SOURCE: Plantinga, Leon B. “Introduction,” “Schumann's Style of Criticism,” and “Schumann's Aesthetics of Music.” In Schumann as Critic, pp. ix-xiii; 59-78; 111-34. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.

[In the following excerpts, Plantinga examines several facets of Schumann's criticism, with particular emphasis on his style and musical philosophy.]

At the age of twenty, Robert Schumann, thoroughly bored with his law studies at the University of Heidelberg, decided to devote himself to music. This was in the autumn of 1830, and during the next year he plunged wholeheartedly into not one, but three kinds of musical activities: piano playing, composing, and writing music criticism. In the spring of 1832 a hand injury put an end to his ambitions as a pianist; but by that time he had already published his earliest compositions as well as his first essay on music, and the pattern of his life was set for some time to come.

In one of the two musical careers left to Schumann, he seems to have achieved permanent recognition. Though his stock as a composer fluctuates mildly from time to time (less than Mendelssohn's, more than Chopin's) a good bit of his music has long been a stable part of the active repertory. But though Schumann himself once said he preferred writing music to writing about it, during much of his lifetime he was in fact better known and more influential as a critic than as a composer. That this estimate of the relative importance of his two roles has now been reversed is not hard to understand. There are, after all, more people who listen to nineteenth-century music than there are who read nineteenth-century music criticism. Moreover Schumann wrote about a full cross-section of the European musical scene in the earlier nineteenth century—not just the small part of it that is still current in the twentieth. But if this kind of comprehensiveness makes some of Schumann's writings seem a little remote from ordinary contemporary interests, it adds immeasurably to their value as a commentary on nineteenth-century European musical culture as it really was.

Schumann began writing criticism at a time when Germany's musical future looked uncertain. In the second half of the preceding century the German-speaking states had for the first time achieved a certain preeminence in music. Though opera was still borrowed from Italy, the instrumental music of the Mannheim court, of C. P. E. and J. C. Bach, and perhaps most importantly, the symphonies of Joseph Haydn, were largely indigenous—and eminently exportable—products. Beethoven added a powerful impetus to the Germans' pride in their music, but when he died in 1827 there was no one in sight to continue the tradition. Within a decade the most admired composer in the world was Meyerbeer, and the few composers like Spohr, Hummel, and Moscheles who continued to cultivate the large instrumental forms were not of sufficient influence to stem the tide of music, much of it trivial, that flowed from the salons of Paris. Once again the Germans listened, for the most part, to foreign styles of music. It was in response to this state of affairs that Schumann first sharpened his critic's pen.

A music critic in the present day, especially in the United States, is someone who makes judgments, instantaneously arrived at and promptly recorded, on musical performances. A Rezensent for a musical journal in Schumann's time acted quite differently: his usual duty was to evaluate not performances but scores. This practice had its beginnings in the semi-popular context of the Kenner und Liebhaber journals of the later eighteenth century, and when Schumann arrived on the scene such music criticism still had, usually, a gentle and tolerant tone. Schumann cut sharply from this tradition. Making the most of his pronounced gift for writing, he went about his work with caustic wit and youthful idealism, injecting into music criticism something of the professionalism and severity of standards he saw in contemporary literary criticism. The result is a unique record of the reactions of a first-rate musical mind to a whole decade of European music.

Schumann wrote almost all his criticism in the course of performing his regular duties as editor and writer for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (cited hereafter as NZfM),¹ the journal he helped establish in 1834 and edited from January 1835 until July 1844. He contributed a few scattered articles to other periodicals; his often-mentioned review of Chopin's Variations on Là ci darem la mano appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (hereafter AmZ) of 1831, and in 1833 two essays entitled Der Davidsbündler were published in a literary journal called Der Komet. In addition he wrote a few concert reviews for the Allgemeine Zeitung of Leipzig.

In 1853 Schumann himself assembled most of his published prose works, together with a few aphorisms from disparate sources, and arranged them in roughly chronological order for publication. In the spring of 1854, just after he was committed to the asylum at Endenich, they were brought out in four volumes by the Leipzig firm of Wigand under the title Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker.² Schumann remained the best editor of his own works until the fourth edition of the Gesammelte Schriften, prepared by the dedicated Schumann scholar F. Gustav Jansen, appeared in 1891; Jansen added a number of articles omitted by Schumann and provided some valuable commentary. Martin Kreisig, former director of the Schumannmuseum in Zwickau, presided over the fifth and final edition, a model of accuracy and thoroughness. But even this collection lacks several articles and a good many comments, footnotes, and the like that are unquestionably by Schumann. The form and order of the material are the same as in the 1854 edition; things Schumann omitted there are given in footnotes and in a Nachtrag, and the true chronological order is shown only in a somewhat abstract table.³ Whatever the merits of Kreisig's edition, I have felt it was essential to base this study on Schumann's criticism in its original form in the NZfM.⁴

In the present day, Schumann the critic has been more used, it seems, than understood. His commentary on music has proved serviceable to countless writers on Schubert, Berlioz, and Mendelssohn; excerpts from his criticism are used in books of various kinds, but much more commonly on record jackets and in program notes. As a result, many people have a faint familiarity with Schumann's writings. Concert-goers recognize “Hats off, gentlemen—a genius!” and “these heavenly lengths,” and many of them know that Schumann wrote a long review of the Symphonie fantastique and endorsed the young Brahms. In view of this popular currency some of his work enjoys, it is remarkable how little has been written about Schumann's criticism; somehow things he said have become common knowledge without ever having been specialized knowledge.

There may be plausible enough reasons for this. In the first place, musical scholarship is still of rather a tender age, and is only now getting around to investigating the nineteenth century. Music historians have shown a lively interest, as they should, in almost all the composers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance; we know a good deal of music by the contemporaries of Machaut and Landini, and of Josquin and Palestrina. The really obscure composers in Western history are the contemporaries of Beethoven and Schumann. Important musicians like Hummel, Moscheles, Loewe, and Hiller remain obscure, and men like C.-S. Catel, F. W. Grund, and C. G. Reissiger interest almost nobody but lexicographers. Perhaps nineteenth-century music has been last to attract the attention of musical scholars because it is too much with us. Since the nineteenth century, it has—or, rather, some of it has—comprised the bulk of the music we hear at concerts (and now on records) and familiarity of this kind, unfortunately, sometimes breeds contempt. In the case of Schumann the field has been left for the most part to generations of simplified and derivative biographies, all based on a few books of substance written long ago.

Though specialized studies in the field are few, I have benefited from a number of publications by people who have worked with Schumann before me, especially the collections of letters edited by Clara Schumann⁵ and F. Gustav Jansen.⁶ Of the older secondary literature on Schumann, most helpful have been the notes in Kreisig's edition of the Gesammelte Schriften, Jansen's Die Davidsbündler,⁷ and the biography of Frederick Niecks (still probably the best book in English on Schumann).⁸ The most extensive research on Schumann of the last forty years is represented by the two books of Wolfgang Boetticher, Robert Schumann, Einführung in Persönlichkeit und Werk (Berlin, 1941), and Robert Schumann in seinen Schriften und Briefen (Berlin, 1942). These books offer a wealth of previously unpublished documentary matter (copious extracts, particularly, from Schumann's diaries), and one should, I suppose, be grateful for them. But nothing in these wartime publications can be taken on faith; calculated to make both Schumann and Boetticher acceptable to the Nazi regime, they are badly marred by distortions and suppressions. Perhaps it is just as well that murky writing makes the Einführung—like many books with this name, it is a gargantuan tome—almost impossible to read. Misinformation in such a form spreads slowly. More recent books on Schumann⁹ show little new research, and none of them acknowledges his criticism with more than a respectful nod. The fullest discussion of Schumann's journalistic activities, strangely enough, is in a book about another composer and critic; it is Robert Pessenlehner's Herrmann Hirschbach, der Kritiker und Künstler.¹⁰ There have been, from time to time, a few indifferent articles on Schumann's aesthetic views, for example those by Hermann Kretzschmar¹¹ and Arnold Schmitz,¹² and most recently, a very much better one by Edward A. Lippman.¹³

This book will be about Schumann's work as a critic: the content and style of his writings, and the context within which he operated. Anyone who writes about criticism is potentially two steps removed from the focal point of interest; for what he offers is essentially a commentary upon a commentary. Here I hope to avoid this pitfall by introducing prominently into evidence (especially in the later chapters) the original subject: the music Schumann was writing about. Otherwise it would be impossible in many cases to understand what Schumann is saying, and any sure assessment of his importance as a critic would be out of the question.

.....

SCHUMANN'S STYLE OF CRITICISM

Until 1830 the young Schumann's interests were about equally divided between literature and music. When in that year he decided to devote himself fully to music, his formal training in the field appears to have been slight—if anything, inferior to his literary education. It consisted almost solely of about eight years' piano study under Johann Gottfried Kuntsch (1775-1855), organist and choir director of the Zwickau Marienkirche, himself an amateur in music, and a man branded by most of the Schumann biographers as decidedly mediocre.¹⁴ Schumann's knowledge of music was otherwise acquired in the homes of amateur musicians where he took part in musical soirées, accompanying vocal music and participating in chamber ensembles. Carl E. Carus (1774-1842),¹⁵ merchant and manufacturer in Bautzen, and later in Zwickau, was the first and perhaps most important patron of the young Schumann's musical career. Upon his death in 1843, Schumann wrote an extended eulogy in the NZfM:

And it was in his house that the names Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were spoken of daily with enthusiasm. It was in his house that I first became acquainted with the rarer works of these masters, otherwise never to be heard in a small town, especially their quartets; I was often even permitted to participate at the piano.¹⁶

In the spring of 1828, Schumann, like many great German musicians before him, enrolled at the University of Leipzig to study law. In his first year there, though law appears to have taken up little of his time, he had no formal studies in music except for a few sporadic piano lessons with Wieck. During this year he submitted some of his compositions to the composer Gottlob Wiedebein (1779-1854), and in a later letter confessed to him, “I have no knowledge of harmony, thorough bass, etc., or counterpoint; I am but a pure, simple disciple of guiding nature, and I merely followed a blind, vain impulse which wanted to shake off all fetters.¹⁷

This pristine innocence Schumann claimed for himself was surely something of a pose; he was strongly attracted at this time to a naive adulation of nature such as that in Edward Young's “Some are pupils of nature only, nor go further to school.” And though during this year in Leipzig, as well as the following one in Heidelberg, his principal contacts with music were through amateur musical circles,¹⁸ in 1830 Schumann was a good enough pianist for Wieck to promise him that, if he applied himself, in three years he would rival Moscheles and Hummel.¹⁹ Schumann's attempts at composing before his return to Leipzig in 1830 were limited for the most part to the improvisation of free fantasias and variations. Yet a few of his early attempts were written down, and some incorporated into later compositions.²⁰ Between Schumann's return to Leipzig in 1830 and the founding of the NZfM in 1834, he studied piano with Wieck, and counterpoint (from July 1831 to April 1832) with Heinrich Dorn—his first sustained professional musical training. Yet by 1834 Schumann had demonstrated his musical proficiency. Some of his best-known compositions date from this period: the Papillons op. 2, the “Etudes on Caprices of Paganini” op. 3 and 10, the “Toccata” op. 7, and parts of the Carnaval op. 9.

