Inspired by the centenary anniversary of Robert Schumann's birth, this new collection of eighteen essays was compiled with the clear aim ‘to take stock: to reflect on the state of existing views and to suggest new paths’ in Schumann scholarship (p. v). Perhaps some might feelwith me an air of trepidation on being faced with another book on a composer whose life, works and reception have already been prolifically chronicled. Nevertheless, this volume does indeed manage to offer some significant ‘rethinking’ on Schumann, and even highlights more areas that could be researched by scholars to come.

Clearly laid out into four primary sections, the book categorises its articles under the headings of ‘The Political Sphere’, ‘Popular Influences’, ‘Analytical Approaches’ and ‘Twentieth-Century Interpretations.’ The openings of the first two sections and the close of whole book constitute an explosion of the nomenclatures we have come to accept as general terminology. Celia Applegate draws on scholarship of the Chinese scholar Prasenjit Duara in distinguishing between hard and soft boundaries in nationalism.Footnote 1 This provides her with a standpoint from which to reconsider various reception histories of Schumann, particularly bypassing the milestone of Wagner to offer a more nuanced view of how Schumann was seen in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. She also refutes the idea of a neutral public sphere, seeing all public space as political, calling it ‘something of a hidden dimension in the study of nineteenth-century musical culture’ (p. 10). These ideas are picked up on in a later article by James Deaville, in which he examines Schumann's interaction with the Tonkunstleversammlungen (Musicians’ Assembly)Footnote 2 and the way in which ‘music participated in the nationalist kulturnation Footnote 3 movement’ (p. 26).

In the similar vein of exploded terms, Jon W. Finson begins part II of the book by taking apart the concepts of ‘popular’ and ‘classical’, comparing Schumann's settings of the Gedichte der Konigin Maria Stuart with settings by Barker and Crawford.Footnote 4 Most striking in his article are the parallels he finds between Mary Stuart and Diana, princess of Wales. This recalls the work of other historians such as Jayne Lewis who has drawn the same comparison.Footnote 5 Finson also draws on his own background in editing to contest the trustworthiness of the poems attributed to Mary Stuart, shedding new light on their authorship.

The entire collection ends, rather fittingly, with Scott Burnham's discussion of late style. Through a comparison with Beethoven in particular, Burnham coins the term ‘the untimely’ as a description of works that add ‘a special dimension to the present’ (p. 416). In particular, he notes parataxis as a frequent feature of this style as it works ‘to disable temporal hierarchy’ (p. 421). In returning to Schumann, he unites the composer's last works through the common theme of death, considering differing relations to it and showing us that ‘our constructions of late styles style our later lives so that we will not be left soulless’ (p. 429). In other words, Burnham shows how there is a certain reflexivity to late styles: we ourselves choose to develop the concept of lateness as our way of dealing with issues of ageing that we would rather not face.

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For me, the third section, ‘Analytical Approaches’ held the greatest excitement, and I was not disappointed. The articles included – replete with annotated examples, tonal diagrams, formal tables and Schenkerian graphs – bear witness to a burgeoning of extraordinarily detailed analyses of Schumann's works. Perhaps the only difficulty is the time and concentration required to fathom the minutiae of detail covered within the articles, and I have to say that Julie Hedges Brown's article stands out ahead of the others in being most clearly explained. Most impressively, the order of the articles means that they systematically review one another: Harald Krebs’ superb consideration of the op. 90 Lenau poems draws on ideas set out in his award-winning book Fantasy Pieces: Metrical Dissonance in the Music of Robert Schumann Footnote 6, and outlines the transition process between Schumann's interest in surface dissonance and his later focus on deeper-level hypermeter. But this is immediately followed by William Benjamin's reconsideration of the definition of hypermeter, which self-confessedly ‘differs from the well known ideas expressed in Krebs’ (p. 208), allowing us to be aware of multiple points of view before forming our own analyses. The following three articles really do constitute a ‘rethinking’: Peter H. Smith challenges the ‘je ne sais quoi’ that has allowed Schubert's harmonic dialects an aesthetic pass whilst making us prejudiced against Schumann's ‘willfulness or, worse…lack of insight’ (p. 259); Julie Hedges Brown explores the influence of the style hongrois on Schumann, a topic that ‘has barely been raised’ (p. 266); and David Kopp challenges the concept that there is ‘a universal and invariant idea of what constitutes a key’ (p. 300). These musicologists lead the way in proving that studies of Schumann's works have not been exhausted.

