Schumann's Virtuosity
Schumann's Virtuosity

Author: Alexander Stefaniak

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-09-19

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0253022096

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“A valuable resource for musicologists, theorists, pianists, and aestheticians interested in reading about Schumann’s views on virtuosity.” —Notes Considered one of the greatest composers—and music critics—of the Romantic era, Robert Schumann (1810–1856) played an important role in shaping nineteenth-century German ideas about virtuosity. Forging his career in the decades that saw abundant public fascination with the feats and creations of virtuosos (Liszt, Paganini, and Chopin among others), Schumann engaged with instrumental virtuosity through not only his compositions and performances but also his music reviews and writings about his contemporaries. Ultimately, the discourse of virtuosity influenced the culture of Western “art music” well beyond the nineteenth century and into the present day. By examining previously unexplored archival sources, Alexander Stefaniak looks at the diverse approaches to virtuosity Schumann developed over the course of his career, revealing several distinct currents in nineteenth-century German virtuosity and the enduring flexibility of virtuosity discourse.

Becoming Clara Schumann
Becoming Clara Schumann

Author: Alexander Stefaniak

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0253058279

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Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband's death. Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music. Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband's music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann's concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband's music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager. By highlighting Schumann's navigation of her musical culture's gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.

Rethinking Schumann
Rethinking Schumann

Author: Roe-Min Kok

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-01-19

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 0199813302

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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.

Clara Schumann Studies
Clara Schumann Studies

Author: Joe Davies

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-12-02

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1108489842

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Develops a holistic and gender-aware understanding of Clara Schumann as pianist, composer and teacher in nineteenth-century Germany.

Schumann
Schumann

Author: Eric Frederick Jensen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-02-13

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0199831955

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Robert Schumann is one of the most intriguing-and enigmatic-composers of the nineteenth century. Extraordinarily gifted in both music and literature, many of his compositions were inspired by poetry and novels. For much of his life he was better known as a music critic than as a composer. But whether writing as critic or composer, what he produced was created by him as a reflection of his often turbulent life. Best known was the tempestuous courtship of his future wife, the pianist Clara Wieck. Though marriage and family life seemed to provide a sense of constancy, he increasingly experienced periods of depression and instability. Mounting criticism of his performance as music director at Dusseldorf led to his attempted suicide in 1854. Schumann was voluntarily committed to an insane asylum near Bonn where, despite indications of improvement and dissatisfaction with his treatment, he spent the final two years of his life. Drawing on original research and newly published letters and journals from the time, author Eric Frederick Jensen presents a balanced portrait of the composer with both scholarly authority and engaging clarity. Biographical chapters alternate with discussion of Schumann's piano, chamber, choral, symphonic, and operatic works, demonstrating how the circumstances of his life helped shape the music he wrote. Chronicling the romance of Robert and Clara, Jensen offers a nuanced look at the evolution of their relationship, one that changed dramatically after marriage. He also follows Schumann's creative musical criticism, which championed the burgeoning careers of Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms and challenged the musical tastes of Europe.

Schumann and His World
Schumann and His World

Author: R. Larry Todd

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1400863864

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We know Robert Schumann in many ways: as a visionary composer, a seasoned journalist, a cultured man of letters, and a genius who, having passed his mantle on to the young Brahms, succumbed to mental illness in 1856. Drawing on recent pathbreaking research, this collection offers new perspectives on this seminal nineteenth-century figure. In Part I, Leon Botstein and Michael P. Steinberg assess Schumann's efforts to place music at the center of German culture, in public and private sectors. Bernhard R. Appel offers a probing source study of one of Schumann's most personal works, the Album für die Jugend, Op. 68, while John Daverio considers the generic identity of Das Paradies und die Peri, and Jon W. Finson reexamines the first version of the Eichendorff Liederkreis. Gerd Nauhaus investigates Schumann's approach to the symphonic finale, and R. Larry Todd considers the intractable issue of quotations and allusions in Schumann's music. Part II presents letters and memoirs, including unpublished correspondence between Clara Schumann and Felix and Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. In Part III, conflicting critical views of Schumann are juxtaposed. Some of these sources are translated into English for the first time. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Robert Schumann: Piano Concerto
Robert Schumann: Piano Concerto

Author: Julian Horton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1316512584

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Offers an introduction to one of the most important and influential piano concertos in the history of Western music. It combines an account of the work's genesis with a detailed yet accessible analysis of each movement and new research into its reception and performance history.

Robert Schumann and the Piano Concerto
Robert Schumann and the Piano Concerto

Author: Claudia Macdonald

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-09

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1000938824

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Robert Schumann was a unique personality in 19th century music: a celebrated music critic and champion of new composers as well as a talented performer and composer himself, he did much to modernize the literature and performance style for the piano. This book covers the key period of c. 1815-55, exploring how the generation that came after Beethoven was central in reshaping and refining the conception of the concerto style, and particularly the piano concerto. It relates Schumann's own compositional development to his musical environment, recreating the exciting milieu in which Schumann and his contemporaries lived and worked. Written in scholarly, but non-technical language, Robert Schumann and the Development of the Piano Concerto will appeal to college and conservatory teachers and students, as well as music connoisseurs. Also includes 60 musical examples.

Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann
Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann

Author: Benedict Taylor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-04-07

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1009178490

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The concept of subjectivity is one of the most popular in recent scholarly accounts of music; it is also one of the obscurest and most ill-defined. Multifaceted and hard to pin down, subjectivity nevertheless serves an important, if not indispensable purpose, underpinning various assertions made about music and its effect on us. We may not be exactly sure what subjectivity is, but much of the reception of Western music over the last two centuries is premised upon it. Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann offers a critical examination of the notion of musical subjectivity and the first extended account of its applicability to one of the composers with whom it is most closely associated. Adopting a fluid and multivalent approach to a topic situated at the intersection of musicology, philosophy, literature, and cultural history, it seeks to provide a critical refinement of this idea and to elucidate both its importance and limits.

Experiencing Schumann
Experiencing Schumann

Author: Donald Sanders

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-09-02

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1442240040

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During his lifetime and for at least a century after his death, Robert Schumann and his music were commonly misunderstood. His long struggle with mental illness was well known, and as a result some of the most original and innovative features of his work were often dismissed as bizarre and irrational. In recent years, however, the rhythmic complexities and unorthodox harmonic practices that lovers of his piano music and lieder have found so appealing are now being received with more objective treatment in critical and scholarly circles. His influence on the music of Brahms and other later composers now seems obvious. The refinement of Schumann’s literary taste is evident not only in his songs, but also in the marvelous fantasy world of his piano pieces. Experiencing Schumann: A Listener’s Companion combines a concise biography of Robert Schumann with an analysis of works from the most important genres in which he worked. The music is discussed in the frame of Schumann’s eventful and ultimately tragic life, and the important influence of his brilliant and adoring—but strong-willed—wife, Clara Wieck Schumann, is also examined. A selected listening discography lists outstanding recorded performances of the featured compositions. Delving into Schumann’s most famous pieces in engaging and accessible style, Donald Sanders provides insightful analysis for dedicated lovers of Schumann as well as newcomers to his musical innovations.