The perennially popular song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben, Op. 42, composed by Robert Schumann to poems by Adelbert von Chamisso in 1840, continues to provoke controversy arising from its presentation of women’s attitudes to love and life. This essay offers two fresh explorations of its context, drawing on the historical model of Susan Youens’s work alongside the ethically-driven epistemology of Gayatri Spivak. First, an examination of overlooked literature contemporary with Chamisso’s writings, as well as later in the century, challenges the assumption that he accurately represented the views of German Biedermeier women in the 1830s, or indeed in the 1860s when the cycle gradually attained popularity in public performance. Second, a survey of the early performance history of the cycle reveals a fragmented approach to the work on the concert stage, especially by Clara Schumann and her contemporaries. These women regularly performed the cycle only in parts, and/or in combination with other works, an approach which, I argue, mitigates its expressive limitations and enriches its undeniable lyrical value. I conclude by examining some contemporary performance approaches. Taken together, these explorations may lead to a fresh understanding and approach to performing the work today.

Even as late as the 1880s singers attempting to integrate the Lied into US concert life confronted a variety of barriers; in addition to difficulties of the German language, audiences preferred large-scale works and assumed the Lied was a rarified genre. Nevertheless, Max Heinrich (1853–1916), the acclaimed “Wizard of Song,” succeeded through performances that captivated audiences and immersed them in the world of each song, be it an intimate lyric or a dramatic ballad. His style and the critics’ reception of his recitals are compared with those of the equally famous baritones of his day, George Henschel and David Bispham. Although Heinrich did not make recordings, his philosophy that performing Lieder rested on a singer’s intellect is documented by numerous publications, including his annotated English-language scores of over 150 Lieder. His distinctive subjective performativity is explored through reviews and a discussion of Schumann’s “Die beiden Grenadiere.” At times critics observed that Heinrich’s interpretations did not conform to the published scores, and thus were in violation of the Werktreue tradition that was characteristic of Henschel. Yet highly perceptive critics, such as Philip Hale, acknowledged that his original interpretations encouraged listeners to perceive well-known pieces in new ways.

Ostensibly, Schumann’s Piano Concerto has its origins in the single-movement Phantasie in A minor for piano and orchestra composed in 1841, which later became the Concerto’s first movement. Broadly understood, however, the work’s genesis spans some fifteen years, encompassing both Schumann’s fledgling attempts to compose in the genre and his developing critical engagement with the concerto idea, expressed in a series of articles for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which documented his views on concerti of his time and set out his own generic agenda. Beginning with the unfinished F major Concerto of 1831, Op. 54’s prehistory takes in the aborted Konzertsatz in D minor of 1839 and also runs parallel with the genesis of Clara Wieck’s Concerto in A minor, Op. 7 of 1833–5, a work with which Schumann was closely involved. Chapter 2 narrates this prehistory, paying attention not only to the compositional genesis of Op. 54 and the process by which it absorbed the Phantasie of 1841 but also to Schumann’s critical relationship with his predecessors and evolution of an alternative concept of the genre, which emphasised the integration of soloist and orchestra and the features of the three-movement cycle into a single-movement sonata form.

The final chapter has two objectives. It first of all traces the performance history of Schumann’s Concerto in the decades after the composer’s death, focusing on London, Vienna, Leipzig, New York and Manchester, and the advocacy of particular pianists, primarily but not exclusively Clara Schumann. It examines critical responses to the work and the ways in which opinion changes over time, evolving from outright hostility and complaints about audacious modernity in the 1850s and 1860s to canonical acceptance and hagiography by the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter’s second objective is to evaluate the work’s compositional reception by exploring the uses of Schumann’s formal and expressive techniques in subsequent concerti, including both canonical music by Brahms, Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov and lesser-known examples by Scharwenka, Beach, Stanford and MacDowell.

The Introduction appraises recent trends in Schumann scholarship and reception, evaluating perceptions about Schumann’s instrumental music and the Piano Concerto’s place within them. It locates the Concerto within the critical tendency, prevalent since the early twentieth century, to style Schumann’s large-scale instrumental compositions as deficient in comparison with the piano cycles of the 1830s and the songs of 1840, evidencing the inadaptability of Schumann’s style to classical forms. Noting that the Piano Concerto has consistently evaded this criticism, I argue that the work should be understood as a landmark in the development of what John Daverio called Schumann’s ‘system of genres’: it marks the point at which Schumann’s evolving engagement with the genre comes to fruition, and makes possible his subsequent experiments with concerto form.

