Rethinking Schumann

A provocative re-examination of a major romantic composer, Rethinking Schumann provides fresh approaches to Schumann's oeuvre and its reception from the perspectives of literature, visual arts, cultural history, performance studies, dance, and film. Traditionally, research has focused on biographical links between the composer and his music, encouraging the assumption that Schumann was solitary, divorced from reality, and frequently associated with "untimeliness." These eighteen new essays argue from a multitude of perspectives that Schumann was in fact very much a man of his time, informed not only by music but also the culture and society around him. The book further reveals that the composer's reputation has been shaped significantly by, for example, changes in attitudes towards German romanticism and its history, and recent developments in musical scholarship and performance. Rethinking Schumann takes into account cultural and social-institutional frameworks, engages with ongoing and new issues of reception and historiography, and offers fresh music-analytical insights. As a whole, the essays assemble a portrait of the artist that reflects the different ways in which Schumann has been understood and misunderstood over the past two hundred years. The volume is, in short, a timely reassessment of this ultimately non-untimely figure's legacy. While the essays consider some of Schumann's most famous music (Dichterliebe, Kinderszenen and the Piano Quintet), they also provide crucial adjustment to judgments against the composer's later works by explaining their musical features not as the result of diminishing creative capacity but as reflections of the political and social situations of mid-nineteenth-century German culture and technological developments. Schumann is revealed to have been a musician engaged by and responsive to his surroundings, whose reputation was formed to a great extent by popular culture, both in his own lifetime as he responded to particular poets and painters, and later, as his life and works were responded to by subsequent generations.

Roe-Min Kok is Assistant Professor of Music at McGill University. She is co-editor of Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth (2006). Laura Tunbridge is Senior Lecturer in Music Analysis and Critical Theory at the University of Manchester. Her publications include Schumann's Late Style (2007) and The Song Cycle (forthcoming).

Preface I. The Political Sphere 1. "Robert Schumann and the Culture of German Nationhood," Celia Applegate 2. "Organizing German Musical Life at Mid-Century: Brendel, Schumann and the Leipzig Tonkünstlerversammlungen/Tonkünstlerverein," James Deaville 3. "The Cry of the Schuhu: Dissonant History in a Late Schumann Song," Susan Youens 4. "Segregating Sound: Robert Schumann in the Third Reich," Lily E. Hirsch II. Popular Influences 5. "At the Interstice between 'Popular' and 'Classical': Schumann's Poems of Queen Mary Stuart and European Sentimentality at Mid-Century," Jon Finson 6. "Who was Mignon, what was she? Popular Catholicism, Fairytale Archetype, and Puer Senex in the Reception of Schumann's Requiem für Mignon," Roe-Min Kok 7. "Entzückt: Schumann, Raphael, Faust," Nicholas Marston 8. "Schumann and Agencies of Improvisation," Dana Gooley 9. "Schumann's Melodramatic Afterlife," Ivan Raykoff III. Analytical Approaches 10. "Meter and Expression in Robert Schumann's Op. 90," Harald Krebs 11. "Hypermetric Dissonance in the Later Works of Robert Schumann," William Benjamin 12. "Associative Harmony, Tonal Pairing, and Middleground Structure in Schumann's Sonata Expositions: The Role of the Mediant in the First Movements of the Piano Quintet, Piano Quartet, and 'Rhenish' Symphony," Peter Smith 13. "Schumann and the style hongrois," Julie Hedges Brown 14. "Intermediate States of Key in Schumann," David Kopp IV. 20th-Century Reception 15. "Choreographing Schumann," Wayne Heisler 16. "The Fictional Lives of the Schumanns," David Ferris 17. "Deserted Chambers of the Mind (Schumann Memories)," Laura Tunbridge 18. "Late Styles," Scott Burnham