represented a reaction against classicism—he did, for instance, situate Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the “turning point from a classical to a romantic period” in a letter of 18 August 1834 to Anton Töpken.⁶⁰ By the end of the decade, he had both refined and expanded his periodization of music history. Based largely on his reading of Wilhelm Christian Müller's Ästhetisch-historische Einleitung in die Wissenschaft der Tonkunst (Leipzig, 1830), Schumann's Chronologischer Geschichte der Musik (Chronological History of Music) includes twenty pages of tables and brief descriptions of the highlights in the development of musical genres, instruments, notation, and aesthetics. In a summary of the chief events in music history from 1200 b.c. (!) to the present, Schumann divides this three-thousand-year span into ten periods (Zeitraüme), each of the later phases an outgrowth of its predecessor. While the art of counterpoint entered a crisis phase in the fifteenth century, given the “overly artificial” approach of figures such as Ockeghem (Schumann writes “Ockenheim”), it attained a new and less mannered significance in the sixteenth century with Willaert and Lassus. Schumann in turn designates his seventh period, 1700-1750, as an era of “melodic counterpoint,” its chief proponents including Porpora, Telemann, and of course, J. S. Bach. Then from 1775 to 1800 comes the “period of universality,” the age of Haydn and Mozart, characterized by the “development of melody and melodic harmony,” and the “unity of art, imagination, and thoughtful congeniality.” Finally, the tenth period (1800 to the present) marks the “summit of musical art” in figures such as Beethoven and Schubert, whose works represent the fulfillment of the aspirations of previous ages.⁶¹ Music history is thus construed not only as a succession of great men, but also as the logical progression of stylistic trends embodied in their works.

At the same time, music-historical progress, for Schumann, was not a purely continuous phenomenon. Its potential leaps and reversals come into play in his view of the relationship between Bach and the talented representatives of Schumann's own generation. “The profound combinatorial power, the poetry and the humor of modern music,” he wrote to Gustav Keferestein on 31 January 1840, “have their origin mainly in Bach: Mendelssohn, [William Sterndale] Bennett, Chopin, Hiller, the whole of the so-called romantic school (of course I have the Germans in mind) are much closer than Mozart was to the music of Bach; indeed they all know his work thoroughly. I too make my daily confession to his lofty one, and strive to purify and strengthen myself through him.”⁶² Just as Schumann and his colleagues drew liberally on Bach's example, the latter's achievements were viewed as premonitions of the present and future. This mode of thought would allow Schumann to make the startling assertion that “most of Bach's fugues are character pieces of the highest kind; some of them are truly poetic creations, each of which requires its own expression, its own lights and shades.”⁶³ As indicated in the letter to Keferstein, Mozart stands fundamentally apart from this line of influence. In an 1834 review of Hummel's Studien, op. 125, Schumann also maintained: “Cheerfulness, repose, grace, the characteristics of the artworks of antiquity, are also those of Mozart's school. Just as the Greeks gave their thundering Zeus a cheerful expression, so too does Mozart restrain his lightning bolts.”⁶⁴ Hence Mozart's music partakes of the dialectical synthesis of opposites that Schumann, in a diary entry of 7 July 1831, associated with classical art and which he defined as: “the ingenious in the guise of the folk-like, the unfathomable in the guise of thrifty affluence, infinity of content in a beautifully rounded form, boundlessness in graceful limitation, the ponderous in the guise of the facile, darkness in luminous clarity, the corporeal inspirited, the real ennobled through the ideal.”⁶⁵ In Schumann's estimation, then, the most promising trends in the musical present derive their inspiration less from the immediately preceding “period of universality” than from the blend of melody and counterpoint that dominates the music of the first half of the eighteenth century.

Schumann was similarly convinced that portions of Beethoven's output, like Bach's, would make their most profound impact only gradually. This was especially so of the late quartets, works “for whose greatness no words can be found,” and which appeared to Schumann, “next to some of the choruses … of J. S. Bach, to represent the extreme limits that human art and imagination have yet reached.”⁶⁶ Among his contemporaries, Schumann saw Hermann Hirschbach as one of the few who had seriously confronted this difficult music. Reviewing Hirschbach's Lebensbilder in einem Cyklus von Quartetten, op. 1, in 1842, Schumann asserted: “Beethoven's last quartets serve him as the starting point for a new poetic era.”⁶⁷ True, Hirschbach's quartets have long since disappeared from the standard repertory, but the general thrust of Schumann's remarks on the reception of Beethoven's late quartets has been borne out by the passage of time: as sources of compositional inspiration, these works skipped not one but several generations.

Of course, Schumann's judgments of the artworks of the past frequently misfired. Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas, he wrote, occupied an important place in the repertory, but “how clumsy their form, how undeveloped their melody, how limited their modulation!”⁶⁸ And as for Haydn: “One can no longer learn anything new from him; he is like a familiar friend of the house who is always greeted with pleasure and respect, but is of no further interest for the present day.”⁶⁹ But on the whole, Schumann's flexible view of music history as a process marked by continuities and discontinuities should strike us as remarkably prescient.