Schumann showed marked literary proclivities from the time of his boyhood in Zwickau. The son of a book dealer and publisher who had literary inclinations himself,²¹ Schumann was early immersed in literature ranging from the Greek classics to the writings of Byron and Scott. His school friend, Emil Flechsig, reminisces in his Erinnerungen (c. 1875), that “there was abundant opportunity to become acquainted with literature; the entire Schumann house was full of classics.”²² Schumann's linguistic and literary training at the Gymnasium in Zwickau must have been excellent, for if we believe his own report in his “Materialen zu einem Lebenslauf,” at the age of fifteen he was making translations from Anacreon, and later from Bion, Theocrites, Homer, Sophocles, Tibullus, Horace and the Latin poetry of the seventeenth-century Polish writer, Matthias Kasmir Sarbiewski. At this time, the report continues, his studies of German literature included the works of Klopstock, Schiller, and Hölderlin, and, especially in 1827, Shakespeare and the novelist who was to exert a formidable influence on his prose style, Jean Paul.²³ Schumann's study of Goethe, as Wörner indicates, did not really begin until about 1830.²⁴

In 1825 Schumann and several of his friends, with adolescent exuberance, formed a “German Literary Society” where they discussed literature of various kinds and presented their own poetry for criticism; this society continued to meet until 1828.²⁵ As a Gymnasium student Schumann was forever composing poetry, essays, aphorisms, and fragments for novels (none of which was ever completed). Jansen pointed out Schumann's remarkable literary precocity in an article in Die Musik in 1906.²⁶ He described there a small manuscript volume from 1823 entitled “Blätter und Blümchen aus der goldenen Aue,” in which Schumann had assembled extracts that appealed to him from a great variety of literary sources. He gave a list of Schumann's writings from the years 1826-27, and printed some of them. There are essays entitled “Ueber die Zufälligkeit und Nichtigkeit des Nachruhms,”²⁷ “Das Leben des Dichters,” and a few poems. Kreisig adds to the list of youthful essays now in print one on a theme that always interested Schumann, “Ueber die innige Verwandschaft der Poesie und Tonkunst,” and one entitled “Einfluss der Einsamkeit auf die Bildung des Geistes und die Veredelung des Herzens.”²⁸ Boetticher's two books on Schumann add considerably to our information about his early literary activities; Boetticher cites fragments of projected novels entitled “Selene” and “Juniusabende und Julitage,” and prints extracts from an attempt at musical aesthetics called “Die Tonwelt,” all from 1826-28.²⁹

During his years in Zwickau, Schumann's familiarity with books was further nurtured in his family's publishing house. In March 1828, Schumann wrote to Flechsig,

I am hard at work with Forcellini, correcting, selecting, looking things up, reading through the Grüter inscriptions. The work is interesting; one learns much from it … besides, all the distinguished philologists are working on it … I have had to ransack the whole library, and have found many unprinted collectanea of Gronow, Gräv, Scalliger, Heinsius, Barth, Daum, etc.³⁰

The first half of this letter is an extreme example of Schumann's most rapturous, ornate prose—a striking contrast to his exacting, sober work on a major Latin lexicon, and even his description of that work. Schumann was by this time an unabashed admirer of Jean Paul, and often imitated his diffuse, extravagant prose. He did this for a time very consciously—he could turn this kind of writing off and on like a water tap—but his fascination with the rapturous late romantic prose style was a passing phase. Schumann continued to appreciate Jean Paul for the rest of his life; but he stopped imitating him as maturity set in.

Wörner says that Schumann's interests in music and literature interfered with each other, and that his literary activities, in fact, long held him to an amateur level in music.³¹ Schumann was painfully aware of this; in December, 1830, after his decision to become a professional musician, Schumann wrote, “If only my talent for music and poetry would converge into a single point, the light would not be so scattered, and I could attempt a great deal.”³² In his career as a music critic, especially the earlier part of it, Schumann was able to reconcile, in more than a superficial sense, his talents for music and literature.

Schumann's earliest journal articles are fantasies in ornate prose that are only incidentally about music. His famous Chopin review in the AmZ of 1831 and his Davidsbündler articles in Der Komet of 1833 are cast as narratives, complete with description of characters, dialogue, and even some action. They look exactly like fragments of novels; the first of the Davidsbündler articles (with the subtitle “Leipziger Musikleben”) begins:

A window above me was suddenly thrown open, and behind it, in the half-shadows, I recognized a pointed, angular-nosed Swedish head. And as I was still looking up, something like fragrant falling leaves floated and played about my temples: it was scraps of paper thrown down from above. But at home, as though rooted to the spot, I read (in a paper that held together better) the following:

Our Italian nights go on. The heaven-storming Florestan has for a time been quieter than usual, and seems to have something on his mind. But then recently Eusebius let fall a few words that reawakened the demon in him. After reading a number of Iris, he said, namely, “He is just too severe.” “What? What did you say, Eusebius?” said Florestan, rising up, “Rellstab is too severe? Is then this damnable German politeness to last for centuries? … But the time is coming when we must stand up against this unholy alliance of patronage and perversity, before it engulfs us and makes for no end of trouble. But what do you think, Master Raro?

You know Raro's methodical way of speaking—made even stranger because of his Italian accent—how he, fugue-like, sets phrase upon phrase, makes various distinctions, narrows down his material, limits it yet more, finally brings everything together again and seems to say, I agree.³³

Schumann had no intention that the Chopin review and the Davidsbündler articles should remain as isolated essays; both were to have been merely the first installments of extended series, and the Davidsbündler articles Schumann specifically intended to expand into a novel. These pieces are clearly examples of the “musical belles-lettres” Schumann mentioned to Mosen in 1833. Schumann apparently intended to give essays like this a prominent place in his journal; he asked Mosen to write a musical Novelle for the first issues, and to Franz Otto he suggested “English letters” addressed to an “imaginary person (a sweetheart, a Vult Harnisch or Peter Schoppe).”³⁴

As 1834 wore on, the duties of editor and reviewer of instrumental music fell more and more to Schumann. It was already clear from his Chopin review that his novelistic style seemed to him perfectly serviceable for writing music reviews, and he used variations of this style—usually with an element of moderation lacking in 1831—in a good many of his early critiques of piano music in the NZfM. The results varied: a review of Hummel's Etudes op. 125 is divided into three parts, each stating a slightly different point of view, and each signed by one of Schumann's imaginary Jean-Paulian characters, Florestan, Eusebius, and Raro (the entire review appears under the heading, “Die Davidsbündler”).³⁵ The gentle Eusebius says,

The experienced, reflective master writes etudes differently from the young fantast. The former knows intimately the forces with which he must deal, their beginning and end, their means and goals; he lays out his circle of activity about him and never steps over that line. The latter, on the other hand, lays piece on piece, piles up rocks one atop the other, until finally he himself can surmount the herculean structure only at the peril of his life. …

In view of the lightning-fast development of music to the heights of poetic freedom—of this no other art can offer a parallel example—it is inevitable that even the better things can remain current for only about a decade. It is an act of intolerance that many of the younger spirits are ungrateful, forgetting that they are building a superstructure upon a foundation they have not laid. Every younger generation has committed this act of intolerance, and every future one will too.

Florestan answers:

Good, kindly Eusebius, you make me laugh. And when you have all turned back your clocks, the sun will still rise as before. However highly I value your tendency to assign everything to its proper place, I think you are really a repressed romantic—but with a certain diffidence about famous names, which time will cure.

Really, my friend, if some had their way, we would soon be back to those golden days when you got your ears boxed for putting your thumb on the black keys. But I won't even go into the falsities of some of your effusions, but instead get to the work itself.

Methods and schools make for rapid progress, to be sure, but such progress is one-sided and trivial. O pedants, what sinners you are! With your Logier-natures you pull the bud forcibly out of its covering. Like falconers you clip the feathers of your students lest they fly too high. You ought to be guides who show the way—without always coming along yourselves! (I'm too embroiled in these ideas to come to the point.) …

Who could deny that most of these etudes show an exemplary plan and execution, that each has a distinctive, pure character, and that they were produced with that masterly ease which results from years of application? But that which is necessary to enchant the youth and to make him forget all the difficulties of the work because of its beauties is utterly lacking—imaginative originality … I speak of fantasy, the prophetess with covered eyes from whom nothing is hidden, and who in her errors is often most charming of all. But what do you say to this, master?

Master Raro says:

My young friends, you are both wrong—but especially you Eusebius. A famous name has made one of you captive and the other rebellious. But what does it say in the Westöstlicher Divan?

                                                  Als wenn das auf Namen ruhte,
                                                  Was sich schweigend nur entfaltet
                                                  Lieb' ich doch das schöne Gute,
                                                  Wie es sich aus Gott gestaltet.(36)

The second article under the rubric Die Davidsbündler is a review of the “Bouquet musical” op. 10, by Schumann's former counterpoint teacher, Heinrich Dorn.³⁷ This conspicuously disjointed essay begins with a section (signed by Eusebius) in which the various flowers in the bouquet converse, the violet even telling a short story. This device is dropped in the next section where Florestan complains about the French titles. In the final section (unsigned), Schumann gives a short analysis of the music. This style is more consistent and clearly more successful in Schumann's discussion of a series of sonatas by Delphine Hill Handley, Carl Loewe, Wilhelm Taubert, and Ludwig Schunke in the NZfM of 1835.³⁸ Here Schumann writes a review in which the large sections are again represented as speeches by Eusebius, Florestan, and Raro. But within each section there is dialogue and a bit of action. In the course of all this, Schumann actually manages to describe and evaluate the compositions—complete with musical examples.

The more general articles Schumann contributed (in accordance with his original plans) to the early volumes of the NZfM were obviously more amenable to his narrative style than were the reviews. In such essays as the “Fastnachtsrede von Florestan,” the “Schwärmbriefe,” and the “Monument für Beethoven,”³⁹ Schumann writes about the German musical scene in narrative prose that is diffuse, but facile and imaginative. The third of the “Schwärmbriefe” includes this remarkable discussion of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony:

I had to laugh—Florestan began, as he launched into the A-major Symphony—I had to laugh at a dry old actuary who found in it a battle of giants, and in the last movement their final destruction—though he had to pass lightly over the Allegretto because it didn't fit into his plan … But most of all my fingers itch to get at those who insist that Beethoven always presented in his symphonies the most exalted sentiments: lofty ideas about God, immortality, and the courses of the stars. While the floral crown of the genius, to be sure, points to the heavens, his roots are planted in his beloved earth.

Now about the symphony itself; this idea is not my own, but taken from an old volume of Cäcilia (though there the setting is changed to the parlor of a count, perhaps out of too great a diffidence for Beethoven—which was misguided) … it is a most merry wedding. The bride is an angelic child with a rose in her hair, but only one. Unless I am greatly mistaken, in the Introduction the guests gather together, greeting each other with inverted commas, and, unless I am wrong, merry flutes recall that in the entire village, full of maypoles with many-colored ribbons, there reigns joy for the bride Rosa. And unless I am mistaken, the pale mother looks at her with a trembling glance that seems to ask, “Do you know that now we must part?” And Rosa, overcome, throws herself into her arms, drawing after her, with the other hand, that of the bridegroom … Now it becomes very still in the village outside (here Florestan came to the Allegretto, taking passages from it here and there); only a butterfly flits past or a cherry blossom falls … The organ begins; the sun is high in the sky, and single long, oblique rays play upon the particles of dust throughout the church. The bells ring vigorously—parishioners arrive a few at a time—pews are clapped open and shut—some peasants peer into hymnbooks, others gaze up at the superstructure—the procession draws closer—first choirboys with lighted candles and censers, then friends who often look back at the couple accompanied by the priest—then the parents, friends of the bride, and finally all the young people of the village. And now all is in order and the priest approaches the altar, and speaks first to the bride, and then to the happiest of men. And he admonishes them about the sacred responsibilities and purposes of this union, and bids them find their happiness in profound harmony and love; then he asks for the “I do” that is to last forever; and the bride pronounces it firmly and deliberately—I don't want to continue this picture, and you can do it your own way in the finale. Florestan thus broke off abruptly and tore into the close of the Allegretto; the sound was as if the sacristan was slamming the doors so that the noise reverberated through the whole church.⁴⁰

Schumann's love of aphorism stands in almost paradoxical contrast to his fascination with this kind of discursive prose. During his ten-years' occupation with the NZfM, Schuman was continually busy collecting pithy and pertinent quotations from literary sources to be used as mottos. His own aphorisms as well appeared from time to time in the early volumes of the journal.⁴¹ In 1848 he assembled his “Musikalische Haus- und Lebensregeln,”⁴² and in 1853-54 he gathered together from various of his earlier writings the sets of aphorisms in the Gesammelte Schriften. In the first volume of the NZfM Schumann printed—in one of the collections of aphorisms—a paragraph in defense of aphorism. This selection is really an extract, only slightly altered, from the second of Schumann's Davidsbündler articles, and it shows the undisciplined vehemence of some of Schumann's early writing:

Why do you turn up your noses with such a superior air at aphorism, you tall Philistines?⁴³ By God, is the world all a level surface? Doesn't it have Alps, rivers, and all different kinds of people? And is life to be reduced to a system? Isn't it a book put together from single, half torn-up pages, full of children's scrawlings, youthful ideas, overturned epitaphs, and blank, ungovernable fate? I think it is. In fact it might not be uninteresting to portray life with all its concomitants in art,⁴⁴ just as Platner and Jacobi⁴⁵ have given whole philosophical systems.⁴⁶

Schumann's most fanciful prose stands directly in the tradition of the German literary-musical figures of the early nineteenth century, Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and W. H. Wackenroder. Abert has said that most of the style and content of Schumann's early writing can be attributed to the influence of Jean Paul. The importance of his novels as a model for Schumann's early style is hardly to be doubted; virtually all of Schumann's biographers agree on this point.⁴⁷ Boetticher has shown from a diary of 1831 that Schumann also admired and consciously imitated Hoffmann at this time; he was even thinking about writing a “poetic biography” of Hoffmann.⁴⁸