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In my opinion, a handful of the articles stood out from the rest. A brilliant paper which brings to light some fascinating readings is Lily E. Hirsch's on the reception of Schumann's works in the Third Reich. She chronicles how Schumann's initial reception by the Nazis as a ‘tarnished sonic emblem or “hardly hero”’ (p. 52) due to his links with the East and history of mental illness is entirely overhauled by accounts of later Nazis who rewrote music history to turn Schumann's insanity into a sign of his position outside the mainstream of society: a sign of his music's autonomy and greatness. As Hirsch writes, Schumann's madness was ‘transformed from liability to virtue’ (p. 58). Most of all, this article acts as a warning to historians of the powerful ways in which the manipulation of biography can impact the composers’ reception history.

Further highlights are by the editors themselves. Roe-Min Kok draws on her considerable expertise in the representation of childhood in music, in her reassessment of the Requiem für Mignon. She challenges a nineteenth-century review by Bischoff, which saw op. 98a as ‘faulty characterisation’ (p. 90), arguing that Bischoff himself was biased by the contemporary concept of the Romantic child of innocence and angelic nature.Footnote 7 Instead, Kok finds Mignon feistier and masculine, yet tender: a true ‘flesh-and-blood figure’ (p. xx). Uniting Bischoff's image with contemporary art, poetry, universal religious images and children's fairytales, she overhauls the longstanding view of Mignon, instead proposing a new interpretation of Mignon as ‘puer senex’, akin to the child in Novalis's Hymns to the Night (1799–1800). What is more, she argues that the very confusion surrounding Schumann's portrayal of Mignon is deliberate: by withholding Mignon's identity she remains ‘a cipher to the last’ and instead of laying her to rest, the requiem ‘infuses her with a new life’ (p. 102), functioning not as a requiem but as an ‘antirequiem.’ Kok had me gripped with every word.

Continuing this high standard, Laura Tunbridge unites film, painting, fiction and opera in a consideration of how Schumann's music aptly recreates ‘the pleasures and perils of a child's vivid imagination’ (p. 399). In fact, this article is just one of a number within the collection that draw interdisciplinary ideas and media into the orbit of Schumann's compositions – something I believe is the true making of this book. Nicholas Marston chooses to reconsider Schumann through the composer's relationship with the visual: in particular, the way he ‘transposes… painting into tones’ (p. 110). He focuses on the Faustszenen,Footnote 8 drawing analogies between the work's form and that of a triptych panel or a pendant canvasand shows that Schumann's music invites us ‘not only to hear, but to see’ (p. 124).

Approaching from a different direction, Ivan Raykoff makes some striking points in recategorising Schumann's declamatory ballades of 1853 as melodramas.Footnote 9 He traces in them the roots of ‘cinematic underscoring’ (p. 159) and argues that they contain devices ‘that would become a familiar practice in scoring for sound films three decades later’ (p. 168).

Still in this interdisciplinary vein, David Ferris examines recent imaginative recreations of the first encounter between Schumann and Clara Wieck, such as in J. D. Landis’ Longing (2000)Footnote 10 and Janice Galloway's Clara (2002)Footnote 11, asking ‘what can the fictional Schumanns offer to scholars’ (p. 360)? Instead of merely dismissing fiction as ‘an obsolete mode of historical discourse’ (p. 362), he follows the ideas of Haydn White in arguing that truth can ‘find its fullest development in fiction’ (p. 363), through the way it adds a ‘literary dimension to the meaning of their lives’ (p. 364). Furthermore, he argues that the fact that Landis confuses fact and fiction actually helps in portraying this same confusion that Schumann experienced in his decline into insanity. He concludes that historians should take stock of fiction as far from being antitheses, ‘the genres are complementary’, because ‘history is only half of what we want from biography’ (p. 388).