Just as intriguing as his conception of the relationships between past and future is Schumann's diagnosis of the present. No historicist, he remained firmly committed to the here-and-now and its special problems. He emphasized this stance in an aphorism from one of the 1834 issues of the Neue Zeitschrift: “critics should engage themselves with the recent activity of the young creative spirits, rather than dawdle over past love affairs. Fashionable withdrawal into the past or pedantic clinging to antiquated customs or dreaming about youthful infatuations is of no use. Time marches on, and we must march with it.”⁷⁰

On more than one occasion, Schumann appeared to contradict himself in evaluating the central term in his triadic historical scheme. In the 1835 New Year's editorial, for instance, he brands the present as an age of decline, but in the Chronologischer Geschichte drafted several years later, he designates it as the “summit of musical art.” Yet Schumann had not made an abrupt volte-face in the intervening years. The apparent contradiction is far more a result of his recognition of the complexities and contradictions in current musical life. Indeed, the present as Schumann saw it was not characterized by a single, overriding trend, but by three distinct forces, each corresponding to one of the phases in his tripartition of historical time as a whole. The present thus reflects, in microcosm, the entire span of music history. (Just as Schumann's musical output enfolds smaller systems within larger ones, so too does his philosophy of history.) Schumann accords this view a decidedly political slant in “Der Psychometer” (1834), where he suggests that his contemporaries can be placed into three “parties”: “classicists,” “justemilieuists,” and “romantics.”⁷¹ He elaborates on this division in a review of Johann Kalliwoda's overtures:

The present is characterized by its political parties. Like their political counterparts, musical parties can be divided into liberal, middle-of-the-road, and reactionary, or romantic, modern, and classic. On the right sit the old-timers, the contrapuntists, the anti-chromaticists, on the left the young newcomers, the Phrygian hotheads, those who scorn formal strictures, the impudent geniuses, among whom the Beethovenians are most conspicious. In the juste-milieu, old and young commingle. This group is responsible for most of the products of the age, the creations of the moment, brought forth here only to be destroyed.⁷²

Both “classicists” and “juste-milieuists” belong to what Schumann called die letzte Vergangenheit, the recent, but moribund past. (The Chronologischer Geschichte implicitly locates composers such as Czerny, Bellini, and F. W. Pixis in this category).⁷³ Only the romantics, those capable of transforming past practice into something fundamentally new, will at once survive the present and point the way toward the “new poetic age.” To be sure, Schumann was circumspect in his employment of the term “romantic,” probably because it was often used by his opponents (for example, Gottfried Fink, the editor of the rival Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung) as a term of derision for the very principles that the Neue Zeitschrift sought to promote.⁷⁴ Although by 1837 Schumann claimed to be “heartily sick of the word ‘romantic’,” he nonetheless found in it an apt designation for the younger generation of composers—Bennett, Chopin, Stephen Heller, Adolf Henselt, Ferdinand Hiller, Mendelssohn, Schunke, Wilhelm Taubert—who, like himself, combined an abiding respect for tradition with an equal commitment to the cause of musical progress.⁷⁵

Given the flooding of the market with compositions of negligible worth, Schumann the critic was principally interested in the works of genuinely talented composers. Responding in the 1835 New Year's editorial to those who found his journal's editorial policy exclusionary, Schumann asserted that there were many items “that simply don't exist so far as criticism is concerned,” and even proposed “stereotypical,” prefabricated reviews for pieces by one of the three “archenemies” of art: the “untalented,” the “cheap talents,” and the “prolific scribblers.”⁷⁶ Simply put, only art could supply an appropriate object for Schumann's criticism. This is the sense behind Florestan's exhortation for his cohorts to root out mediocrity in the cultural life of the present: “Assembled Davidsbündler, youths and men alike, prepare to slay the Philistines, musical and otherwise.”⁷⁷ Yet it is important to bear in mind that he hardly viewed the artistic products of even the most gifted of his contemporaries—the young romantics—as embodiments of perfection: they lay claim to neither the impeccable craftmanship of Bach nor the Olympian grace of Mozart. When asked to evaluate E. Güntz's recently published set of Tänze for piano, the psychometer offers a mixed review: “Does he show outstanding talent?”—“I think so”; “Has he founded a school?”—“no”; “Should he have withheld his work?”—“certainly”; “To which party does he belong?”—“romantic.” The fantastic machine goes on to say: “[Güntz] feels deeply, but for the most part incorrectly—in spite of isolated flashes of moonlight, he fumbles in the dark; while now and again he seizes a flower, he also grasps at straw … his aim is well-meaning, though like unpracticed marksmen, he fires with his eyes closed.” But still—and here we come to the crucial point—the psychometer would prefer to deal with a “scattershot, poetic hobgoblin” such as this than with “a dozen dim-eyed, pointy-nosed pedants.”⁷⁸ Long forgotten today, Güntz is nonetheless representative of the ambivalent status of the “romantic school” as a whole: their works are imperfect but hold out much promise for the “new poetic age” to come. Even those compositions that “distinguish themselves through only one tiny felicitous trait,” Schumann wrote in his 1835 editorial, would be considered for review.⁷⁹ In this too, Schumann's critical attitude bears comparison with that of the Jena Romantics. As Friedrich Schlegel maintained in an essay entitled “On the Limits of the Beautiful” (1794): “Our failings themselves are our hopes, for they arise from the supremacy of the understanding, whose perfection, while slow to come, knows no bounds.”⁸⁰

Schumann recognized both the positive and negative aspects of the music of his day, but the truly radical quality of his criticism lies in its willingness to acknowledge that even the latter offered a measure of hope for the future. For example, we may consider his reactions to three of the most prominent characteristics of the recent compositional scene: the surfeit of light, even “trivial” music, the tendency toward fragmentation, and the demise of the classical forms.