Another important forerunner for Schumann's earlier style, this one from the eighteenth century, is usually overlooked: Christian Daniel Schubart (1739-91). Schubart, who acted out the excesses of the Sturm und Drang for most of his adult life, had much in common with the young Schumann: untutored enthusiasm for poetic qualities in music, and a love of rapturous improvisation both in music and prose. Schumann as a boy of thirteen already knew Schubart's Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst; Schumann's “Blätter und Blümchen aus der goldenen Aue,” compiled in 1823, contains excerpts from this book.⁴⁹ Among the articles Schumann wrote for the Damenkonversationslexikon in 1834 is one called “Charakteristik der Tonleitern und Tonarten.”⁵⁰ His model for this essay, he tells us, was Schubart; though he disagrees at several points with Schubart's characterization of keys, he finds in it much that is “graceful and poetic.”⁵¹ Toward the end of 1838, when Schumann was in Vienna, he borrowed a copy of Schubart's book from Fischhof and read it again.⁵² And in March of 1839, mottos from Schubart's Ideen began again to appear in the NZfM.⁵³

It would strike us as peculiar behavior if a present-day critic should write little stories instead of telling us in a straightforward fashion about the things he is reviewing, and Schumann's behavior as a critic certainly seemed peculiar to some of his contemporaries. Fink, for example, sneered in the AmZ about the “insufferable followers of Chopin who pursue dreams they aren't dreaming.”⁵⁴ The special forms of Schumann's fancy—the half-imaginary characters, and the personification of several sides to his own personality—might suggest the aberrations of incipient schizophrenia.⁵⁵ But to attribute any substantial part of Schumann's style of music criticism to mental disturbance would be a real error. There is little reason to think that Schumann failed to distinguish between the real world and the imaginary one he peopled with the members of the Davidsbund. It was with consciousness and even purposefulness that he indulged his love of anagrams, pseudonyms, and Jean Paulian mystification. He explained all this with perfect lucidity to Zuccamaglio:

If by any chance you approve of the tone of the Davidsbündlerbriefe from Augsburg, Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, I suggest that you adopt it for your own correspondence articles. Indifferent material can thus be presented in an interesting way; the journal gains solidity and colorfulness this way, and the readers will be shown a kindness. Think of the Davidsbund merely as a spiritual brotherhood which is now expanding to fairly sizable proportions, also externally, and will, I hope, bear much good fruit. The mystification of this, after all, has an unusual charm for many people; moreover, like everything mysterious, it has a special power.⁵⁶

G. Noren-Herzberg has suggested that Schumann adopted a highly “poetic” style for his journal because literature of all kinds was in great vogue in Germany.⁵⁷ Post office clerks read Goethe and accountants tried their hand at sonnets and essays. In such a milieu Schumann's early style of criticism would find a friendly reception. Schumann did not write extravagant and fanciful criticism because he was detached from reality, nor because of any other personal idiosyncrasy. In his work for the journal, as we have seen, he showed a never-failing presence of mind, and his writing for it was no exception. Schumann wrote this way deliberately because he thought this kind of criticism would be effective.

Schumann's early style of music criticism is a highly personal variation of a type that goes back to the music reviews of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann's reviews of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and his Trios op. 70 in the AmZ of 1810 and 1813⁵⁸ mark the beginning of a new kind of music criticism. Here, language rich in images and figures strains to communicate in words the qualities of music; the result is really the use of one artistic medium to explicate another. In the introduction to his review of Hiller's Etudes op. 15, Schumann offers an eloquent apology for this kind of procedure:

The editors of this paper have been reproached for emphasizing and extending the poetic side of music at the expense of its scientific side. They have been called young fantasts who have not always been informed that basically not much is known about Ethiopian⁵⁹ and other such music, etc. This accusation contains exactly that element by means of which we would hope to distinguish our paper from others. We do not wish to pursue the question of to what degree the cause of art is advanced faster by one manner or the other. We certainly confess, however, that we hold as the highest kind of criticism that which itself leaves an impression similar to the one created by the subject that stimulated it.

A footnote to this passage contains the famous statement,

In this sense, Jean Paul could possibly contribute more to the understanding of a Beethoven symphony or fantasia through a poetic counterpart (even without talking about the symphony or fantasia alone) than a dozen critics who lean their ladders against the colossus to take his exact measurements.⁶⁰

The style of Hoffmann's reviews and Schumann's early criticism is a natural concomitant of the changing standards for music in the romantic milieu of which both men were so much a part. A critic whose foremost demands have to do with subjective elements—emotion, imagination (in the modern sense), “the characteristic,” or Schumann's elusive “poetic”⁶¹—cuts himself off from established rationalistic ways of talking about his subject. For the romantic music critic it is precisely those qualities he most cherishes that are least susceptible of any kind of conventional discussion. He must find new ways to intimate that which—by his own admission—is inexpressible; it is hardly surprising that the result is something original, subjective, and, in Schumann's sense, poetic. And for Schumann, convinced of a basic similarity of all the arts, but particularly of literature and music,⁶² a poetic literary style must have seemed a perfectly appropriate vehicle for conveying his ideas.

In literary criticism there were striking parallels—or more precisely, precedents—for the subjective music criticism Schumann wrote in the early 1830s. They too followed in the train of important changes in standards for the arts in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. The dissolution of the literary principles of the Enlightenment, and their gradual replacement with views of literature associated with romanticism began in Germany in the late 1760s. Lessing, who preferred Shakespeare to Corneille, began to counteract the French neoclassicism so wholeheartedly embraced by the Germans since Gottsched. In the high tide of the Sturm und Drang, shortly afterward, all the old rules about the integrity of genre, the unities, the view of art as a product of judgment, the theory of mimesis—all of this was denied. The most important (though hardly the most readable) spokesman for the literary Sturm und Drang, this precursor of romanticism more violent in its rejection of established traditions than romanticism itself, was Johann Gottfried Herder.⁶³ The values he substituted for the neoclassical complex of rules were those we associate with romanticism: an appreciation for history, a “high estimation of the unique, the original, and the irrational … [a] conviction of the value of individuality and personality.”⁶⁴

René Wellek describes Herder's style of criticism in this way:

Herder differs from all other critics of the century not only in his radicalism, but also in his method of presentation and argument. In his writings there is a new fervid, shrill, enthusiastic tone, an emotional heightening, a style which uses rhetorical questions, exclamations, passages marked by dashes in wearisome profusion, a style full of metaphors and similes, a composition which often abandons any pretense at argument and chain of reasoning. It is that of a lyrical address, of constant questions, cumulative intensifying adjectives, verbs of motion, of metaphors drawn from the movement of water, light, flame, and the growth of plants and animals.⁶⁵

Wellek also sees in Herder's work:

the germs of much that is bad in criticism since Herder's time: mere impressionism, the idea of “creative” criticism with its pretensions to duplicating a work of art by another work of art.⁶⁶

“Creative” criticism—criticism which seeks to elucidate a work of art by means of evocative, figurative, impressionistic language—was renewed with the romantic writers. Friedrich Schlegel's attitude toward this kind of criticism, Wellek points out, was favorable but cautious. Schlegel says on one occasion:

Poetry can only be criticized by poetry. A judgment on art which is not itself a work of art, either in its matter, as presentation of a necessary impression in its genesis, or in its beautiful form and a liberal tone in the spirit of old Roman satire, has no citizens' right in the realm of art.⁶⁷

But on another occasion he is skeptical of any criticism which has no other aim but reproduction of an impression:

If many mystical lovers of art who consider all criticism dissection and every dissection a destruction of enjoyment were to think consistently, “I'll be damned!” would be the best judgment on the greatest work. There are critics who do not say more, though at much greater length.⁶⁸

Although Schlegel agreed, at least partly, with Herder in his estimation of creative criticism, he differed fundamentally from his predecessor in his love of polemic, and his faith in the possibility and importance of censure. It was out of the acknowledged subjectivity of Herder's judgments that his own tolerant, liberal tone was born. Schlegel, though he absorbed (if indirectly) something of the theory and style of Herder's criticism, was convinced that a critic's judgments can have an objective validity. The possibility of censure in criticism cut loose from the rationalistic moorings of the earlier eighteenth century depends upon such a conviction, and in a very real sense, the justification for it was provided by Kant in his Critique of Judgment. In this connection it is easy to appreciate Walter Silz's statement, “One might say that the difference between ‘Sturm und Drang’ and Romanticism is due chiefly to the appearance of Kant's writings in the interval.”⁶⁹

Schumann's impressionistic style of music criticism arose out of the difficulties inherent in talking about anything intangible; in his solution to these difficulties he was by no means alone. In his outlook as a critic Schumann had a good deal more in common with Schlegel than with Herder. Criticism was for him not mere description and appreciation; it entailed serious evaluation. Schumann always had a special talent, in fact, for polemics and censure. He saw the critic's role as a didactic one; he must act not only as an interpreter, but also as a guide.

Like Friedrich Schlegel, Schumann was keenly aware that creative criticism is not by itself sufficient for the fulfillment of the critic's responsibility. From the earliest issues of the NZfM Schumann's writings include, too, a radically different type of criticism: an analytic dissection of the composer's craft.⁷⁰ Creative criticism was a way of getting at what Schumann would call the poetic qualities of a work of art. But he readily acknowledged his duty as a critic to deal with other aspects of a composition as well—and in any event much of the music he reviewed did not have, in his opinion, anything poetic about it. In his review of Hiller's Etudes, adopting a favorite romantic organic metaphor, Schumann proposes to discuss the “flower, root, and fruit, that is, the poetic, harmonic-melodic, and mechanical “elements” of the music.⁷¹ Vivid contrasts in style within Schumann's criticism result from this variety of elements in music he wanted to talk about: in the NZfM of 1834-35 we have conversations between flowers, an account of a dream about a fair, and a painstaking analysis, complete with diagrams, of the form and harmony of the first of Hiller's etudes—an analysis intended to show a “looseness, which even degenerates into a lack of clarity and balance.”⁷²

The vivid extremes of Schumann's early style are combined in his famous review of Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique in the NZfM of 1835. This review is generally known only in its reduced (but nevertheless enormous) form in the various editions of the Gesammelte Schriften. A large section of the review deleted in the Gesammelte Schriften is the introductory installment,⁷³ an extravagant tribute to Berlioz finishing off with a poem by Franz von Sonnenberg—a “poetic counterpart” to Berlioz' symphony.⁷⁴ Here Schumann engages in the most outright kind of creative criticism: he offers to his readers a poem by way of explication of a symphony. In the following analysis of the first movement, he employs diagrams and musical examples, indulging in an almost painful degree of detail. Thus in a single review Schumann touches both extremes of his style as a critic—subjective, metaphorical suggestion, and meticulous, technical dissection.

During his earlier years as a critic Schumann's writings showed signs that he struggled to reconcile the divergent ways in which he wanted to talk about music. Dissatisfied with both the evocative and technical types of reviews by themselves,⁷⁵ he adopted something of a middle course and wrote a great many in a mixed style. His review of Mendelssohn's Melusina overture, for example, treats the “subject” of the music in richly figurative prose, finishing with an admission that the description falls short of duplicating the evocative qualities of the music. With an abrupt shift in language Schumann then begins to talk about such technical elements as form and orchestration.⁷⁶ Schumann still felt confronted with these two possible styles of criticism when he reviewed Berlioz' Waverly overture in 1839:

It would be easy for me to depict the overture either in a poetic fashion by reproducing the various images it evokes in me, or in a dissection of the mechanics of the work. Each method of explaining music has something to recommend it. The first at least escapes the danger of dryness, into which the second, for better or worse, often falls.⁷⁷

The shift in style long remained characteristic of Schumann's more important reviews. But it was often modified to a form in which general observations about the composer and his composition would be couched in a literary style, and specific points about the music dealt with in technical language.⁷⁸ It must be remembered that the shift in style, in fact the use of any poetic language at all, was always limited to reviews of music in which Schumann detected poetic qualities. It would have been impossible and pointless for Schumann to lavish his poetic style on every piece of music that crossed his desk. He was in fact very good at adapting his tone and style to the task at hand. If necessary, as we have seen, Schumann could deal with a great stack of mediocre music in a very short space; and in such a situation there is little reason for poetizing.

Schumann's most extravagant literary style disappeared rather quickly from the pages of the NZfM. The novelistic type of review was really confined to the years 1834-35, and the Davidsbündler names appeared only infrequently after 1836.⁷⁹ In his soberer style of the later 1830s and the 1840s Schumann began to use more of the technical language of music theorists. Terms such as “Anlage” and “Ausführung,” common in music theory since Sulzer and Koch, begin to appear frequently in his writings of the early 1840s.⁸⁰ But the stimulus of a talented new composer such as Hirschbach, Gade, or much later, Brahms, or of a new, exciting composition from Mendelssohn, Chopin, or William Sterndale Bennett never failed to resurrect in Schumann some of his original flair for poetic description.

.....