And finally, Wayne Heisler Jr. discusses the use of non-dance works by Schumann for choreographic treatment, such as in Fokine's and Kröller's ballet version of Carnaval Footnote 12 and Balanchine's of Davidsbündertänze.Footnote 13 Drawing on Daverio's claim that Schumann's music possesses an ‘imagistic essence’ (p. 332), Heisler discusses how personifications of the alter egos Florestan and Eusebius within these ballets, as well as of Clara and Robert Schumann himself, create the powerful realisation that ‘dancing with Schumann's music is to dance also with Schumann’ (p. 330). He successfully validates interdisciplinary considerations such as the ones in this collection by explaining that they provide ‘fresh contexts…and thus inspiration to go on playing, listening to, studying, writing about, and choreographing Schumann’ (p. 350).

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Overall, what is most admirable in a ‘rethinking’ of a composer is that this book does not try and force contrived interpretations on the reader merely for the purpose of being novel. Indeed, Susan Youens’ article does just the opposite, analysing the ‘post revolutionary disillusionment’ (p. 30) shown in a selection of Schumann's songs, but making it quite clear that political readings are only valid in a ‘potent minority’ (p. 31) and even then, ‘not overtly so’ (p. 40). But far from weakening her argument, Youens’ frank and unexaggerated assessment of the political content of the songs, as well as her in-depth analysis of symbols that suggests rather than imposes itself on us, allows the political content of Schumann's material to speak for itself, confirming Youens’ own readings in the process.

If I could venture to suggest what is missing from this book, it would be a section on performance approaches. The only comments made in this area are by Finson, who claims that the fifth Gedichte der Konigin Maria Stuart contains ‘fairly dramatic leaps’ that assume ‘an operatic mien that looks presciently toward the public Liederabend and the age of recordings by professional singers’ (p. 83). Granted, this song is not intended for an inexperienced singer, but its technical difficulty is not truly comparable to an operatic level. Apart from a leap from F# to F♮ in bars 8–9 (which is actually aided by a rest in the vocal part and an anticipation in the top line of the piano), there are only two leaps, which encompass comfortable and idiomatic sixths, with almost the entire rest of the movement being stepwise within an untaxing mezzo range. Dana Gooley comes close to performance in his discussion of Schumann's own performances and his use of performance directions and their interpretation in op. 11, but his only real conclusion on the subject of performance is that playing ‘“freely” is a precondition for a good performance’ (p. 136). He also offers some astute points about the ABEGG variations from an analytical point of view, but does not venture any advice on how to incorporate this when playing them. Overall, he shows the importance of improvisation for Schumann but warns that ‘any attempt to reconstruct Schumann's improvisation practices is essentially provisional’ (p. 130). There is no denying it is a compelling article, but I couldn't help but want more discussion of interpretation in light of the issues Gooley raises.

Overall, the only disappointment in such a collection of essays is when they finish. A prime example of this is Applegate's consideration of German nationalism. She quotes Schumann in asking ‘what is a musical paper compared to a Chopin concerto’ (p. 9)? This turn from theory to music is exactly what it would be fascinating to attempt in light of what she suggests: how would her theories of liberal nationalism and fluid boundaries apply to Schumann's music? She hails the composer as an ‘avatar of a liberalising national community’ (p. 12), but is this manifested in the music itself or just in his writings? We can only hope that questions such as this are addressed in future publications. At least it goes to show that in considering figures as iconic as Schumann there are still ‘neue bahnen’ for future scholars to pursue.