The waltzes of Johann Strauss (Senior) might not attain the same heights as a Bach fugue, but it is still important for a young composer to know them, for, as Schumann maintained, Strauss may well be the most representative figure of his time. Schumann further prized Strauss's dances for their naturalness, their lack of affectation, their easy-going grace and charm, qualities toward which compositions in the more serious genres should aim. In an 1837 review of Mendelssohn's Preludes and Fugues for Piano, op. 35, he expressed this thought in extreme terms: “the best fugue will always be the one that the public mistakes for a Strauss waltz, in other words, where the artistic roots are concealed like those of a flower, so that we only perceive the blossom.”⁸¹ And just as fugues should strive for the elegance of waltzes, so too can the waltz and other dances, when infused with wit and irony, serve as the basis for the poetic character piece. Schumann's own Papillons and Intermezzi readily come to mind.

Schumann's ambivalent attitude toward the present—as an imperfect but perfectible age—is most apparent in his writings on the musical miniature. Speaking through his Florestan persona in 1834, he chides the philistines for “turning up their noses” at aphorisms, musical and otherwise, since after all, “isn't life itself patched together from half-torn pages?” But in the same year he cautions the pianist and composer Joseph Kessler against “seeking refuge in the miniature.” Interestingly enough, Schumann's skepticism regarding the musical fragment intensified over the course of the 1830s, precisely when he was composing some of the most enduring keyboard miniatures of all time. In 1839 he exhorts Henselt to turn away from the smaller forms and toward the “higher genres” such as the sonata and concerto, but then, in an 1842 critique of Ludwig Berger's songs, returns to his earlier position: “One should not undervalue such short pieces. A certain breadth of foundation and a commodious structure … may elicit praise for an endeavor. But there are tone-poets who can say in minutes what others need hours to express.”⁸² As we will see in the following chapter, the dichotomy in Schumann's thinking on the fragment is reflected in the dialectic between smaller and larger forms played out in his own compositions of the 1830s.

The sorry state of the “classical” forms during the same period provided another cause for Schumann's anxiety as critic. The “most brilliant period of the variation,” he feared, was drawing to a close; younger composers treated the sonata as a variety of academic exercise, while older composers avoided the genre altogether; the concerto was in serious danger of becoming obsolete; and composers of symphonies were, for the most part, content to write pale imitations of Beethoven.⁸³ But there was a positive side to this tale of decline, for Schumann recognized that while the older forms were on the wane, newer ones were emerging to take their place: the variation was giving way to the more freely conceived capriccio; the sonata to the fantasy and ballade; the three-movement concerto to a composite, one-movement form; and the traditional symphony to more rhapsodic conceptions, such as Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique.⁸⁴ Moreover, the alternation of decay and rebirth was a perfectly natural process. The sonata, Schumann noted in 1839, “has practically run out its life course, but this is indeed in the order of things, for rather than repeat the same forms for centuries, we should be intent on creating new ones instead.”⁸⁵ The positive light in which Schumann casts the negative moments embedded in the music of his day underscores the teleological thrust of his thinking. As he put it in an aphorism from the Denk- und Dichtbüchlein (1833/34), “criticism should rush ahead of the sinking present and at the same time fight it off from the vantage-point of the future.”⁸⁶ The critic who wages this battle is also a historian, “a prophet facing backward” in Friedrich Schlegel's suggestive formulation.⁸⁷

In addition to its deep engagement with history, Schumann's criticism is notable for a poetic quality quite unlike that in any earlier writings on music. But what may first strike us as florid excess is in fact a solution to an acute problem: that of forging a specifically romantic music criticism. Like the Jena Romantics, Schumann displayed an antipathy toward the normative approach to criticism as often practiced in the eighteenth century. According to the early nineteenth-century view, the critic was neither a judge nor a dispenser of rigid, formal laws, but rather a kind of poet. As Friedrich Schlegel maintained, “the true critic is an author to the second power.”⁸⁸ Insofar as “poetry can only be criticized by way of poetry,” the critic ensures the continued growth of the literary canon itself.⁸⁹ Through criticism the romantic dreamer, who turns out to be not so dreamy after all, finds a means of putting his or her reflections to productive use. According to Novalis's even more radical presentation of the same conceit, the critic provides not just a complement but an actual completion of the literary artwork.⁹⁰ Untiring in his efforts to make musical journalism into an intellectually respectable enterprise, Schumann shared in these views. But at the same time, he recognized the obvious discrepancy between musical and verbal discourse. The principal objects of his attention were not literary texts but musical works whose “criticism” by way of other musical works was possible only in a metaphoric sense. Hence his crusade against philistinism takes up the tone, style, and even the form of early romantic literary-philosophical criticism, but derives its content from the musical phenomena under consideration. The result is the inimitably “poetic” criticism with which Schumann made his mark as a writer on music.

Two features more than any others account for the poetic quality of Schumann's criticism: its attempt to evoke the spirit of the musical work that called it forth and its reliance on a fanciful perspectival technique. In his articulation of the critical ideal in an 1835 review of Hiller's Etudes, op. 15, Schumann wrote: “we recognize the highest criticism as that which leaves an impression similar to the one evoked by the motivating original.” On this view, the critic neither replicates, describes, nor passes judgment on the artwork, but rather responds to it with a “poetic counterpart” (poetische Gegenstück), that is, with another artwork in its own right.⁹¹ In 1828, Schumann had done just this in the closing portion of the “Tonwelt” essay, a prose poem titled “Beethoven,” its high-flown language intended to call up the feelings inspired by the composer's music: “All my desires and cravings were quelled—a deep stillness, a great waveless ocean! Formless spirit shadows in clear white garments like distant sails pressed toward their homeland.”⁹² In Schumann's writings of the 1830s, Eusebius is largely responsible for effusions of this sort, though Florestan too can rise to poetic heights. On one occasion, Raro even praises him for offering, instead of a judgment, an “image” (Bild), a metaphoric account “through which understanding is more easily attained than through technical-artistic expressions that remain incomprehensible to the musically uneducated.”⁹³ Serving a similar purpose is Florestan's recounting of a “scenario” for Beethoven's Seventh Symphony he had read in Cäcilia, where the work is said to recall the “merriest of peasant weddings.”⁹⁴