SCHUMANN'S AESTHETICS OF MUSIC

Philosophers in Schumann's time were very fond of talking about art. The notion of a system of fine arts—distinct from all the other kinds of activities in which people engage—become gradually more articulate in the preceding century in the writings of Abbé Dubos (Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture, 1719), Charles Batteux (Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe, 1746), and Alexander Baumgarten (Aesthetica, 1750).⁸¹ Kant wrote about art somewhat as an afterthought; he felt that his philosophical system, though largely complete after the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), still contained a lacuna. This lacuna, he thought, could be filled by developing his ideas about the mental faculty he called “judgment.” In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant characteristically divides this faculty into “determinant” and “reflective” judgment, and then separates the latter into “teleological” and “aesthetical” judgment. Here, finally, in this rather obscure corner of the splendid edifice of Kant's system, he discusses the arts.

The German idealists who followed Kant devoted an ever increasing share of their attention to the arts; the wave of enthusiasm for romantic (i.e. postclassical) art stimulated by Schiller's Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795) and the subsequent writings of the Schlegels undoubtedly contributed to this preoccupation with the branch of philosophy now called aesthetics. Schelling, in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), declared, “the universal organon of philosophy, and the keystone of its entire arch, is the philosophy of art.”⁸² Schelling and the other idealists usually thought of the arts as reflections, in one way or another, of things which are very important to idealist philosophers—things they call by such names as “idea,” “the absolute,” “absolute ego,” and “Urselbst.”

The German philosophers who discussed art in this period often indulged in classifications of the individual arts and evaluations of their relative importance. In these ratings music came out better and better. Kant's classification divides the field into the arts of speech, the formative arts, and the arts of the “play of sensations”—music belonging to the last of these.⁸³ In his “Comparison of the respective aesthetical worth of the beautiful arts,” Kant places music (with some reservations) second to poetry. One defect music suffers, he says, is “a certain want of urbanity”—it often bothers the neighbors.⁸⁴ Less than thirty years later Schopenhauer assigned to music a place of unique importance among the arts. While all the other arts, he tells us, are only indirect portrayals—like the figures on the wall in Plato's cave—of the “Will” (something like an id of the universe), music is the immediate representation of it.⁸⁵

Such explanations of music attained a wide currency in Schumann's time. Dozens of formidable and sometimes murky books on musical aesthetics appeared in Germany in the 1830s and '40s, most of them strongly influenced by idealistic philosophy and produced by minor writers whose specialties lay somewhere between history, philosophy, and music: for example, Gustav Nauenburg, Gustav Schilling, Ferdinand Hand, Eduard Krüger, August Kahlert, and Amadeus Wendt. Articles on aesthetics appeared in the musical journals (rarely in the NZfM), and these journals were occasionally the arenas for lively philosophical debates about music.

In the 1830s Schuman was largely ignorant of what was going on in philosophy. In the dozens of pages in Boetticher's two books devoted to extracts from Schumann's diaries—always rich in records of his reading—there is little evidence that he read philosophy or aesthetics.⁸⁶ It is characteristic of Schumann that he read and reread Jean Paul's novels, but apparently ignored his Vorschule der Aesthetik. Schumann showed his naiveté about philosophy and philosophers in an interesting way in the extract from his second Davidsbündler article reprinted in the NZfM under the title “Das Aphoristische.”⁸⁷ Here, when he wants to give an example of some philosophers who have made “complete philosophical systems,” he doesn't mention Kant or Hegel, but Ernst Platner and F. H. Jacobi, two distinctly provincial writers, neither of whom left anything that could conceivably be called a complete philosophical system.

Like most practitioners of the arts (but unlike Wagner), Schumann was wary of philosophical explanations of his occupation. In his “motto-book” he cited as the height of the ridiculous a perfectly normal-sounding definition by Christian Weisse: “The idea of beauty is the form of all true being perceived under the pattern of necessity.”⁸⁸ While his distaste for formal aesthetics was somewhat tempered later on, Schumann always remained aloof from any disputes of a philosophical nature about music;⁸⁹ and though he reviewed almost anything else, he never wrote a review of a book on aesthetics.⁹⁰

Several writers have noted that Schumann once began to write an aesthetics of music, but never completed it.⁹¹ They seem to imply that had this work been finished and preserved we should have a systematic exposition of his philosophical views about music. But the evidence these writers rely upon is the nineteen-year-old Schumann's letter to Wieck of November 1829, claiming that he had begun “years ago” to write an aesthetics of music;⁹² from what is known about Schumann's adolescent writings one could hardly expect this to be aesthetics in any usual sense of the term. There is in fact a fragmentary document by Schumann, written in 1827 or 1828, that is probably the “aesthetics of music” he mentioned to Wieck. It is called “Die Tonwelt,” and it makes some show of describing the effects of music and how they operate. But it really amounts only to a rhapsodic literary effusion similar to many of Schumann's other writings from this period; it may be described as something like the “In praise of music” section from an early medieval treatise as it might have been written by Jean Paul.⁹³

The fact is that Schumann paid little attention to aesthetics divorced from artistic practice. Yet some of the ideas of the philosophers reached him indirectly by way of the literary men who absorbed their influence. E. T. A. Hoffmann, for example, one of Schumann's favorite authors, sounded like almost any one of the idealist philosophers when he said of instrumental music that “its sole subject is the infinite.”⁹⁴ Thus Schumann, quite unintentionally, became interested in some of the questions that occupied the philosophers, and he shared some of their vaguely Platonic views about art. One of the subjects both the philosophers and Schumann discussed, but from quite differing vantage points, was the problem of musical reference.

PROGRAMS AND MUSICAL REFERENCE

Aestheticians of music have for a long time concerned themselves with: (1) whether music refers to anything outside itself (or, simply, whether it means anything); and (2) whether it depends for its effect upon association, either by the composer or the listener, with extraneous events, experiences, feelings, and the like.⁹⁵ It is often assumed that in the nineteenth century, especially the earlier part of it, most composers and others who thought about these questions believed in musical reference, and that most twentieth-century composers and writers have put away childish things and embraced the “autonomist” position.⁹⁶ In other words, most romantics would, roughly speaking, answer “yes” to the questions posed above, and most modern composers and critics would answer “no.” But things aren't nearly that simple; for as these answers have changed, the questions, none too clear at the outset, have changed as well.

Onomatopoeic effects, presumably, ought not to be the issue here; not even the most confirmed autonomist would deny that Respighi is able to make his listeners think of the cuckoo bird when he introduces into his music a phonograph recording of its call. Nor would he deny that Strauss can remind his audience of a flock of sheep by a skillful orchestral imitation of their bleating. What he does deny is that the composer ought to do these things. So far as onomatopoeic effects are concerned, at least, the question is not “Can a piece of music refer to anything outside itself?” It has become “Should a piece of music refer to anything outside itself?” And in answering “no,” the twentieth-century critic agrees with most of the major writers on music beginning at least with Vicenzo Galilei.

The real battles between autonomists and referentialists have raged over questions about the relationship between music and the emotions. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, when people began to see in music more similarities to rhetoric than to mathematics, theories about music have allotted a prominent place to the emotions or passions. The most usual and durable explanation of the relationship between music and the emotions has two parts: (1) music expresses or portrays emotions, and (2) its most important effect is to arouse the emotions of the listener. When Hanslick, perhaps the first and certainly the most articulate of the modern autonomists, wrote his famous book in 1854—the same year that Schumann published his Gesammelte Schriften—it was still precisely these two propositions, he felt, that had to be refuted. He wrote:

On one hand it is said that the aim and object of music is to excite emotions, i.e., pleasurable emotions; on the other hand, the emotions are said to be the subject matter which musical works are intended to illustrate.

Both propositions are alike in this, that one is as false as the other.⁹⁷

The first of these statements that Hanslick so vigorously denies—that “the aim and object of music is to excite emotions”—is on the surface a bit puzzling. For can music really have any aim? Aims, objectives, and intentions are the sort of thing, so far as we know, that only people (and perhaps some animals) have. Certainly Hanslick was speaking figuratively—as we did above in calling one chapter of this study “the goals of the journal.” What he meant was undoubtedly something like this: “The aim and object a composer has in writing music (or a performer has in performing it) is to excite emotions.” But in this case his categorical denial of the proposition is puzzling. Does he really mean to say that no composer or performer aims to excite the emotions of his listeners? Wagner, for one, claimed that he did; and Hanslick was his bitter opponent, not because he thought Wagner was lying (in this instance, at least), but because he thought Wagner's objective (that is, to excite the emotions) was a bad one.

Hanslick's book as a whole reinforces our suspicions that his formulations are more prescriptive than descriptive. He does not deny that music sometimes excites emotions; he admits this on the very next page, and in a later section he gives the improviser permission to do all the things he denied the composer.⁹⁸ In any event, as Hanslick would doubtless admit, the way to find out whether or not music excites emotions is to ask those who listen to music; and Hanslick's world was full of people who reported that it did. His point was simply this: that arousing the emotions of the listener ought not to be the primary objective of the composer, and that the kind and intensity of emotion the listener feels is not a stable criterion for judging a musical composition.⁹⁹ So again the original question has changed; it is not now “Is it the goal of music (or its composer) to excite the emotions?,” but more like “Should it be the goal of the composer to excite the emotions?”¹⁰⁰

If an examination of the statements of an arch-autonomist like Hanslick begins to break down the popular notion of a sharp dichotomy between a “romantic” and “modern” view of music, a careful reading of the romantics does so even more. Schumann, like Hanslick, thought a great deal about problems of musical reference, and his thinking was remarkably critical and consistent. He doubted, with Hanslick, that music can portray, as a painting would, a nude reclining on a couch or a group of peasants gathering grain. And he thought that it probably cannot, like a novel, tell a story about a countess who marries an aging duke in order to be near her current lover who is a police official at court. Schumann even agreed with Hanslick that the psychological reactions of people listening to music are not entirely predictable. But he differed with him in the importance he assigned to these psychological reactions and in his interest in discovering their causes and controlling them.

Schumann did not leave us a treatise on the relationship between music and the emotions or on any kind of musical reference because, nonphilosopher that he was, he could never muster up much enthusiasm for these subjects in the abstract. But in the course of performing his duties as a critic he nevertheless discussed them a good deal. Questions about whether or not music refers to events or objects come up most often, as we might expect, in his reviews of program music—that is, instrumental music which the composer provides with specific narratives or evocative titles (like E. Haberbier's piano etude, “Coeur insensé sois calme ou brise-toi”), and which may make use of onomatopoeic effects (like the sound of the head bouncing from the guillotine in Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique). Schumann's ideas about programs and musical reference have been subject to such a variety of interpretations that a reexamination of his statements on these subjects seems to be in order.

Aside from musical imitations of the sounds of bouncing heads and the like (which he hardly ever deigned to discuss), Schumann, as I have said, was very skeptical about the ability of music to refer to events, people, or objects in the way that language and pictures do. He never posited a program of any kind as the single possible referent or meaning of a piece of music. In his review of Berlioz' Waverly Overture in 1839, in fact, he specifically denied that this was possible, even for the composer:

Berlioz has now written music to it [Scott's novel]. Some will ask, “to which chapter?, which scene?, for what purpose?, to what end?” For critics always want to know what the composers themselves could not tell them, and critics often hardly understand a tenth part of what they talk about.¹⁰¹

Even in 1835, when Schumann was writing his programmatic piano music, he worried about the risks a composer took that the composer's intentions in using programs might be misinterpreted:

Beethoven was very well aware of the dangers involved with his Pastoral Symphony. In the few words with which he prefaced it, “more the expression of emotion than tone-painting,” there lies an entire aesthetics for composers. It is ridiculous that a painter should represent him in portraits sitting at a brook, his head resting on his hand, listening to the splashing.¹⁰²

Schumann denied that composers of programmatic music usually have any intention of portraying events, scenes, or characters. In his best-known discussion of programs, that in the review of Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique, he wrote: “He surely deceives himself who believes that the composer simply takes up his pen and paper with the sickly intention of expressing, depicting, or painting something or other.”¹⁰³

And in his later review of Spohr's programmatic symphony, Irdisches und Göttliches im Menschenleben, he declared,

They [the philosophers] are clearly wrong when they think that a composer working with an idea sits down like a preacher on Saturday afternoon, schematizes his theme according to the usual three points, and works it out in the accepted way—to be sure, they are wrong.¹⁰⁴

It is clear from Schumann's writings that he seriously doubted that music can denote objects or events or state propositions.¹⁰⁵ A musical composition, in Schumann's opinion, does not mean the same thing as its program. If it did, there would seem to be little reason for having both. Yet Schumann thought that the connection between a literary program and the music it accompanies can be an intimate one, and on occasion he found programs and programmatic titles useful. In a review of Julius Schaeffer's Lieder ohne Worte he explained, “There are certain mysterious moods of the soul which can be more readily understood by means of these verbal indications from the composer, and we must be thankful for them.”¹⁰⁶ And, he said, they can prevent a misinterpretation of the composer's intent; Schumann wrote about Henselt's etude, Ave Maria, “Here is an example of how a well-chosen heading can enhance the effect of the music. Without this title most players would rattle it off like a Cramer etude.”¹⁰⁷ But a composition should be able, ideally, to achieve its effect independently: “I always say, ‘first of all let me hear that you have made beautiful music; after that I will like your program too.’”¹⁰⁸

The quotation above from the Schaeffer review provides a key to Schumann's ideas about the workings of programs and about the nature of the connection between music and its program. This connection involves a third participant, namely Schumann's “mysterious moods of the soul,” which, he tells us, the program can help us to understand. Now it was these moods of the soul (Seelenzustände) that Schumann associated with all the best music of his time, not just programmatic music. The program, he felt, could serve as an aid to their clearer apprehension and hence toward a clearer apprehension of an essential part of the music. A program or suggestive title, according to Schumann's notion, acts very much like the poetic descriptions of creative criticism. The Jean Paulian “poetic counterpart” could serve equally well as a descriptive assessment of a composition, or as a program for it; in Schumann's work as a composer and critic, it did both. Thus the music does not denote or portray the program; something like the reverse is true: the program suggests and clarifies certain qualities of the music.

