Part I, ‘Hearing Subjects’, turns attention to Robert Schumann, addressing the composer’s early grappling with the Romantic problematisation of subjectivity and personal identity frequently present in his music of the 1830s and early 1840s. In ‘Hearing the Self’, I trace the historical development of subjectivity in music up to Schumann’s time, before turning to an early and notable exemplification of the composer’s practice in Carnaval. This forms the starting point for a more detailed consideration of the ways in which a sense of subjectivity can be manifested in Schumann’s piano music of the 1830s, including such features as allusiveness, idiosyncrasy, interiority, a fantasy principle in connexion of moods, and the questioning of continuity and coherence. Finally, I look at the sense of subjectivity conveyed in Schumann’s concertos and the sense in which they collapse distinctions between self and world.

‘Hearing Selves’ outlines the problem of the divided subject as manifested in philosophical discourse around the turn of the nineteenth century as well as in several of Schumann’s favourite authors such as Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Against this backdrop we may better understand Schumann’s creation of his alter egos Florestan and Eusebius and his whimsical questioning of subjective identity. Subsequently, this chapter delves more deeply into the musical features that make a sense of divided subjectivity palpable, examining the conflicting voices and sense of irony present in Schumann’s Lieder of 1840, above all his settings of Heine, alongside the split levels of discourse created in instrumental music through the use of tonal dualism, textural interleaving, and the use of metric dissonance to suggest a conception of the self as an agglomeration of diverse bodily rhythms subsisting through overlapping temporal processes.