Yet the critic must be more than a crafter of images, since metaphors, suggestive though they may be, function as only one means toward understanding. To accommodate other approaches, Schumann developed a wide array of perspectival techniques. In the Introduction to the 1854 collected edition of his writings, he provides a succinct rationale for the strategy: “In order to express different points of view on artistic matters, it seemed appropriate to invent contrasting artist-characters, of whom Florestan and Eusebius were the most important, with Master Raro occupying a mediating position between them.”⁹⁵ Therefore Florestan and Eusebius, who constitute the flipsides of the double nature that Schumann hoped to resolve through a character like Raro, function as spokesmen for the diverse voices competing for attention within the critic himself.

We can observe the technique at work in an 1834 review of Dorn's Bouquet musical, op. 10, a set of three character pieces for piano, each named after a flower: the narcissus, the violet, and the hyacinth. Eusebius begins by relating a conversation among the flowers on which he has eavesdropped, their speeches taking the form of Jean-Paulian polymeters: “What then did the hyacinth say?—She said ‘My life was as beautiful as my end, because the most beautiful Lord loved and destroyed me.’ But from the ashes sprang a flower that might console you.”⁹⁶ Eusebius is endowed with the power to comprehend the secret language of the flowers; like the poet, he transmits the mysterious utterances of Nature in a form understandable to ordinary mortals. Yet his poetic language likewise makes a significant critical point. Since the “ashes” emerging from the flower are an emblem for the musical composition itself, he suggests that the artwork arises from a mysterious transformation of the natural object that inspired it. Then Florestan continues in a more prosaic vein, gently chiding Dorn for “placing such German flowers into French pots” (that is, giving his pieces French titles), and commenting, not without irony, on the implications of descriptive titles for the possible content of the pieces: “Perhaps the flower is as fragrant for the deaf as the tone is sonorous for the blind. The language translated here is so congenial and finely differentiated that there can be no thought of ‘tone-painting.’”⁹⁷ In this way, Schumann illuminates the object of his critical attention from different but complementary angles. The ideal critic, he implies, must be both poet and pragmatist, dreamer and realist, Florestan and Eusebius.

Furthermore, if music critics are to arrive at informed conclusions about the artworks under consideration, they must possess a deep understanding of the workings of a composition and also of the relationships among compositions. “In music everything depends on the contextual position of the whole,” Schumann asserted in an 1835 review of Joseph Kessler's works, “and this applies to [the relations between] the small and large scale, to the isolated artwork as much as to the artist's entire output.”⁹⁸ In order to effect the shuttling back and forth from part to whole associated with the hermeneutic method, critics must also be analysts, even if they don't flaunt their skills for a reading public who may not have much knowledge of or interest in the nuts and bolts of musical composition (recall Raro's words of praise for Florestan's avoidance of “technical-artistic expressions”).⁹⁹ While in the nineteenth century detailed analyses were mainly the province of learned theoretical tracts, such as Gottfried Weber's Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst (1832), a work Schumann knew well,¹⁰⁰ Schumann's interest in the “contextual position” of parts within wholes implies that, for him, analysis too had a place in critical discourse. Indeed, in his review of Dorn's Bouquet musical, he follows Eusebius's poetic reading and Florestan's ironic rejoinder with an analytical account of the first piece in the set by “Rohr,” who illustrates his comments on thematic relationships and unusual harmonies with musical examples.¹⁰¹

Even in his 1831 review of Chopin's Variations on “Là ci darem la mano,” often viewed as the example par excellence of Schumann's emulation of Jean Paul's quirky prose style, music-analytical issues play a significant role. His “musico-aesthetic Opus 1 of ‘epoch-making’ importance”¹⁰² aims in part to present Chopin as an individual who nonetheless belongs to a tradition embracing both Beethoven and Schubert. Hence intermingled with Florestan's account of the Variations as a wordless drama are observations touching on musical structure (the connection, or rather lack of connection, between the slow introduction and the rest of the work) and the affective logic of the overall tonal plan (which moves from Bf major to the parallel minor for Variation 5 and back to major for the Finale).¹⁰³

But nowhere in Schumann's writings does analysis play such an extensive part as in his review of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Published over six installments of the 1835 volume of the Neue Zeitschrift,¹⁰⁴ the review, by far Schumann's longest, falls into two parts: a “psychological” reading signed “Florestan” and a close analysis signed “R. Schumann.” The former is a quasi-programmatic interpretation of the symphony as a reflection of the artist's life and his stormy relationship with his beloved, the latter, a consideration of form, “compositional fabric,” the “specific idea” represented in the work, and “spirit.” As in the Dorn review, though on a larger scale, the various perspectives complement one another. To take one example, Schumann's critique of Berlioz's program in the analytical portion of the essay resonates with Florestan's opening comments. In his discussion of the “specific idea” embodied in the Symphonie fantastique, Schumann argues that, on the one hand, programs are detrimental to the unfettered exercise of the listener's imagination while, on the other, people tend to worry too much about the capacity of music to represent thoughts and events: what counts is the intrinsic merit of the music. The second portion of the review, in other words, might be read as a gloss on the first, which, interestingly enough, Schumann omitted from the collected edition of his writings.