Music and its program are related to each other because both are related to something else, namely certain psychological states, or emotions, or, as Schumann sometimes said, Stimmungen. Schumann was never very explicit about the nature of this relationship between the program and the emotions, or—and this is of more immediate concern to us—between music and the emotions. Is it simply that music elicits the emotions of the listener? Or does it express emotion the composer was feeling at the time of composition, or the one the performer feels during performance? Or does it, as language could, communicate the idea of an emotion, quite aside from whether or not any of these people experienced it at any particular time?

Schumann seemed to admit more than one of these possibilities. There can be no doubt that he thought music elicits emotion; his descriptions of his own reactions to music show this plainly enough. But he believed that the listener does more, ideally, than merely react; a full appreciation of music involves receiving and understanding a kind of communication. One of the clearest statements to this effect is in Schumann's article “The Comic in Music”:

less well informed people usually tend to hear in music without text only sorrow or only joy, or that which lies halfway between, melancholy. They are not able to perceive the finer shades of passion, as in one composition, anger and penitence, in another, feelings of satisfaction, comfort, and the like. Because of this it is very hard for them to understand masters like Beethoven and Schubert, who could translate every circumstance of life into the language of tone.¹⁰⁹

We can gather from this passage (and from a number of others as well) that Schumann thought music is able to communicate feelings or psychological states, and in this he was apparently at odds with Hanslick. Schumann surely did not think this would always work—that the reference of music to the emotions was universally valid or necessary, as Boetticher claims. In order to understand it you need to be “well informed”; the whole apparatus of programs, programmatic titles, and poetic critiques in which Schumann indulged, moreover, would have been useless were there no possibility of misunderstanding the emotional message of music.

But we still have not determined whether the communication of which Schumann speaks belongs to the second or to the third of the possibilities suggested above, that is, does music communicate the idea of an emotion, or does it express directly the emotions the composer is feeling? The difference between these two possible functions of music amounts to the distinction Susanne Langer draws between a sign and a symbol.¹¹⁰ A sign, as she uses the word, announces that something is present or that it is occurring. Smoke is a sign of fire; a train whistle is a sign that the train is approaching. A symbol conveys the idea of something (whether it is present or not); a symbol for fire is simply the word “fire.” A symbol for what one feels in a stubbed toe is “pain,” while a sign of it might be “ouch.”¹¹¹

When Schumann, then, says that a composition communicates anger or penitence, is this the particular anger or penitence of the composer (or of the performer)—i.e. is it a sign of someone's psychological state? Or is the music a symbol for an abstract anger or penitence? Schumann does not really say. His never-failing interest in such things as form and development of musical materials seems to preclude a view of music as an immediate, exclamatory expression of anyone's feelings. But the composer's ability to communicate any feeling depended, it seems, upon his having experienced it at some time or other; the “circumstances of life” Beethoven and Schubert translated into music were the ones they knew at first hand. The inevitable influence of a composer's experiences, impressions, and temperament upon his music is a dominant theme in Schumann's writings. He explains in a letter to Clara how this works in his own case: “Everything that happens in the world affects me, politics, literature, people; I reflect on all of this in my own way, and then whatever can find release in music seeks its outlet.”¹¹² And in his review of Schubert's Symphony in C, Schumann reflects on the beauties of Vienna, concluding, “it becomes perfectly clear to me how such works could be born precisely in these surroundings.”¹¹³

If music cannot, in Schumann's opinion, induce with any certainty into the mind of the listener a vision of a radiant sunset or thoughts about a heroic woman risking her life to save her husband, it can communicate the kind of feelings which attend such things—provided that the listener is properly perceptive and properly conditioned. Feeling in a broad sense (or “conditions of the soul” or Stimmungen), then, lies at the center of Schumann's theories about musical significance. They become part of the composer's experience simply as a result of his own environment and his own impressions. They are communicated in music to the receptive listener, who, the composer hopes, will understand them and at least to some extent experience them himself. The literary program is meant to reinforce this communication by suggesting to the listener ideas, events, or narratives with which he might associate such feelings. It is an alternate route to the same goal.

Perhaps this interpretation of Schumann's ideas will help to explain his seemingly inconsistent statements about program music. For sometimes he favors programs and at other times not; sometimes he wants to substitute different programs and titles for the ones composers have given their music, or he provides more than one program for the same piece; sometimes, as in the case of the Papillons, he associates a single program with pieces composed independently and at various times, and always stoutly insists that the programs and titles, even of his most programmatic music, are applied ex post facto.

Schumann's apparent inconsistency about the value he sets upon programs is now easier to understand. If the music itself is communicative, a program, ideally, should not be necessary. Several times Schumann said that it would be “a good test of the composer's success” if his listeners knew nothing of his programs or titles.¹¹⁴ And he reproved Berlioz and Spohr for habitually providing their music with programs or programmatic titles, though he never had any serious quarrel with either their music or their programs per se.¹¹⁵ In Schumann's opinion, attaching a program to a piece of music was something like telling a joke and then explaining the punchline.

If the music itself were not communicative, Schumann insists, attaching a program or evocative title to it would be as futile as writing a poetic critique of it. This is true of the etude by Haberbier mentioned above, “Coeur insensé sois calme ou brise-toi.” Such a heartbreaking title, he says, can do nothing for this pedestrian music.¹¹⁶

Schumann was sometimes willing to accept more than one program for the same composition; in his review of the Schubert C-major Symphony he implies that the suitability of a program or poetic counterpart may depend upon the sensibilities of the listener:

I will not attempt to provide the symphony with a foil, for the different generations choose very different words and pictures to apply to music. And the youth of eighteen often hears in a piece of music an event of worldwide importance, while the grown man sees only a local happening, and the musician thought of neither the one nor the other.¹¹⁷

The possibility of fitting more than one program to a composition with satisfactory results is consistent with Schumann's view of the program as a supplement or accessory. Just as a single piece of music could be subject to various poetic descriptions—and often was by the contrasting personalities of Florestan and Eusebius in Schumann's early criticism—so its message could be suggested by more than one program.

But in many cases, Schumann seems to say, the composer describes in his program the very events, experiences, or impressions that aroused in him the feelings he wishes to communicate in his composition. Schumann apparently thought Berlioz did this in his Symphonie fantastique.¹¹⁸ But even such a program has no special claims to authenticity. Schumann, in fact, wanted to forget Berlioz' program and make his own: “In the beginning the program spoiled all my enjoyment and all my freedom of outlook. But as this receded more and more into the background and my own imagination became creative, I found all this and much more. …”¹¹⁹ But this is not to say that program-making was an arbitrary and entirely subjective matter. Not just any one would do; Schumann often quarreled with the names composers gave their music (Johann Kittl was a habitual offender in this respect) and the programs they associated with it. Though more than one poetic counterpart to a piece of music was possible, finding a really appropriate one, Schumann thought, was a difficult and exacting task.

The ideas about musical reference emerging from Schumann's writings also cast some light on the seemingly erratic treatment of programmatic elements in his own music.¹²⁰ The individual movements of the Phantasie op. 17, for example, were originally to have borne the names Ruinen, Trophaeen, and Palmen; Schumann later changed these to Ruine, Siegesbogen und Sternbild, and Dichtungen,¹²¹ and finally eliminated them altogether. The Intermezzo from the Faschingschwank aus Wien, as we have seen, was to have been included in a set of pieces with quite different programmatic connotations, the Nachtstücke—which itself Schumann first intended to call Leichenphantasie.¹²² This kind of indecision bolsters Schumann's claim that he did not compose to illustrate preexistent literary schemes, but that, as he said, programs and titles occurred to him only after he had composed the music.¹²³ This is perfectly consistent with Schumann's view of the program as a supplement to a composition, not a subject of it.

In the case of one of Schumann's compositions, the Papillons, he certainly seems to say that he composed the music with a preexistent literary scheme in mind, namely the last chapter of Jean Paul's Flegeljahre. When copies of the Papillons were sent to various journals for review in 1832, Schumann, fearful that the reviewers would not know what to make of it, sent a few words of explanation to each of four editors, Rellstab, Fink, Castelli, and Gottfried Weber. These explanations are substantially similar; this one is from his letter to Rellstab:

Less for the editor of Iris than for the poet and spiritual kin of Jean Paul, I shall allow myself a few words about the origins of the Papillons; for the thread that binds them together is barely visible. You will remember the last scene of the Flegeljahre—masked ball—Walt—Vult—masks—Wina—Vult's dancing—the exchange of masks—confessions—anger—disclosures—hurrying away—closing scene and then the departing brother.—I turned the last page over again and again; for the end seemed to me but a new beginning—and almost without knowing it I was at the piano, and thus arose one Papillon after another. May you find in these origins an apology for the whole, which in its particulars often needs one!¹²⁴

And in a letter to his family in Zwickau he says,

and tell them all to read, as soon as possible, the final scene of Jean Paul's Flegeljahre, and that the Papillons are in fact meant as a translation into tone of this masked ball. And then ask them if the Papillons accurately reflect, perhaps, something of Wina's angelic love, Walt's poetic nature, and Vult's lightning-sharp spirit.¹²⁵

Boetticher has found some marginal notes in Schumann's own copy of the Flegeljahre (now in the Robert Schumann-Haus, Zwickau) which seem to make the connection between the Papillons and Jean Paul's novel even more explicit. Schumann marked specific passages in the last chapter of the Flegeljahre with numbers designating the individual Papillons.¹²⁶ Thus the Papillon no. 1, for example, is linked with this passage:

As he stepped out of the little room, he asked God that he might be happy when he returned to it; he felt like a hero who, thirsty for fame, goes forth into his first battle.¹²⁷

So Schumann's own testimony apparently indicates that in this case a literary program (though one unmentioned in the published music) preceded and in some sense gave rise to the composition. Schumann seems to be afraid, furthermore, that the music will not be intelligible without this program, and he even speaks of his music as a “translation into tone.” Boetticher's discovery, moreover, shows very detailed connections between program and music; these would tend to strengthen his position that Schumann was trying in his Papillons to communicate directly the events of Jean Paul's story. All of this apparently contradicts Schumann's statements that he always made connections with programs after the music was finished, and his professed belief that programs are but extrinsic aids—that music communicates states of the soul, not events.

Now when Schumann insisted that he always chose his titles, mottos, and programs ex post facto, he surely did not mean to say that a single piece of literature could never serve both as the impetus for a composition and as its program. The factors which influenced a composer in the making of a piece of music often became part of its program, as in the case, Schumann said, of Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique. His point is simply that the whole question of programs and titles had to be settled after the music was finished, and, as in the case of the Symphonie fantastique again, even things which influenced the composer have no inviolable claim to validity as programmatic aids for his music.

Thus if Schumann in fact composed the Papillons under the spell of the Flegeljahre and then recommended that novel to various people as a program for it, this was not inconsistent with his assertions that he applied programs ex post facto. But it is very doubtful that this is even what happened. For whatever Schumann told the editors, he wrote thus to Henrietta Voigt about the Papillons:

I must also mention that I added the text to the music, not the reverse—for that would seem to me a silly beginning. Only the last, which by strange coincidence formed an answer to the first,¹²⁸ was aroused by Jean Paul.¹²⁹

If we must make a choice as to which we are to believe, Schumann's statement to the editors, or to Henrietta Voigt, surely it has to be the latter. Schumann felt that the editors would require a plausible explanation for the novel form of the Papillons, while he could be much more frank with an intimate friend. The history of the Papillons throws even more suspicion on Schumann's report to Rellstab and the others that he read Jean Paul and then immediately composed these pieces. For they existed previously as independent waltzes and polonaises, and were composed intermittently over a long period of time.¹³⁰

Boetticher treats the marginal notes in the Flegeljahre as final authority on what Schumann meant to communicate in composing the Papillons.¹³¹ But we do not know what Schumann intended by these markings, nor even when they were made. It is perfectly plausible that he wrote these notations (his letter to Henrietta Voigt clearly suggests this) after the Papillons were complete, just as he suddenly discovered in his In der Nacht from the Fantasiestücke, long after it was finished, a certain kinship with the legend of Hero and Leander.¹³² The notes in the Flegeljahre certainly do not justify Boetticher's opinion that Schumann intended in his Papillons to depict the specific events and characters of Jean Paul's novel.