Chapter 1 sketches the generic contexts for Schumann’s Piano Concerto. It evaluates important theories of concerto form from Donald Francis Tovey to James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, and identifies a disconnect between these theories, which typically take Mozart as their point of orientation and trace a subsequent history through Beethoven and Mendelssohn to Brahms, and the milieu with which Schumann engaged, which was saturated with the practices of the virtuoso concerto and the models advocated by Hummel, Field, Kalkbrenner, Moscheles, Herz and others. Taking these influences as its starting point, this chapter builds an approach to the analysis of the Romantic piano concerto, which is put into action in Chapters 4 and 5.

Schumann’s essay on Symphonie fantastique was an extended critique. Much of it he admired and defended from an earlier critic, but he took exception to other aspects, including the programme and the music of the final movement. He discusses the form of the first movement Allegro, viewing it as a valid alternative structure related, but not identical, to ‘the traditional model’. The debate about the validity or otherwise of Berlioz’s procedures (which were not born of ignorance or ineptitude, as some have supposed) may never reach a conclusion agreed upon by every critic and theorist, despite the music’s positive reception by audiences; the conclusion must be that whatever its eccentricities compared to academically approved models, it ‘works’ in performance.

In its final form, Op. 54’s first movement engenders an analytical paradox. In its original incarnation, it realised Schumann’s ambition, first voiced in 1836, to combine ‘the Allegro-Adagio-Rondo sequence in a single movement’, thereby instantiating the compression of the genre’s movement cycle into its first-movement form. To an extent, the full Concerto of 1845 undoes this ambition: those aspects of the Phantasie, which invoke the features of a slow movement and finale, recede into the first movement once the second movement is underway. The first movement is nevertheless distinctive for its rejection of both the classical and virtuoso sonata-ritornello form in favour of a unitary, symphonic sonata form. This chapter examines the Phantasie’s form and the processes from which it is constructed, exploring the implications of its inclusion within Op. 54 for the work’s three-movement design and clarifying its multiple but largely neglected debts to the virtuoso repertoire. Schumann retains the virtuoso concerto’s stylistic hallmarks, but rehouses them in a new formal context and makes them responsible to processes of thematic transformation and development.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Intermezzo and Finale respond to the challenge of balancing the first movement’s slow-movement and finale-like episodes with the movements of the overarching concerto cycle. The Intermezzo is a ternary-form lyric character piece, which invokes the epigrammatic style of Schumann’s early piano cycles, and which is elided with the Finale via an enigmatic reference to the first movement’s main theme. The Finale, in contrast, is an expansive sonata rondo, which, in a nod to the Beethovenian symphonic struggle–victory narrative, supplants A minor with the parallel major. Together, the two movements convey a productive dialectic of lyric concentration and symphonic expansion, which in combination radically rethink the bel canto and brillante stylistic hallmarks of Schumann’s virtuoso precedents.

The introduction outlines the musicological context for the book’s engagement with Schubert’s string quartets. It offers a fresh perspective on the issues surrounding the early reception of Schubert’s instrumental music and considers the lingering tendencies of that history in more recent scholarship. It situates Schubert in relation to Carl Dahlhaus’ concept of the Stildualismus of the nineteenth century, and problematises the frequent setting of Schubert and Beethoven as opposites, exposing the disciplinary remnants of Beethoven’s centrality to the formalisation of music theory in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.It also lays the foundation for considering the lyric as a category of form, which the later chapters develop, and defines the concept of ’lyric teleology’ which is foundational to the book’s analytical case studies. Finally, the introduction explains and rationalises the book’s specific areas of focus (string-quartet first movements) and situates the book within existing and emerging debates surrounding nineteenth-century musical form and Schubert’s place within them.

In this chapter, pianos made by firms such as Broadwood, Érard, Graf, Pleyel, Stein, Streicher, and others owned or used by composers and virtuosi such as Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Schumann, and others are discussed and technically described. Histories of the piano making firms are provided.