While the structure of the review, its bipartition into subjective/psychological and objective/analytical sections, recalls the similar division in E. T. A. Hoffmann's well-known account of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony,¹⁰⁵ Schumann's approach in the analytical portion recalls the strategies of the Jena Romantics. Just as Friedrich Schlegel, in his seminal critique of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, had argued that the rhapsodic design of the novel was tempered by an artfully crafted web of topical relationships, so too does Schumann aim to demonstrate that the “formlessness” of the first movement of Berlioz's work is only an “apparent formlessness.” While Berlioz seems to depart radically from the “older model” for opening movements, he merely reversed the order of themes in the reprise to produce a symmetrical and perfectly satisfying arch form.¹⁰⁶ Similarly, in the portion of his analysis devoted to “compositional fabric” (harmony, melody, continuity, workmanship, style), Schumann counters Fétis's disparaging appraisal of Berlioz's melodic and harmonic manner with a penetrating commentary on the work's harmonic freshness, syntactic freedom, and the logic of its thematic invention.¹⁰⁷ Thus, Schumann puts his analysis at the service of a higher goal: an argument for the grounding of Berlioz's work in a system of thoughtfully conceived musical relationships.¹⁰⁸

The review culminates with a striking passage on the “spirit” that rules over form, matter (or “fabric”), and idea in Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Here Schumann synthesizes the psychological and analytical approaches developed thusfar, bringing them both together under the banner of his philosophy of history. The determination of the presence or lack of spirit in a musical composition is clearly a subjective activity, but given his objective look at the inner workings of Berlioz's symphony, Schumann is confident in asserting that it is indeed imbued with this quality. The work certainly has its flaws (Schumann reserves his harshest judgment for what he views as lapses of taste in the finale's representation of the witches' sabbath), but these flaws may well be inextricably linked to an age “that tolerates a burlesque of the Dies irae.”¹⁰⁹ On Schumann's view, burlesque, parody, and irony are very much a part of the texture of the present; moreover, all of these categories have been given poetic expression in the writings of Heine, Byron, and Hugo. To deny them to contemporary poets and composers would be tantamount to setting ourselves against the times—a futile and foolish exercise. As an artist living in an imperfect but perfectible age, Berlioz should not be too harshly criticized for what he has failed to do but rather praised for what he promises to accomplish in the future, in the “new poetic age” toward which Schumann looked forward.¹¹⁰

As we will see, Schumann eventually came to view his journalistic undertakings as a noisome drain on his time and energy. Just under a decade after assuming full editorial control of the Neue Zeitschrift, he sold his share in the journal to Franz Brendel, ostensibly to pursue his compositional projects undistracted. But in the mid-1830s, Schumann's work as critic answered to a real need: it provided him with a means of mediating a long-standing inner struggle between his dual inclination toward music and poetry, thus serving as yet another manifestation of his attempt to approach all creative activity as a form of literature. Moreover, there is a fascinating give-and-take between Schumann the critic and Schumann the composer throughout the middle and later 1830s. Often his comments on the triumphs and failings of other artists amount to veiled critiques of his own compositional endeavors. And if much of Schumann's criticism reads like “poetry”, so too can much of his music be interpreted as a kind of critique in sound, a point to which we will return in the following chapter.

Notes

1. TB [Schumann, R., Tagebücher] 1, pp. 417, 419.

2. Entries in what Schumann called a “kleines Tagebuch” cover the period 28 July 1836 to 28 October 1837; see TB 2, pp. 22-42.

3. TB 1, pp. 419-23.

4. See [Schumann, R.,] Briefe, Neue Folge, p. 537.

5. The case for a period of heated compositional activity in the first half of 1833 is further strengthened by the Vienna précis, where Schumann notes that immediately after drafting the Impromptus [26-30 May], he set to work on the Fn-minor Sonata, and “more or less finished [it] up to the last part.” See TB 1, p. 419.

6. This is one of the central arguments of Kapp's Studien zum Spätwerk; see, e.g., pp. 9, 32-34, 41, 57-58, 61-62.

7. GS [Schumann, R., Gesammelte Schriften …] 1, p. 63.

8. For a discussion of the Berlin sketch and transcriptions of the Intermezzo and several of the Ritornelli, see Boetticher, Schumanns Klavierwerke 1, pp. 87-90. A presumably later sketch, once part of a private collection in Munich, but now lost, also bears the title Scenes musicales; see Boetticher, Schumanns Klavierwerke 1, pp. 85-86.

9. Schumann, Selbstbiographische Notizen, ed. Schoppe.

10. For an excellent summary of the genesis of Schumann's themes, see Becker, “New Look,” pp. 570-77. As Becker points out, the opening of Clara's theme bears an uncanny resemblance to a four-measure sketch drafted by Schumann on 30 September 1830 while en route from Paderborn to Detmold (see TB 1, p. 321). Since Clara's composition probably dates from 1831 (and since even if it dates from 1830, Schumann, who was in Heidelberg at the time, would not have seen it), Becker convincingly argues that after resettling in Leipzig in October 1830 Schumann may have shared his sketch with Clara, who then elaborated it as the theme of her Romance. As Becker also notes, “Clara's” theme was destined for a long history. When Clara and Brahms wrote variations on the fourth piece in Schumann's Bunte Blätter, op. 99—Clara's Variations, op. 20 (1853) were dedicated “to HIM,” that is, Robert, while the manuscript of Brahms's Opus 9 (1854) refers to Variations on a “theme by him” and “dedicated to her”—they both alluded to the theme of Clara's youthful Romance (see mm. 201-6 of Clara's Variations, and Variation 10, mm. 30-31, of Brahms's). Clara's theme, in other words, had evolved into an emblem for shared artistic ideals among the members of Schumann's circle.