Schumann's literary style is often highly figurative and sometimes it is more notable for its grace than for its precision. Yet it will pay us to read his statements about the Papillons and their program attentively. The letter to his family cited above comes closest, seemingly, to positing an immediate connection between the Papillons and events in the Flegeljahre. But even here Schumann does not say that the Papillons portrays Wina, Walt, or Vult, or anything they did, but “something of Wina's angelic love, Walt's poetic nature, and Vult's lightning-sharp spirit”—in short, it communicates states of the soul. And when Schumann speaks of his music as “a translation into tone,” he specifies what it is that is translated: the masked ball. A ball is precisely the sort of thing that music can imitate through onomatopoeia, for the most noticeable sound at a ball is, of course, music. And the Papillons, like the music for a ball, consists simply of a series of dances.¹³³

For Schumann the literary program was an aid to comprehension, a means for getting at an elusive and fragile content which is already present in the music—a content that any number of conventional performance directions or any straightforward, literal description would be helpless to communicate. Schumann's programmatic piano compositions, like his essays in creative criticism, were largely confined to the 1830s. As time passed, Schumann apparently became convinced that if the music itself is really communicative, there is no need for either of them.

INSPIRATION AND CRAFTSMANSHIP

If music communicates feeling, as Schumann says it does, it would seem perfectly reasonable to ask “How?” We know that language employs symbols with fairly well fixed referents, so that a person speaking or writing these symbols can communicate information of many kinds (including information about feelings). Whatever the claims of Schering, Boetticher, and others, music lacks a repertory of defined symbols; thus if music communicates anything, it must do so in some other way. The question, then, is “How?” This problem has been written about a good deal, especially by philosophers. Susanne Langer, for example, whose ideas about musical significance are in some respects very much like Schumann's, argues that music can symbolize and communicate “general forms of feeling,” or “the morphology of feeling.”¹³⁴ It can do this, she says, because music fulfills various requirements (which she enumerates) for a nonverbal language. Among these is that it shows a “logical form” similar to that of its referent; the motions of waxing and waning and of tension and relaxation, which serve to define its “logical form,” are characteristic of both music and our feelings. In fact, Langer continues, “Because the forms of human feeling are much more congruent with musical forms than with the forms of language, music can reveal the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach.”¹³⁵

The principal clause of this last sentence might have been uttered by Schumann or almost any of the romantics. But Schumann would not have been interested in the explanatory dependent clause. Schumann's “mysterious states of the soul” are mysterious because they are inaccessible to any ordinary linguistic description. The workings by which music conveys them, too, are mysterious, and Schumann was not particularly eager to explore these mysteries. Music that is genuinely expressive, Schumann believed, is at least partly a gift of inspiration, and he sometimes showed a real reticence about inquiring too closely into the nature of that gift.

There was of course nothing new in Schumann's belief that inspiration—nonrational and inexplicable—plays a role in musical invention. Even the most formal descriptions of the process of musical composition in the late eighteenth century emphasized the importance of inspiration. In his book on composition, Heinrich Christoph Koch, for example, makes use of J. G. Sulzer's term Anlage (“laying out,” or initial conception) and explains to his readers “the manner in which such an Anlage arises in the soul of the composer.” Before this can happen at all, he says, the composer must be in “a special state of inspiration.”¹³⁶ This special state of inspiration—sometimes indistinguishable from a kind of feverish emotional excitement—is further emphasized as a factor in musical creation by the earlier romantic writers on music, Wackenroder, Tieck, and Jean Paul.

Schumann too was convinced of its importance, and at times he seems to embrace the peculiarly romantic doctrine of the infallibility of initial inspiration. In a review of Cherubini's second string quartet, he says he suspects that the composition is really a reworking of an unsuccessful symphony. “I am averse to all such transformations,” he writes, “for they seem to me like a sin against the divine first inspiration.”¹³⁷ And in his review of F. W. Grund's sonata for piano, op. 27, Schumann speculates that the second of the two movements was written much later than the first, and that the composer was unable to recapture the original mood of the piece:

For the stimulation of the composer's imagination is such a delicate matter, that once the track is lost, or time intervenes, it is only by a happy coincidence that in a later rare moment it can be recovered. For this reason, a work discontinued and laid aside is seldom completed; it would be preferable for the composer to begin a new one, and give himself over completely to its Stimmung.¹³⁸

Schumann included in his Gesammelte Schriften an aphorism to the same effect—one which shows that Schumann, like many of his predecessors, tended to identify inspiration with the strong emotions accompanying artistic creation: “The first conception is always the most natural and the best. Reason errs, but never feeling.”¹³⁹

During his ten-year stint as critic, Schumann's descriptions of the process of composition changed somewhat in emphasis. He became more and more impressed with the importance of the rational processes of the craft—of systematic development of themes, of revision and refining. In the 1840s Schumann began to find Ausführung (“working out”) fully as necessary as Erfindung (“invention”).¹⁴⁰ Expressions foreign to his early vocabulary, such as Reinheit des Satzes (“purity of phrasing”) and Geschicklichkeit der Anordnung (“skill in ordering”),¹⁴¹ began to show up in his reviews, and in 1843 he even recommended to his readers one of the most rationalistic of all books on composition, Mattheson's Kern melodischer Wissenschaft.¹⁴²

But this change was one only of emphasis. For Schumann had a healthy respect—as any active composer must—for the ordinary operations of musical craftsmanship from the time he first became a critic. In one of his early critical essays, a review of sonata by Wilhelm Taubert, Schumann (in the person of Raro) praises Taubert's Fortführung and Ausbauung (approximately “carrying out” and “finishing off”) as well as his Anlagung.¹⁴³ A major proportion of Schumann's attention in both the Hiller and Berlioz reviews of 1835 is addressed to technical matters such as form, harmony, and phrase structure—the sort of things that are hardly the free gift of inspiration. And even when inspiration is dispensing her bounties, a good deal is left to the discretion of the composer; in another review from 1835, Schumann speculates rather accurately about Beethoven's method of composition:

In his Pastoral Symphony Beethoven sings simple themes such as any child-like mind could invent. Yet surely he did not merely write down everything presented by the initial inspiration, but made his choices from among many possibilities.¹⁴⁴

In their explanations of how art is made, the early romantics in Germany, as heirs of both Herder and Kant, wavered in their allegiances between the inexplicable visitations of furor poeticus and the controlled operations of reason and craftsmanship. Both as theorists and practitioners, they often longed for an ideal balance between craftsmanship and inspiration, between reason and feeling. Wackenroder writes in his Wesen der Tonkunst:

But when beneficent nature brings together the unlike artistic sensibilities, when the feelings of the listener burn more brightly in the heart of the learned master artist, and he forges his profound science in these flames, there will result a work of indescribable value. In it feeling and science will be bound together inseparably, like the stone and coloring of an enamel.¹⁴⁵

Schumann offers some explanation of how both inspiration and craftsmanship can affect the outcome of a composition in his review of a concerto by E. H. Schornstein:

But in general we might wish for more sifting, selection, and refinement. The first plan for the whole, to be sure, is always the most successful. Yet details must often be molded and polished; in this way talent gains for itself recognition, and for its product, permanence. And in this way, too, interest is maintained—an interest not inherent in the first conception of the whole. In this we include elegance of passagework, the charm of accompaniments to cantabile melodies, color in the middle voices, the elaboration and fashioning of the themes, the juxtaposition and combination of various ideas.¹⁴⁶

Here Schumann describes the learned procedures of musical craftsmanship as a second stage in the process of composition. Inspiration provides not a finished product, but only an outline. The detail—figuration, accompaniments, and even developmental procedures—must all be worked out later. So the two kinds of processes Schumann says are involved in composing music turn out to be not contradictory, but complementary. Schumann explains the origins of music much as Wordsworth explains the origins of poetry; it results from a powerful emotion (or inspiration) recollected—and improved upon—in tranquillity. But there always remained a duality in the qualities Schumann appreciated in music and the ways in which he thought these qualities came about. In 1841 (in a review of a set of piano pieces by A. H. Sponholtz) Schumann mused about the difficulty of enjoying the “freedom of genius,” and still constructing pieces with a good form,¹⁴⁷ and in one of his last reviews for the NZfM, he asserted that a composition must have two quite different kinds of excellence: purity of form, orderliness, and, on the other hand, “richness of invention, freshness, originality.”¹⁴⁸

In the quotations above from the Schornstein and Sponholtz reviews, Schumann seems to associate the two kinds of operations involved in composing music, the rational and nonrational ones, with “talent” and “genius” respectively. This association is rather consistent in his writings as a whole. Kant had defined genius as the “innate mental disposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art,” and he explained its operation this way:

It cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products, but it gives the rule just as nature does. Hence the author of a product for which he is indebted to his genius does not know himself how he has come by his ideas; and he has not the power to devise the like at pleasure or in accordance with a plan, and to communicate it to others in precepts that will enable them to produce similar products.¹⁴⁹

In Schumann's time genius was still regarded as a quality—like inspiration—whose operation could be neither understood nor explained; genius was a kind of direct pipeline from a higher reality, and the value and authority of its products were unassailable. Schumann himself usually understood the term in this way.¹⁵⁰ Talent, the faculty responsible for the details and final form of the art work, deals with procedures that can be learned, and is itself susceptible to training and development. As Schumann said, “Talent labors, but genius creates.”¹⁵¹

Schumann did not explore very far the implications of his ideas about inspiration and craftsmanship and their correlation to genius and talent. He never said, for example, whether inspiration entailed genius, or genius entailed either inspiration or talent. His statements about these matters are not systematic, but sketchy and suggestive. They are like the first Entwurf given by inspiration; they have not been submitted to the rational processes of development and working out of detail. This is because Schumann's expressions of his aesthetic views were always to some extent by-products of his criticism. He was always interested, first of all, in discussing music, and in particular, specific musical compositions. In the following chapters we shall see what he had to say about them.

Notes

1. Published in Leipzig by C. H. F. Hartmann (1834), J. A. Barth (1835-37), and Robert Friese (1837-51). In 1834 the journal appeared under the title Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift für musik, but for the sake of convenience this first Jahrgang will also be called “NZfM.”

2. Hereafter GS 1854.

3. Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin Kreisig (Leipzig, 1914, hereafter cited as GSK), xxxiv-xxxv.

4. There are now three anthologies of Schumann's writings translated into English. The earliest one, Fanny Raymond Ritter's two-volume work of the late 1870s, by far the most extensive of the three, is shot through with errors. A much smaller selection prepared by Konrad Wolf and Paul Rosenfeld (Pantheon, 1946; now in a McGraw-Hill paperback), though rather dependent upon Mrs. Ritter for its translations, is more accurate. The most recent collection, that of Henry Pleasants, is so heavily edited as to be misleading. Henry Pleasants, ed., The Musical World of Robert Schumann. A Selection from Schumann's Own Writings (New York, 1965). See my review in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 17 (1965), 417-19. Quite aside from any deficiencies of these translations, they are all based on one or another edition of the Gesammelte Schriften, not the NZfM; for all quotations from Schumann in this book, therefore, I have made new translations.

5. Clara Schumann, ed., Jugendbriefe von Robert Schumann (Leipzig, 1885).

6. F. Gustav Jansen, ed., Robert Schumanns Briefe, neue Folge (Leipzig, 1904), hereafter cited as Briefe.

7. F. Gustav Jansen, Die Davidsbündler. Aus Robert Schumanns Sturm- und Drangperiode (Leipzig, 1883).

8. Frederick Niecks, Robert Schumann, ed. Christina Niecks (London and Toronto, 1925).

9. The most satisfactory of these is Karl H. Wörner's Robert Schumann (Zürich, 1949), a concise and accurate “life and works.”

10. Düren-Rhld., 1932.

11. “Robert Schumann als Aesthetiker,” Jahrbuch der musikalischen Bibliothek Peters, 13 (1906), 50-73.

12. “Die aesthetischen Anschauungen Robert Schumanns in ihren Beziehungen zur romantischen Literatur,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 3 (1920), 111-18; also “Anfänge der Aesthetik Robert Schumanns,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 2 (1920), 535-39.

13. “Theory and Practice in Schumann's Aesthetics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 17 (1964), 310-45.

