The tonal relationships between the songs of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe Op. 48 (1840) have been studied extensively by musicologists. Indeed, it is typically key, more than poetry, narrative, or style, upon which arguments for the coherence of the song cycle hang. Such careful analytical accounts, however, are rarely heeded by performers, who often transpose songs. Schumann did not specify a voice type for Dichterliebe; the dedication of the first edition to Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient seems more to do with her character than her Fach. A tenor may sing the whole cycle at pitch, but baritones, basses, sopranos, and mezzos rarely do so, with one exception: the seventh song, “Ich grolle nicht,” which almost everybody performs in the original key of C major. The primary reason for so doing appears to be that age-old weakness of singers to show that they can manage the high note: here, an ossia top A. Exploring the historical and poetic contexts of “Ich grolle nicht” illustrates the tensions between the hermeneutics of reading and analyzing a score and interpreting that same score in performance. David J. Levin wrote about how performances can “unsettle” even canonical operas; the same is true of song cycles, but perhaps musicology can also unsettle approaches to performance.

The essay first focusses on the role of music Sebald’s writings in general. It explores the influence of music on his critical and literary writings in terms of style and thematic considerations. The focus of the essay is on pop music, discussing the connections between music and key themes such as memory and trauma. Next, the essay analyses Sebald’s impact on pop music and popular culture. His books, especially The Rings of Saturn, inspired many musical artists working in Avantgarde contexts (e.g. The Caretaker, Mabe Fratti, Christoph Heemann) and influenced many pop musicians who often are writers, too (e.g. Nick Cave, Patti Smith, David Byrne, Dirk von Lowtzow). These connections leads to a closer consideration of the similarities between Sebald’s literary techniques and the format of the pop music album.

This chapter elaborates upon the claims I discussed in the introduction. First, I show what can be gained by taking Clara Schumann’s music on its own terms rather than measuring it against the music of her husband. Second, I argue that the traditional tools of music theory and analysis can reveal an enormous amount about her compositional craft – and, by extension, about the craft of other female composers. I also suggest that those tools themselves can be enriched by being applied to her music (principally in that her songs encourage us to use those tools in search not only of overt complexity and radical ingenuity but also of subtlety and expressive nuance). Finally, I claim that bringing the tools of the “new Formenlehre” to Clara Schumann’s songs allows us to appreciate the sophistication of her text-setting practices, and also to grapple with broader questions about the relationship between form and text in nineteenth-century art song.

At Clara Schumann’s concerts, Robert Schumann’s sets of piano character pieces met audiences only through her own reshaping and recontextualization. She extracted pieces from some sets for ‘mosaics’ of two or more pieces, potentially from different opuses and by different composers. In other cases, she performed piano sets in abridged or reordered versions. This chapter closely considers several of Schumann’s mosaics, as well as her several versions of Kreisleriana. It argues that Schumann’s reworkings of her husband’s piano sets were acts of compositional agency that reflected her own strategies. In her mosaics, she juxtaposed pieces to create new textural, tonal, motivic or stylistic interrelationships and, in her abridged versions of sets, changed their larger structures in both radical and subtle ways.

Examining this aspect of Clara Schumann’s performances can nuance how we understand her image as her husband’s pianistic champion, reminding us that she cultivated this image while participating in practices that allowed performers to customize works. More broadly, it invites us to recognize a musical work as a building block for a concert, and to recognize that performers’ decisions shape how features seemingly fixed within the score can take on varying significances within this larger context.

If not an idée fixe in scholarship, the notion of musical exchanges among intimates of the Schumanns’ circle probably counts at least as a Leitfaden. Clara Schumann’s wistful instrumental romances – and those composed by Robert Schumann, Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms – encourage a reconsideration of the role that ‘conversations’ played for her within the miniature genre. We begin with a chronology of the romances composed by this circle between 1829 and 1893 – predominantly for solo piano, but also for violin and piano, oboe and piano, string quartet, piano or violin and orchestra, orchestra, and cello and piano – and discuss how these ‘conversations’ could yield subtle allusions, performative physical memories and nostalgic recollections. Focusing on Clara Schumann’s Romances Opp. 21 and 22, this study brings forward aspects of formal and textural ambiguity, and virtuosity, all of which help reveal Clara Schumann’s contribution to the genre, while elucidating how her complex, multifaceted roles in the private and public spheres did not impede her from continuously challenging herself as a composer as she engaged in nuanced musical dialogues inspired by her circle.