11. The resemblance between Schumann's and Beethoven's variations was not lost on Liszt. See the comments on the Impromptus in his 1837 review of Schumann's Opp. 5, 11, and 14 for the Gazette musicale, reproduced in Wasielewski, Schumann, p. 521.

12. See Selbstbiographische Notizen, ed. Schoppe; and TB 1, p. 400. On Schumann's debt to Bach in the Impromptus, see also Rosen, Romantic Generation, pp. 664-668. As Rosen points out, Schumann draws upon (but transforms) the tradition of the fugal gigue in the finale of the work.

13. To be sure, Schumann's revision of the Impromptus, published in 1850, in which he excised the rhapsodic No. 11 altogether and made the concluding references to Clara's theme more explicit, undercuts this interpretation. For a thorough account of the differences, great and small, between the two versions of the work, see Becker, “A Study of Robert Schumann's Impromptus,” and “A New Look,” pp. 583-85. Becker makes a good case for the affective “imbalance” of the revision. In my view as well, the later version lacks the poetry of the original.

14. TB 1, p. 419.

15. Ibid.

16. [Schumann, R.,] Jugendbriefe, pp. 227-28. The last quotation, omitted from the Jugendbriefe, is cited from Ostwald, Schumann: Inner Voices, p. 103.

17. Litzmann, Clara Schumann 1, pp. 84-85. This letter, when considered along with Schumann's reference to his move from a fifth-floor to a ground-floor apartment, strengthens the conjecture that he may have contemplated suicide by flinging himself out of his apartment window on the “most frightful evening” of 17 October 1833; see TB 1, p. 419. Wasielewski notes, however, that while some individuals supported the claim, others denied it. See Wasielewski, Schumann, p. 11.

    As we have already seen (Introduction, pp. 5-7), there is little evidence to support Ostwald's claim that “homosexual panic” hastened the onset of Schumann's illness. True, a group of “attractive young men,” many of them eventual collaborators on his journal, had begun to gather around him, and to be sure, “revelry as well as rivalry” prevailed in that circle, but the composer's supposed “desire for intimacy with men” was probably more of a cultural than a sexual phenomenon. Cf. Ostwald, Schumann: Inner Voices, pp. 102-4.

18. These together with related symptoms (depression, anxiety, fear of death, physical weakness, trembling in the limbs, insomnia) would recur with greater intensity about a decade later. But the effects of the breakdown that Schumann suffered following his return from a Russian tour with Clara in 1844 would persist for almost three years. See TB 2, p. 396; Litzmann, Clara Schumann 2, p. 76; and Wasielewski, Schumann, p. 352.

19. Jugendbriefe, p. 227.

20. TB 1, p. 417.

21. See Schumann's letter to his mother of 28 June 1833, in Jugendbriefe, p. 209; and TB 1, p. 419.

22. Jansen, Davidsbündler, p. 53. See also TB 1, p. 420; and Schumann's Introduction to the collected editions of his writings (1854), in GS 1, p. 1.

23. Jugendbriefe, pp. 209ff. Likewise, Schumann was not indifferent to the possible material benefits of the enterprise. See the letter of 19 March 1834 to his mother (Jugendbriefe, p. 233): “Apart from honor and fame, I can also expect some profit [from the journal], so that you can really rest easier about my getting along in the future.”

24. See Marc Andreae's Preface to Schumann, Sinfonie G-moll für Orchester (Frankfurt, London, New York: Litolff's Verlag/Peters, 1972).

25. TB 1, p. 419.

26. Ibid.

27. Jugendbriefe, p. 232.

28. TB 1, p. 420.

29. See Schumann's letter of 25 August 1834 to Henriette Voigt, in Briefe, Neue Folge, p. 55; and TB 1, p. 420.

30. NZfM [Neue Zeitschrift für Musik] 2 (1835), p. 146.

31. A somewhat abridged version of the article appears in GS 2, pp. 260-72.

32. See TB 1, pp. 339, 342-44, 379, 382; and Schoppe, “Schumanns frühe Texte,” p. 13.

33. Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe (cited hereafter as KFSA) 2, p. 271.

34. See the entry for 6 June 1831, in TB 1, p. 337.

35. Warrack, Weber, p. 104.

36. The leading lights of Leipzig's cultural elite belonged to the Tunnel über der Pleisse; other members whom Schumann knew well included the music dealer and publisher Friedrich Hofmeister, Karl Herlossohn, and Heinrich Dorn. Although Schumann never joined the group, he did attend some of the functions it sponsored. A diary entry for January 1837, for example, reads: “Masked ball at the Tunnell” (TB 2, p. 31). For an excellent summary of the activities of the Ludlamshöhle, the Tunnel über der Spree, and the Tunnel über der Pleisse, along with an account of their relationship to Schumann's Davidsbund, see, Appel, “Schumanns Davidsbund,” pp. 1-15.

37. GS 1, p. 2.

38. Letter of 14 September 1836 to Dorn, in Briefe, Neue Folge, p. 77.

39. There are some differences of opinion over the identities of the individuals masked by these Davidsbündler names. “Knif,” for instance, may refer to Gottfried Fink, the editor of the rival Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (“Knif” = “Fink” in reverse); or to Julius Knorr, who also appears in the Neue Zeitschrift simply as “Julius.” Jansen (Davidsbündler, p. 31) held to the first view, Kreisig (GS 2, p. 460, note 520) to the second.