14. See W. J. von Wasielewski, Robert Schumann, trans. A. L. Alger (Boston, 1871), p. 17, where Kuntsch is described as provincial and amateurish; also K. Wörner, Schumann, p. 27, and Rehberg, Schumann, pp. 19-20. Jansen, in the footnotes to the Briefe, p. 528, offers some defense of Kuntsch's competence. Schumann was always respectful toward Kuntsch (See Jugendbriefe, p. 186), and Clara reported in later years to Frederick Niecks that “my husband thought a great deal of him. He certainly was not distinguished enough to be my husband's teacher.” Frederick Niecks, Robert Schumann (London, 1925), p. 32.

15. See Niecks, pp. 35-36.

16. NZfM, 18 (1843), 27.

17. Briefe, p. 7.

18. In Heidelberg, Schumann was exposed to many performances of Baroque music at the home of A. F. J. Thibaut, jurist, amateur musician and author of Ueber Reinheit der Tonkunst (Heidelberg, 1825; 2d ed., 1826). This work was furiously attacked for its amateurish reactionism by Hans Georg Nägeli in his Der Streit zwischen der alten und der neuen Musik (Breslau, 1826). Mendelssohn as a youth of 18 years describes his favorable impressions of Thibaut (and especially of his library) in a letter from Heidelberg in 1827. Yet he remarks, “It is strange; the man does not know much about music, even his historical knowledge of it is limited, his judgments are mostly purely instinctive.” Felix Mendelssohn, Letters, ed. Seldon Goth (New York, 1945), 1, 34. Schumann always remembered Thibaut with respect. Ueber Reinheit der Tonkunst provided a large number of the mottos heading individual issues of the NZfM, and one of Schumann's “Musikalische Haus- und Lebensregeln,” written about 1848, reads, “Thibaut's Ueber Reinheit der Tonkunst is a fine book. Read it often when you are older.” GSK, 2, 167.

19. See Niecks, pp. 93-94.

20. Many passages of the four-hand polonaises (1828) published by Geiringer (Universal edition, 1933), for example, reappear in the Papillons, op. 2. See Geiringer's explanation of the relationship of the compositions in “Ein unbekanntes Klavierwerk von Robert Schumann,” Die Musik, 25, Bd. 2 (1932), 725-26.

21. August Schumann was well known as the translator of the works of Sir Walter Scott. Wörner, pp. 12 ff.

22. Quoted in Boetticher, ed., Schriften, p. 8.

23. Cited in Boetticher, Einführung, p. 225. Boetticher's transcription of Schumann's entries appears to be in error at some points. I have taken “Anacova” to mean Anacreon, “Titull” I interpret as Tibull, and “Sarbiesky” as Sarbiewsky. Schumann's report of his own linguistic prowess seems almost too good to be true. Even the best Gymnasium education would hardly equip him to unscramble the Doric dialect of Bion.

24. Wörner, p. 11.

25. See the description in Niecks, pp. 41-42.

26. F. Gustav Jansen, “Aus Robert Schumanns Schulzeit.” Die Musik, 5 (1906), Bd. 4, pp. 83-99.

27. Kreisig (GSK, 2, 449) points out a similarity of part of this essay to some of the commentary in an encyclopedic series called Bildnisse berühmter Männer aller Zeit, a publication of August Schumann with which Robert had recently assisted.

28. GSK, 2, 173-75, and 186-90.

29. Boetticher, ed., Schriften, pp. 9-10, 24-28, and Einführung, pp. 114-15 and 623. Perhaps it was an indication of Schumann's maturing tastes that in 1833 he ridiculed the idea of naming his musical journal “Tonwelt.”

30. Jugendbriefe, pp. 16-17. The work with whose publication Schumann assisted was correctly identified by Niecks (p. 42) as Forcellini's Totius Latinitatis Lexikon (first edition, Padua, 1771). More precisely, it was the four-volume German version of the third edition of this work that Schumann's brother published (the original third edition appeared in Padua in 1827).

31. Wörner, p. 26.

32. Jugendbriefe, p. 136.

33. GSK, 2, 260-61.

34. Briefe, p. 45 and Jugendbriefe, p. 223.

35. NZfM, 1 (1834), 73-75. In GS 1854 and succeeding editions of the Gesammelte Schriften, this heading was changed to “Aus den kritischen Büchern der Davidsbündler.” In a footnote to this review in the NZfM, Schumann promises a later explanation of the Davidsbund. A “clarification” in a later issue (NZfM, 1 [1834], 152.) merely says:

    “There are many rumors afoot about the fraternity whose name appears below. Since, unfortunately, we must still withhold the reasons for concealing our identity, we will ask Herr Schumann (should he be known to any of the editors) to represent us, should the occasion arise, under his own name.”

    —The Davidsbündler

    “I shall do so with pleasure.”

    —Robert Schumann

    The most lucid and concise discussion of the nature of the Davidsbund and its members, Florestan, Eusebius, and Raro, is in Kreisig's footnotes to his edition of the Gesammelte Schriften (GSK, 2, 367-69).

36. NZfM, 1 (1834), 73-75. See Appendix I, 24.

37. NZfM, 1 (1834), 97-99.

38. NZfM, 2 (1835), 125-27, 133-34, and 145-46.

39. NZfM, 2 (1835), 116-17; 3 (1835), 126-27, 147, 151-52, 182-83; and 4 (1836), 211-13.

40. NZfM, 3 (1835), 152.

41. See, for example, the series under the heading “Grobes und Feines” in NZfM, 1 (1834), 147-48, and 150-51.

42. The “Musikalische Haus- und Lebensregeln,” according to Kreisig (GSK, 2, 448), were originally to have been inserted between individual numbers of the Jugendalbum, op. 68, composed in 1848. Instead they were first published in an “Extrabeilage” of the NZfM in 1850, and they appeared together as an appendix to the second edition of the Jugendalbum in 1851.

43. An allusion, apparently, to Goliath.

44. The original version of this passage in the Davidsbündler article (GSK, 2, 268) makes more sense: it has “Aphorismen” instead of “der Kunst.”

45. Schumann refers to the German philosophers Ernst Platner (1744-1818), and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819).

46. NZfM, 1 (1834), 151. See Appendix I, 26.

47. Except Niecks (pp. 122-23) who tends to dismiss Jean Paul's influence as negligible. He is undoubtedly right in limiting it almost exclusively to Schumann's earlier years.

48. Boetticher, Einführung, p. 144, n. 90, and p. 319.

49. Jansen, “Aus Robert Schumanns Schulzeit,” Die Musik, 5 (1906), Bd. 4, p. 85.

50. Damenkonversationslexikon, 2, 332-33. Schumann incorporated this essay, with certain changes, into the NZfM in 1835 (NZfM, 2, 43-44), and Kreisig has reprinted both versions (GSK, 1, 105-06, and 2, 207-08).

51. Schubart's essay on the keys is in his Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (Vienna, 1806), pp. 377-82.

52. See Briefe, p. 145, and Erich Schenk, “Halbjahr der Erwartung,” in H. J. Moser and E. Rebling, eds., Robert Schumann, aus Anlass seines 100. Todestages (Leipzig, 1956), p. 21. The page reference to the Briefe in Schenk's citation is in error.

53. NZfM, 10 (1839), 77, 157, and 185.

54. AmZ, 40 (1838), 668.

55. There is little reasonably scientific information on Schumann's illness. P. J. Möbius considered the problem in an entire book, Ueber Robert Schumann's Krankheit (Halle, 1906). A more recent study is Gerhard Granzow's “Florestan und Eusebius, zur Psychologie Robert Schumanns,” Die Musik, 20 (1928) Bd. 2, pp. 660-63. Despite Boetticher's infatuation with a movement in German psychology called Charakterologie (a study of personality which became contaminated with strong implications of racism), his discussion of Schumann's illness (Einführung, pp. 161 ff., and 167 ff.), appears to be sensible. There is general agreement that Schumann's affliction would now be diagnosed as schizophrenia.

56. Briefe, p. 70.

57. G. Noren-Herzberg, “Robert Schumann als Musikschriftsteller,” Die Musik, 5 (1906), Bd. 4, p. 104.

58. AmZ, 12 (1810), 630-42, and 652-59; 15 (1813), 141-54. See the later condensed version of these reviews in Strunk, ed., Source Readings, pp. 775-81.

59. In the Gesammelte Schriften, Schumann changed this to “griechischer … Musik.” GSK, 1, 44.

60. NZfM, 2 (1835), 42.

61. In his Einführung, p. 106, n. 5, Boetticher has assembled a series of early statements to show what Schumann meant by “poetic.” Schumann almost always used this word in an analogical sense, that is, not to distinguish poetry from prose, but to distinguish works of art which were original and imaginative from those which were not. The term “poetry,” in German literary criticism as well, no longer referred only to a general category of literary composition; it described any literary creation rich in imagery and emotional connotations. Thus Novalis said, “The novel must be poetry through and through.” See R. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (New Haven, 1955), 2, 85. Schumann referred in a similar vein to his journal as “the defender of the rights of poetry.” Jugendbriefe, p. 222.

62. A typical statement is this: “We believe that the painter can learn from a Beethoven symphony, just as the musician, for his part, can learn from a work of art by Goethe.” NZfM, 1 (1834), 36.

63. Wellek (1, 176-81) considers none of the other writers associated with the Sturm und Drang, Lenz, Bürger, Stolberg, Gerstenberg, or even Hamann an important critic. Herder played a vital role as a forerunner of the literary theories of both the German classicists and romantics. The romantics themselves tended not to recognize this in Herder, but to extract from Goethe and Schiller ideas they could have gotten firsthand from Herder.

64. Walter Silz, Early German Romanticism. Its Founders and Heinrich von Kleist (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), p. 6.

65. Wellek, 1, 182.

66. Wellek, 1, 184.

67. Wellek, 2, 10.

68. Ibid. Though Schlegel shows vacillation on this point, his earlier writings are as a whole conspicuously coherent and perceptive. It is inconceivable that an impartial reader of his works should, like Irving Babbitt, repeat Nietzsche's senseless aspersion that “no one had a more intimate knowledge of all the bypaths to chaos.” Rousseau and Romanticism (Cleveland, 1962), p. 85.

69. Silz, Early German Romanticism, pp. 6-7.

70. Almost all writers on Schumann have ignored this side to Schumann's criticism. See, for example, the description by H. Kretzschmar in “Robert Schumann als Aesthetiker,” Peters Jahrbuch, 13 (1906), 47-73.

71. NZfM, 2 (1835), 43.

72. NZfM, 2 (1835), 56.

73. NZfM, 3 (1835), 1-2. Schumann also deleted in his Gesammelte Schriften the first two paragraphs of the second installment (3, 33). The first installment is signed “Florestan.” The opening paragraphs of the second offer the pretense of having been written by a different author and question the adequacy of the “psychological method” of the first installment.

74. NZfM, 3 (1835), 2. The opening lines of the poem are:

    Du bist!—und bist das glühend ersehnte Herz,
    Durch stumme Mitternächte so heiss ersehnt
    Du bist's, die einst süsschauernd am Busen mir
    In langem Tiefverstummen, in bebenden
    Gebrochnen Ach's, verwirrt, mit holdem
    Jungfraunerröthen in's Herz mir lispelt:
    “Ich bin das Ach, das ewig die Brust dir eng
    Zusammenkrampft' und wieder zum Weltraum hob.”

75. Schumann's comment in the Berlioz review about the inadequacy of “psychological criticism” is one of his few explicit statements to this effect. His doubts about the efficacy of “technical” criticism, however, he reiterated frequently. A most explicit discussion of this subject also appears in the review of Berlioz' symphony (NZfM, 3 [1835], 37). A review that analyzes the form and harmony of a piece of music, Schumann maintains (quite sensibly), is of no use whatever to those completely unfamiliar with the music. An analysis, when addressed to readers who do know the music, can be useful if the reviewer has some special point to make about the form or harmony of the piece (as in the case of the Berlioz symphony to demonstrate that the first movement has a clear and rather traditional form). Schumann had no use for the aimless, matter-of-course analysis that was habitual in the longer reviews of the AmZ.

76. NZfM, 4 (1836), 6-7.

77. NZfM, 10 (1839), 187. See Appendix I, 28. C. M. von Weber discusses the possibilities open to the critic in a similar fashion in his review of E. T. A. Hoffmann's opera Undine. See Strunk, ed., Source Readings, p. 802.

78. A good example of this style in Schumann's later writing is his review of the Marienlieder of his erstwhile Mitarbeiter, Carl Banck. NZfM, 17 (1842), 10-12.

79. Of the principal names representing Schumann, “Raro” was the first to be dropped, in 1836. “Eusebius” appeared sporadically until 1839, and “Florestan” made one final appearance in 1842. A Paris correspondent (Stephen Heller?) persisted in signing his contributions “Dblr” until 1843. See NZfM, 18 (1843), 146. In 1837 Schumann was disinclined to protract the half-imaginary existence of the Davidsbund, and wished to form in its place a real musical society. See Briefe, p. 87.

