This book offers a theory of Romantic song by re-evaluating Schumann's Dichterliebe of 1840, one of the most enigmatic works of the repertoire. It investigates the poetics of Early Romanticism in order to understand the mysterious magnetism and singular imaginative energy that imbues Schumann's musical language. The Romantics rejected the ideal of a coherent and organic whole and cherished the suggestive openness of the Romantic fragment, the disconcerting tone of Romantic irony and the endlessness of Romantic reflection - thereby realizing an aesthetic of fragmentation. Close readings of many songs from Dichterliebe show the singer's intense involvement with the piano's voice, suggesting a 'split Self' and the presence of the 'Other'. Seeing Schumann as the 'second poet of the poem' - here of Heine's famous Lyrisches Intermezzo - this book considers essential issues of musico-poetic intertextuality, introducing into musicology a hermeneutic that seeks to synthesize philosophical, literary-critical, music-analytical and psycho-analytical modes of thought.

Interdisciplinary studies of some of the greatest examples of German art song by major scholars in musicology and German literature.

This Companion is an accessible introduction to Schumann: his time, his temperament, his style and his œuvre. An international team of scholars explores the cultural context, musical and poetic fabric, sources of inspiration and interpretative reach of key works from the Schumann repertoire ranging from his famous lieder and piano pieces to chamber, orchestral and dramatic works. Additional chapters address Schumann's presence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century composition and the fascinating reception history of his late works. Tables, illustrations, a detailed chronology and advice on further reading make it an ideally informative handbook for both the Schumann connoisseur and the music lover. An excellent textbook for the university student of courses on key composers of nineteenth-century Western Classical music, it is an invaluable guide for all who are interested in the thought, aesthetics and affective power of one of the most intriguing figures of a culturally rich and formative period.

The Muse has long been figured as a divine or erotically alluring consort to the virile male artist, who may inspire him or lead him to the edge of madness. This book explores the changing cultural expressions of the relationship between the male artist with a beloved, imagined or desired Muse, to offer new and penetrating perspectives on musical representations and transformations of creative masculine subjectivity, and important aspects of the shift from the styles and aesthetics of Romantic Idealism to Modernist Anxiety in music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of the chapters begins with explorations into male artists' relationships with their Muse, and moves to analysis and interpretation which uncovers cultural constructions of masculine artistic inspiration and production, and their association with creatively inspiring and erotically charged relationships with a Muse. New insights are offered into the musical meaning and cultural significance of selected works by Rossini, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Sibelius, Mahler, Bartók, Scriabin, Szymanowski, Debussy, Berg, Poulenc and Weill.

Late Style and its Discontents interrogates the critical cliche of "late style," questioning whether Titian, Beethoven, Goethe and others can usefully be assimilated to one another, as though their particular social and historical circumstances had been transcended by a singular existential predicament.

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.

Featuring 28 music examples this book takes an innovative approach to analyzing and interpreting nineteenth-century German song, offering new perspectives on Robert Schumann's Lieder and song cycles. Robert Schumann's Lieder are among the richest and most complex songs in the repertoire and have long raised questions and stimulated discussion among scholars, performers, and listeners. Among the wide range of methodologies that have been used to understand and interpret his songs, one that has been conspicuously absent is an approach based on narratology (the theory and study of narrative texts). Proceeding from the premise that the performance of a Lied is a narrative act, in which the singer and pianist together function as a narrator, Andrew Weaver's groundbreaking study proposes a comprehensive theory of narratology for the German Romantic Lied and song cycle, using Schumann's complete song oeuvre as the test case. The theory, grounded in the work of narratologist Mieke Bal but also drawing upon recent work in literary theory and musicology, illuminates how music can open up new meanings for the poem, as well as how a narratological analysis of the poem can help us understand the music. Weaver's book offers new insights into Schumann's Lieder and the poetry he set while simultaneously proposing a methodology applicable to the analysis and interpretation of a wide range of works, including not only the rich treasury of German Lieder but also potentially any genre of accompanied song in any language from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Jeremy Begbie explores how the practices of music and the discourses it has generated bear witness to some of the pivotal theological currents and counter-currents shaping modernity. Begbie argues that music is capable of yielding highly effective ways of addressing some of the more intractable theological problems and dilemmas of modernity.

Terence Cave traces the afterlives of Mignon, an apparently minor character in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, through the European cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries. The enigmatic and fascinating Mignon reappears in wide range of different works, mainly narrative fiction but also poetry, song, opera, and film.