40. Entry for 8 June 1831, in TB 1, p. 339.

41. As Appel points out, Leipzig enjoyed a relatively loose enforcement of the censorship laws in the period after the enactment of the Carlsbad Decrees (1819); see “Schumanns Davidsbund,” pp. 17-18.

42. In the months leading up to the founding of the journal, the makeup of the editorial committee underwent several changes. Schumann included Ortlepp, Wieck, and two unnamed music teachers among the journal's “directors” in a letter to his mother of 28 June 1833 (Jugendbriefe, p. 210); a week before the March 1834 contract was drawn up, he listed Ferdinand Stegmeyer (who, according to the final arrangements, was retained as a tie-breaker should the four editors fail to reach a concensus), Knorr, Schunke, Wieck, and himself as editors; see Jugendbriefe, p. 233, and Kross, “Aus der Frühgeschichte,” p. 432.

43. The contract is reproduced in Kross, “Aus der Frühgeschichte,” pp. 429-32.

44. GS 2, p. 273.

45. Jugendbriefe, p. 242.

46. TB 1, p. 420.

47. For a detailed account of the entire affair and a transcription of the 24 December 1834 contract, see Kross, “Aus der Frühgeschichte,” pp. 426-29, 433-38.

48. GS 1, p. 1.

49. Kross, “Aus der Frühgeschichte,” p. 445.

50. TB 1, pp. 420, 473 (notes 447, 448).

51. See Boetticher, Schumanns Klavierwerke 2, p. 47.

52. See Eismann, Quellenwerk 1, p. 124; and TB 1, pp. 420-21.

53. TB 1, p. 419.

54. See Plantinga, Schumann as Critic, pp. 82-85. Before the founding of the Neue Zeitschrift in 1834, Schumann is known to have studied two books dealing with music history: C. F. D. Schubart's Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1806), and Thibaut's Über Reinheit der Tonkunst (1825/26), both of them highly unreliable on matters of historical fact. Only around 1840, and perhaps under the influence of C. F. Becker, who reviewed publications on historical themes for the Neue Zeitschrift, did Schumann make a serious effort to improve his knowledge in this area. After selling the journal in 1844, he continued along the same course; among the entries in the Lektürebüchlein for 1847 are Forkel's biography of Bach, Mattheson's biography of Handel, and Kiesewetter's Geschichte der Europaeisch-Abenalaendischen oder unsrer heutigen Musik (1834/1846); see Nauhaus, “Schumanns Lektürebüchlein,” pp. 71, 83. As Boetticher has pointed out, Schumann also read Baini's biography of Palestrina during this period; see Schumann: Einführung, pp. 291-292.

55. NZfM 2 (1835), p. 3.

56. GS 1, p. 60.

57. As early as May 1828 Schumann expressed the same conceit in even more starkly existential terms: “The past is the angel of destruction of the present, and every moment a victim of suicide, for a single beautiful moment kills not only itself but also millions of its future sisters.” See TB 1, p. 89; and Mayeda, “Schumanns Gegenwart,” p. 18.

58. TB 1, p. 110; and GS 1, p. 23.

59. See Szondi, “Friedrich Schlegel and Romantic Irony,” pp. 57-59. For discussions of the points of contact between Schumann's thinking and Schlegel's, see Botstein, “History, Rhetoric,” pp. 23-29; Dahlhaus, Analysis, p. 16; Dahlhaus, Klassische und Romantische, p. 260; and my Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 12. Other precedents for Schumann's philosophy of history include Heine's faith in a future informed by the spirit of progress (as articulated in Zur Geschichte der Neueren Schönen Literatur in Deutschland [1833]) and Jean Paul's conviction that the past and future can only be experienced poetically, as “memory” and “hope” (see “Über die Realität des Ideals” from Titan, in [Paul, Jean,] Jean Paul Werke 3, p. 221). For further commentary on the relationships among Schumann, Heine, and Jean Paul, see Knepler, Musikgeschichte, p. 774; and Mayeda, “Schumann's Gegenwart,” p. 13.

60. Briefe, Neue Folge, p. 52.

61. For excerpts from Schumann's Chronologische Geschichte, see Boetticher, Schumann: Einführung, pp. 291-92.

62. Briefe, Neue Folge, pp. 177-78. Schumann's reference to the “profound combinatorial power” of Bach's music resonates with the critical categories of Jena Romanticism. For Friedrich Schlegel, the combinatorial power par excellence is Witz (wit), the faculty that allows us to discern similarities between apparently dissimilar entities. See, e.g., Athenäum Fragment 220 (KFSA 2, p. 200), Ideen Fragment 123 (KFSA 2, p. 268), Philosophische Fragmente, Zweite Epoche II, no. 729 (KFSA 18, p. 381), and especially the commentary on the literary fragment in Lessings Gedanken und Meinungen (KFSA 3, p. 83).

63. 1838 review of Czerny's edition of the WTC, in GS 1, p. 354.

64. GS 1, p. 9.

65. TB 1, p. 348.

66. Leipziger Musikleben 1837/38, in GS 1, p. 380.

67. GS 2, p. 74.

68. 1839 review in GS 1, p. 401.

69. 1841 review of the 13th through 16th subscription concerts of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, in GS 2, p. 54. By the following year, Schumann had somewhat tempered this position. In a review of recently composed string quartets, he noted that while Hirschbach took Beethoven as his model, “many fruit-laden trees still stand in the gardens of Mozart and Haydn.” GS 2, p. 75.