80. See NZfM, 18 (1843), 14, 31; 21 (1844), 58.

81. For Baumgarten, “aesthetics” was a science of sensation or perception in general (from αἰσθητικόs, capable of perceiving). He discusses, among other things, telescopes and thermometers as aids to perception. It was only somewhat later, especially after Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, that the word came to mean specifically “the science of the perception of the beautiful in art.”

82. Quoted in B. Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic (New York, 1957), p. 321.

83. I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Bernard (New York, 1951), pp. 164-69.

84. Critique of Judgment, pp. 172-74. Kant adds in a footnote, “Those who recommend the singing of spiritual songs at family prayers do not consider that they inflict a great hardship upon the public by such noisy (and therefore in general pharisaical) devotions, for they force the neighbors either to sing with them or to abandon their meditations.”

85. A. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. Deussen (Munich, 1924), 1, pp. 303 ff.

86. Boetticher was very much bent upon showing that “Schumann is to be included among the philosophers of art of his time” (Einführung, p. 340) and musters all the evidence he can to prove that Schumann was abreast of current events in philosophy. His evidence is thoroughly unconvincing; he is reduced, for example, to making a great deal of Schumann's casual acquaintance with the “psycho-physicist” and amateur philosopher Gustav Theodore Fechner (Friedrich Wieck's brother-in-law). Ibid., pp. 337-38.

87. NZfM, 1 (1834), 151. Quoted above, p. 69.

88. Quoted in Boetticher, ed., Schriften, p. 58.

89. Schumann's closest brush with such a controversy was in his article known as “Das Komische in der Musik.” NZfM, 1 (1834), 10. This is the title appearing over the article in all the editions of the Gesammelte Schriften; consequently almost all writers on Schumann have taken it to be an autonomous essay. The title of the article in the NZfM is “Ueber den Aufsatz: das Komische in der Musik von C. Stein im 60. Hft. der Cäcilia.” In this article in the Caecilia (60 [1833], 221-66), Gustav Keferstein (who wrote in several of the musical journals under the pseudonym K. Stein, or C. Stein) refutes an article in an earlier volume of the Caecilia (51) by one Stephan Schütze, who claimed that music cannot be comic. Keferstein gives a lengthy, systematic exposition of his position and provides a number of musical examples to show that music often is comic. Schumann's article, which consists almost entirely of musical examples, was meant only as a supplement to the examples given by Keferstein.

    The fight about “the comic” went on and on—in the Caecilia, the Iris, and the AmZ (See the description of the controversy in Julius Knorr's Journalschau article on the Caecilia, NZfM, 1 (1834), 190-91). Schumann never paid any more attention to it in print.

90. Schumann once wrote to Ferdinand Hand that he had been reading the review copy of his Aesthetik der Tonkunst. Briefe, p. 230. Nevertheless, Schumann would not undertake the review of the book himself, but, after it had been on his desk “for a year and a day,” asked August Kahlert to take care of it. Briefe, p. 216. Kahlert's review appears in the NZfM, 17 (1842), 75-77 and 85-86.

91. See H. Kretzschmar, “Robert Schumann als Aesthetiker” Peters Jahrbuch, 13 (1906), p. 50, and the recent article by Edward A. Lippman, “Theory and Practice in Schumann's Aesthetics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 17 (1964), 310.

92. Jugendbriefe, p. 83.

93. Parts of it are printed in Boetticher, Einführung, pp. 114-15.

94. Strunk, ed., Source Readings, p. 775.

95. I shall use the term “musical reference” somewhat broadly, admittedly, to cover the subjects of both these questions.

96. See Leonard B. Meyer's review of Donald M. Ferguson, Music as Metaphor in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 15 (1962), 234.

97. E. Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. G. Cohen (New York, 1957), p. 9.

98. Ibid., pp. 76 ff.

99. In his enthusiasm for making this point Hanslick tends to overstate his opponents' views. “Beauty in music,” he says, “is still as much as ever viewed only in connection with its subjective impressions, and books, critiques, and conversations continually remind us that the emotions are the only aesthetic foundations of music, and that they alone are warranted in defining its scope” (The Beautiful in Music, p. 9). Which critics could these be who view music “only in connection with its subjective impression,” and who regard the emotions as the “only aesthetic foundations of music”? Schumann, clearly, was not one of them. The late baroque music theorists probably believed more implicitly than anybody else in a connection between music and the emotions (although their term “passion,” deriving largely from Descartes' Les Passions de l'âme, was a somewhat broader one than our “emotion”). Yet these theorists were also concerned, as their composition books show, with a host of other considerations: correct harmony, facile melody, and the like. When Heinichen shows how to extract the proper passions from an “unfruitful” text and illustrate them in music, it is assumed that the illustrations will take all these other considerations into account. See J. D. Heinichen, Der General-Bass in der Composition (Dresden, 1728), pp. 31 ff.

100. Stravinsky, the most determined autonomist of all (in his writing, that is—many of his compositions are of types that presuppose close association with stories, events, and scenes), also gives us more preferences than postulates. For if his dicta about the independence of music are taken as descriptions of fact (see his Autobiography, New York, 1936, p. 53), he would seem to be condemning the romantics (and Berlioz in particular) for doing what he claims is impossible. See also his Poetics of Music (New York, 1936), pp. 74 and 130.

101. NZfM, 10 (1839), 187.

102. NZfM, 2 (1835), 65.

103. NZfM 3 (1835), 50.

104. NZfM, 18 (1843), 140.

105. In saying this I believe (though I cannot be sure) that I am contradicting Boetticher. He repeats throughout his Einführung that genuine German romantic music is always referential; the kind of reference involved is “symbolism” (See pp. 66-83). And because Schumann was a genuine German romantic, he used symbolism in his music and insisted that everyone else do so. Boetticher tries to show this, typically, by stating what he claims is Schumann's position, and then by way of demonstration, quoting something irrelevant from Schumann's writings (see especially p. 323). Though it is very difficult to discern what Boetticher means by “symbols,” it is clear that he considers their significance to be universally valid; the connection between a musical symbol (he gives a schematic list of them on pp. 84-86) and its referent, he states, is a “necessary” one. But why this should be true he explains in language I cannot understand (and shall not attempt to translate): “Der äussere und innere Teilsinn erreicht niemals den Hochstgrad der Verschmelzung, die Erkenntnisnotwendigkeit muss aus einer Spannung zwischen Symbolträger und -gehalt hervorgehen.” Einführung, p. 68.

106. NZfM, 15 (1841), 33.

107. NZfM, 10 (1839), 74. And in his review of Moscheles' Etudes op. 95 (which bear titles such as “Das Bacchanal” and “Volksfestscenen”), Schumann wrote, “The use of such headings for musical compositions, which have become common again recently, is now and then criticized. It is said ‘a good piece of music has no need of such indications.’ Certainly not, but neither does it become less valuable because of them, and they are the surest means by which a composer can guard against gross misunderstandings of the character of a composition.” NZfM, 8 (1838), 201.

108. NZfM, 18 (1843), 140.

109. NZfM, 1 (1834), 10.

110. Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (New York, 1951), pp. 54 ff. Philosophers and literary critics often do not mean the same thing by “symbol.” Philosophers speak of “conventional symbols.” The symbols of logic provide examples; there is nothing about the figure s which makes it more suitable than any other to denote negation. But in literary criticism (this has been true at least since the time of Goethe) symbols are thought to have some kind of intrinsic affinity with their referents. The bull, for example, has long been a symbol for passion and virility, and most people would agree that it is more appropriate for this than would be, say, a butterfly.

111. In the preface to the second edition of her book Miss Langer suggests the substitution of “signal” for “sign.” Whichever term is used, there remain, I believe, certain loose ends to this distinction as she presents it. The utterances: “The train is approaching,” and “I am in pain” would function, apparently, just as the train-whistle and the exclamation “ouch.” But these statements certainly do not appear to be signs (or signals) as she thinks of them; both, for one thing, make use of symbols (“train” and “pain”).

112. Jugendbriefe, p. 282.

113. NZfM, 12 (1840), 82. Schumann was convinced that a composer's geographical location had an important effect on his music. On several occasions he printed his audacious aphorism, “Tell me where you live, and I will tell you how you compose.” NZfM, 4 (1836), 198, and 5 (1836), 128.

114. NZfM, 2 (1835), 65, 202.

115. NZfM, 2 (1835), 65; 18 (1843), 140; and 20 (1844), 11.

116. NZfM, 16 (1842), 103.

117. NZfM, 12 (1840), 82. See Appendix I, 49.

118. He says, “In any case, the five principal headings would have sufficed; oral tradition would have passed on the other details of these events quickly enough. The interest stimulated in the person of the composer, who himself lived through this symphony, would assure that.” NZfM, 3 (1835), 50. See Appendix I, 50.

     Barzun has shown convincingly enough that Berlioz' program for the Symphonie fantastique is not autobiographical; it was synthesized from various literary sources. Jacques Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century (Boston, 1950), 1, 157 ff.

119. NZfM, 3 (1835), p. 50.

120. Mr. Lippman's article on this subject (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 17 [1964], 310-45) is thorough and thoughtful. But it does not take sufficient note, I think, of Schumann's profound skepticism about the ability of music to depict events, objects, or people.

121. Jugendbriefe, p. 281.

122. Ibid., p. 301.

123. In 1837 Schumann wrote to Moscheles about the Carnaval, “I hardly need assure you that the arrangement of the individual numbers as well as the headings came about only after the composition of the music.” Briefe, p. 92. And later he wrote to his admirer Simonin de Sire, “The titles of all my compositions occur to me only after I have finished composing the music.” Ibid., p. 148. Boetticher (Einführung, p. 332) collects a series of Schumann's statements to this effect, but chooses not to believe them.

124. Jugendbriefe, pp. 167-68.

125. Ibid., p. 166.

126. Einführung, pp. 331-32, and 611-13. Boetticher provides for each of the Papillons, in parallel columns, the passage Schumann marked in Jean Paul, his own description of the music (this is in some places seriously inaccurate; the Papillon no. 5, for example, is in B-flat major, not G minor), and the later explanations of the Papillons given by Julius Knorr.

127. From Boetticher, Einführung, p. 611. The remainder of these passages are given in accurate translation in Lippman, pp. 315-16.

128. Lippman, p. 320, has a good explanation for this passage.

129. Briefe, p. 54.

130. See Wolfgang Gertler, Robert Schumann in seinen frühen Klavierwerken (Leipzig, 1931), pp. 4 ff. Some of the polonaises incorporated into the Papillons have been published by Geiringer in a Universal edition; Geiringer discusses them in “Ein unbekanntes Klavierwerk von Robert Schumann,” Die Musik, 25 (1932), Bd. 2, pp. 725-26.

131. Several of these passages seem disturbingly unconvincing as counterparts to the music. The scherzando, leaping, harmonically spicy middle section to the Papillon no. 4 refers, Boetticher tells us, to “a simple nun with a half mask and a fragrant bunch of auriculas.” Boetticher attempts to mitigate this incongruity by describing the music as “stepwise and pianissimo”—neither of which it is. Einführung, p. 611.

132. Jugendbriefe, pp. 286-87

133. A number of these pieces (e.g. nos. 1, 2, 6, 10) even have the introductory section which announces the next dance of the ball. This collection of dances reflects the importance in Schumann's early musical experience of amateur music-making; many of them clearly show the influence of the style of four-hand piano music in vogue at the time.

134. Langer, p. 202.

135. Langer, p. 199. In Miss Langer's opinion, then, music is a symbol for the emotions, but not a “conventional symbol”; for its significance is not based on either general agreement or a stated definition, but on a natural similarity to its referent. But why this similarity—i.e. that both music and the emotions wax and wane, etc.—should be called a similarity of logical form is not clear.

136. Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Leipzig, 1787), 2, 70.

137. NZfM, 9 (1838), 79.

138. NZfM, 11 (1840), 186. See Appendix I, 51.

139. GSK, 1, 25.

140. See the review of C. G. Likl's Elegies. NZfM, 19 (1843), 121.

141. See NZfM, 19 (1843), 158.

142. NZfM, 19 (1843), 124. Schumann prints some short excerpts from the book with this comment: “This book (which appeared 107 years ago and is now out of print) contains a good deal that is practical, substantial, and still valid today.”

143. NZfM, 2 (1835), 133.

144. NZfM, 3 (1835), 158. See Appendix I, 52.

145. W. H. Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe (Jena, 1910), 1, 185-86.

146. NZfM, 4 (1834), 71-72. See Appendix I, 53.

147. NZfM, 15 (1841), 17.

148. NZfM, 19 (1843), 158.

149. Critique of Judgment, p. 151.

150. In some of his early letters and diaries Schumann used the word in its earlier sense, to mean a kind of personal attendant spirit.

151. GSK, 1, 25. See also the comparison between genius and talent in GSK, 1, 21.

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