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.

Chapter 2 is a meditation on the general conditions of our intercourse with the past, especially as engaged by its material forms, whether in buildings, artworks, literary works or musical works. Distinctions between the forms are of course necessary but, it is argued, continuities remain: the mute testimony of the material object concerning the agents of its creation; the role of the viewer or reader in realising the work; the hand of the editor-conservator; and the role of time in its successive forms of existence.

Lydia Goehr’s history of the work-concept in music is pushed further and the dilemma of conservation, witnessed by the restored Teatro La Fenice (Phoenix Theatre) in Venice, is explored. The work-concept emerges as a regulative idea rather than a transcendent ideal form.