70. NZfM 1 (1834), p. 78.

71. NZfM 1 (1834), p. 62.

72. NZfM 1 (1834), p. 38. For further discussion of Schumann's politicization of the current musical scene, see Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 247-48; Dahlhaus, Klassische und Romantische, p. 261; and Knepler, Musikgeschichte, p. 773.

73. Boetticher, Schumann: Einführung, p. 292.

74. See Plantinga, Schumann as Critic, pp. 102-3.

75. Review of Heller's Drei Impromptus, op. 7, in NZfM 7 (1837), p. 70. Cf. also Schumann's 1839 New Year's editorial, NZfM 10 (1839), p. 1; and his letter to Keferstein of 31 January 1840, in Briefe, Neue Folge, pp. 177-78. As Plantinga further points out, Schumann and his confrères were often dubbed “neoromantics,” a term emphasizing their position as restorers of tradition, by contemporary writers; see Schumann as Critic, p. 107.

76. NZfM 2 (1835), p. 3.

77. Fastnachtsrede von Florestan, in NZfM 2 (1835), p. 116.

78. NZfM 1 (1834), p. 63.

79. Ibid., p. 4.

80. Schlegel, KFSA 1, p. 35.

81. GS 1, p. 252. See also “Etüden für das Pianoforte” (1839), GS 1, p. 76.

82. See NZfM 1 (1834), p. 151; NZfM 1 (1834), pp. 113-14; NZfM 10 (1839), p. 74; and NZfM 16 (1842), p. 174.

83. NZfM 5 (1836), p. 63; NZfM 10 (1839), p. 134; NZfM 10 (1839), p. 6; NZfM 11 (1839), p. 1.

84. NZfM 5 (1836), p. 63; NZfM 15 (1841), p. 141; NZfM 4 (1836); p. 163; NZfM 3 (1835), p. 33.

85. “Sonaten für Clavier,” NZfM 10 (1839), p. 134.

86. GS 1, p. 30.

87. Athenäum Fragment 80, KFSA 2, p. 176.

88. Philosophische Fragmente, Erste Epoche, II, no. 927, KFSA 18, p. 106.

89. See Kritische Fragmente 117, KFSA 2, p. 183; and “Vom Wesen der Kritik” (1804), in KFSA 3, p. 55.

90. See Benjamin, Begriff der Kunstkritik, pp. 60-63.

91. GS 1, p. 44.

92. Otto, Schumann als Jean-Paul Leser, p. 75.

93. “Der Davidsbündler,” GS 2, p. 263.

94. “An Chiara” (1835), GS 1, pp. 121-22.

95. GS 1, p. 2.

96. Ibid., p. 13.

97. Ibid., p. 14.

98. Ibid., pp. 52-53.

99. For a discussion of the points of contact between hermeneutics and Schumann's critical strategies, see Bent, Music Analysis 2, pp. 122-23.

100. See the entry for 31 May 1831, in TB 1, p. 335.

101. GS 2, pp. 210-11.

102. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 54.

103. The “first kiss,” which Florestan locates in Variation 5, occurs in Gf major, not Bf major as he says. See GS 1, pp. 6-7.

104. NZfM 3 (1835), pp. 1-2, 33-35, 37-38, 41-51. For translations, see Cone, Berlioz, pp. 220-248; and Bent, Music Analysis 2, pp. 166-94.

105. Hoffmann's review, first published in 1810 in the AmZ, begins with a florid account of Beethoven's ability to awaken “just that infinite longing which is the essence of romanticism” and proceeds with a demonstration of the thematic unity of the Fifth Symphony, supported by numerous musical examples. See Hoffmann, Schriften 5, pp. 34-51. Three years later, Hoffmann combined material from this review with another on Beethoven's piano trios, op. 70; the newly titled essay, “Beethovens Instrumentalmusik,” was published in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt. The essay also appeared in the Kreisleriana section of the Fantasiestücke in Callot's Manier (1814-1815).

106. Cf. NZfM 3 (1835), p. 37; and the gloss on Schumann's analysis in Cone, Berlioz, pp. 250-261.

107. Though Fétis is not mentioned by name, Schumann published his 1 February 1835 review (Revue musicale) in the 19 and 23 June 1835 issues of the Neue Zeitschrift and thus knew it well. See Bent, Music Analysis, vol. 2, pp. 162-63.

108. As Bent also points out, it is remarkable that Schumann should have come to such insightful conclusions working from Liszt's piano transcription of the score alone. See Bent, Music Analysis, vol. 2, p. 161.

109. NZfM 3 (1835), pp. 50-51.

110. Berlioz was much heartened by Schumann's review. In a letter of 28 December 1836, he expressed his wish for a meeting with Schumann; this, however, did not take place until February 1843 (Boetticher, ed., Briefe und Gedichte, pp. 35ff. and 232ff.) As time went on, Schumann grew more uncertain of Berlioz's ability to make good on this promise. In an 1839 review of the Waverley Overture, he wrote: “If one traces the derivation of isolated thematic ideas, they often seem conventional, even trivial in themselves. But the whole exerts an irresistible charm on me, in spite of its assault on a German ear unused to such things. Berlioz reveals himself differently in all of his works and charts out new territory in each: it's difficult to know whether he should be called a genius or a musical adventurer.” (NZfM 10 [1839], p. 187). Four years later, Schumann's reaction to Berlioz's music had cooled further: “At present, I confess, I would certainly be harsher with much of his work. The years make one more severe, and the unlovely things I found in Berlioz's earlier music … have not become more beautiful in the interim. But I also maintain that a divine spark resides in this musician.” (NZfM 19 [1843], pp. 177-78).

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