From his own time up to the present, Robert Schumann has been associated with the idea of subjectivity, to an extent perhaps greater than any other composer in the Western tradition. This opening section traces the historical reach of the connection between Schumann’s music and subjectivity, its situation in early nineteenth-century (and primarily German) discourses about the self and interiority, and starts to unravel the range of meanings contained in the term subjectivity. I outline the three primary aims of the following book, which can be given as Critical, Musical, and Philosophical. Finally, this section provides an overview of the ensuing argument of the book.

This chapter considers the quintessential Romantic genre of art song. After a brief background in late eighteenth-century song style, it describes the expansion and deepening of the genre that began in the nineteenth century with the oeuvre of Franz Schubert. As other composers imitated and developed Schubert’s approach to song, poems in many languages were set to music. Across the century, these texts represent the changing emphases and concerns of Romantic poetry. The chapter outlines some central ideas of early German Romanticism: interdisciplinary collaboration, the idealisation of the fragment, and the importance of subjective experience. The gathering of short literary fragments into collections is compared to the song cycle, which groups songs to create a larger story or impression. Three case studies – songs by Schubert, Fauré, and Schumann – are explored to show how various poets and composers used scenes of nature metaphorically to express larger topics of pantheism, intimacy, and mystic unity.

Like many other nineteenth-century composers, Brahms was often approached to edit other composers’ works. Publishers strove to attract famous musicians such as Clara Schumann, Franz Liszt and Julius Rietz for editing work, alongside music scholars, not least because their names attracted buyers. Brahms’s own preference as editor was to remain anonymous, and we also do not know exactly why he undertook this work. The demands on time (studying the sources, comparing texts, revising, corresponding with the publisher, etc.) were considerable, especially alongside his own daily work of composition and concert duties. Furthermore, the pecuniary rewards were limited [see Ch. 8 ‘Finances’]. Thus, in relation to Brahms’s edition of Mozart’s Requiem, he was told on 12 February 1876 that he, like all the other editors, would have to be content with a ‘modest compensation of 1.50 Marks per score plate’.

During his lifetime, Brahms accumulated a sizeable fortune. Although the early days were not without difficulties, his finances then accumulated steadily and virtually uninterruptedly. When he died in 1897, he left behind not only manuscripts of his own works, but also an extensive collection of other composers’ autograph manuscripts (including of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, etc.) as well as bonds worth over 181,000 Gulden.The size of the sum is evident when one compares the rent that he paid his landlady Coelestine Truxa between 1887 and 1897 for his three-room apartment in Vienna’s Karlsgasse, which amounted half-yearly to 347 Gulden and 25 Kreuzer.

Brahms grew up in the Hamburg‘Gängeviertel’, an area of workers, small-scale artisans and tradesmen in modest circumstances [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’]. Later on, when he could determine his own lifestyle, luxury still held no appeal.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.

Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.

Various books and films have been devoted to the friendship between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann, often overlooking the manifold connections Brahms also had with other members of the Schumann family. Listeners and performers have been intrigued by stories of love and romantically inspired works with secret encoded musical messages. Indeed, triangular artistic relationships like that of Robert and Clara Schumann and Brahms are fascinating for many reasons, rarely to do with music – but can Clara Schumann be compared to Alma Mahler-Werfel or Cosima Bülow-Wagner? In reviewing the relationship, with recourse to unpublished letters from Clara Schumann’s correspondence with her family, the following focusses on the mutual artistic influences, dedications, Clara Schumann’s performances and Brahms’s editorial contributions to her complete edition of Robert Schumann’s works.

‘Today, my dear wife, née Nissen, successfully delivered a healthy boy. 7th May 1833. J. J. Brahms.’ Thus, on 8 May 1833Johann Jakob Brahms announced the birth of his first son Johannes in the local paper, the Privileged Weekly General News of and for Hamburg (Privilegirte wöchentliche gemeinnützige Nachrichten von und für Hamburg). At a time when such announcements were the exception, this was a clear sign of pride. Johann Jakob Brahms or Brahmst, as he also spelled it, was born on 1 June 1806 in Heide in Holstein, the second son of the innkeeper and trader Johann Brahms, who had moved to Heide from Brunsbüttel via Meldorf. His ancestors were from Lower Saxony. Johann Jakob completed a five-year apprenticeship as a city wait in Heide and Wesselburen, during which he learned the flugelhorn, flute, violin, viola and cello, then standard instruments. In early 1826, the young journeyman began his travels with his certificate of apprenticeship, received in December 1825.