In his fascinating new book, Alexander Stefaniak introduces readers to a ‘virtuosity discourse’ in which critics and musicians debated ‘the imagined distinctions between transcendent and superficial virtuosity’ (p. 2). Robert Schumann helped shape this discourse ‘most influentially not as a performer but as a composer, critic, and collaborator’ (p. 4). The sources of Schumann’s views on virtuosity are diverse and include some that Stefaniak discovered through archival research. Newly discovered or previously unrecognized sources include the Fantaisies et finale, the long-lost epilogue to his ‘Ein Opus II’ review of Chopin, essays in which Schumann claimed virtuosity could convey the sublime, documents of Schumann’s association with Henriette Voigt and Liszt’s 1854 essay on Clara. Newly significant well-known sources include drafts of Schumann’s piano concerto and his reviews of Liszt’s 1840 Leipzig concerts.
Schumann has historically been regarded as an important thinker on virtuosity, specifically as an opponent to it; however, Stefaniak revises this view be exploring the complexity and extent of Schumann’s engagement with it. Dana Gooley hints at this complexity – ‘For Schumann, virtuosity must contribute to the animation of mind that makes music a poetic art’ – but he doesn’t delineate the specifics of how Schumann defined transcendent and superficial virtuosity.Footnote 1 Stefaniak urges readers to focus on ‘what aspects of specific works and performances Schumann and his contemporaries responded to, what shapes their arguments took, and what contemporary ideals their own virtuosity drew upon’ (p. 8).
Schumann’s Virtuosity is thoughtfully organized and loosely chronological, with in-depth, elegant analyses of relevant examples. Part I (chapters 1–4) is about the piano decade and Part II (chapters 5–6) focuses on the work concept, where Stefaniak offers insights into Schumann’s activities in the 1840s–50s. Rather than attempting to exhaust the topic, he highlights the ‘genres and instruments that figured most prominently in the virtuosity discourse and on works whose reception most pointedly discussed virtuosity’ (p. 248).
Schumann participated fully in the virtuosity discourse because he cared deeply about what it meant for music’s cultural status. John Daverio commented on this anxiety, writing that for Schumann, ‘music should aspire to the same intellectual substance as the lettered arts: poetry and philosophy’.Footnote 2 Virtuosos were often seen as craftsmen, even compared to circus performers, who threatened the cultural status of music; however, Schumann offered an alternative by recognizing performers who channelled the poetic or the sublime.
Stefaniak begins Part I reminding readers that Schumann’s early career was as an aspiring virtuoso himself. He was immersed in the type of music his peers called ‘brilliant’ and today we term ‘post-classical’, with its transparency, glittery textures, ornate detail, predictable phrasing and technical bravura. Herz, Hummel, Czerny, Kalkbrenner, Weber, Hünten, Döhler and Bertini, who flourished between the late 1810s and the 1830s, represented the style. Schumann’s compositions from this period compare to early contributions by Liszt, Chopin and Thalberg in their ‘strikingly original, idiosyncratic approaches to virtuosity that set them apart from their postclassical models’ (p. 20).
Schumann heard most post-classical pieces as sensuous, accessible, effortless, immediately appealing, shallow, frivolous and lacking transcendent qualities. Meanwhile, his contemporaries, Gottfried Wilhelm Fink and Carl Czerny defended the aesthetic of pleasure.Footnote 3 Stefaniak’s book ‘newly considers the effects that Czerny believed virtuosic improvisations and compositions should produce for the listener’ (pp. 22–3).
Czerny wrote about the importance of keeping listeners engaged with audible, pleasant melodies: ‘The chief aim of the composer must always be to remain tasteful and interesting, to stretch out no passage too much, and to preserve the most beautiful and animated ideas for the end’.Footnote 4 He believed that borrowed operatic themes were perfect for this purpose, citing Herz’s ‘Violette’ Variations and Thalberg’s Grande fantaisie et variations sur des motifs de l’opéra ‘Norma’ as ideal examples.
Schumann, on the other hand, found the Thalberg piece overly accessible and pleasurable, lacking any sense of inner depth; however, he did believe that the pleasurable (sensuous) and the poetic (interior) were overlapping aesthetics. ‘Schumann’s concept of “poetic” interiority did not reject the figurational and structural idioms of popular pianism, nor did it abnegate the sensual pleasures of virtuosity’ (p. 51). One example that illustrates Schumann’s argument that the poetic and the pleasurable were not mutually exclusive is his ‘Ein Opus II’ essay.
Stefaniak discovered in his archival research that ‘Ein Opus II’ (Schumann’s 1831 review of Chopin’s ‘Là ci darem la mano’ Variations Op. 2) originally contained a conclusion that Fink omitted when he published it in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. The review elevated Chopin’s work because of its poetic interiority, but it neglected a detailed analysis of piece’s technical aspects. The omitted conclusion is no longer completely legible, but evidence suggests that it supplied a technical analysis of the piece, complementing the earlier, more subjective review. By publishing a negative critique of the variations alongside Schumann’s positive one, Fink attempted to expose Schumann as impulsive, reacting only to the subjective affect of the piece. With Stefaniak’s discovery of the long-lost conclusion, we now see that Schumann brought the subjective and technical attributes of Chopin’s the piece together, concluding that it was both masterful and transcendent.
One month before ‘Ein Opus II’, Schumann published his first piece, the Thème sur le nom ‘Abegg’ varié. Stefaniak includes a splendid analysis of the piece claiming that it illustrates ‘musical metaphors for interiority and cultivation’ (p. 92). He has recognized that the variations subvert post-classical convention by obscuring the theme’s melody, harmonies and phrasing through the use of complex textures.
Stefaniak also focuses on Schumann’s Fantaisies et finale, which Schumann never published, though the work was later revised to become the Études symphoniques Op. 13. Stefaniak includes a compelling side-by-side analysis of the two works, concluding that the Fantaisies, with their disguised reference to Heinrich Marschner’s Der Templer und die Jüdin, possess a Germanocentric ‘aura of cultivation and interiority’ (p. 122).
In the late 1830s and 1840s, Schumann focused on a different, more intense aspect of virtuosity: the sublime. Personified by Beethoven and Liszt, the sublime overwhelmed listeners with fear and admiration. Critics centred their writings about the sublime on large symphonic or choral works, typically excluding the virtuoso from the discussion. Mark Evan Bonds recognized this stance, stating that even the concerto ‘was never able to free itself entirely from the specter of empty virtuosity. Self-serving display was simply not consistent with the idea of the sublime’.Footnote 5
Like many of his contemporaries, Schumann saw Liszt as an exception, a virtuoso who embodied the sublime. In his first publication on Liszt, Schumann tackled the monumental Grandes etudes. He likened Liszt’s playing to Paganini’s, admitting that he felt overpowered by the performance. In his 1839 review, Schumann conceded that Liszt’s virtuosity, like the presence of a conquering military hero, represented another antidote to empty virtuosity, albeit a very different sort than the feminine, introspective ideal of poetic interiority.
Stefaniak also includes a lengthy analysis of Schumann’s Concert sans Orchestre in his effort to show that Schumann was not only writing reviews, but also writing music in the late 1830s that engaged with the sublime. With their roles reversed, Liszt the critic found the piece shocking and transcendent, stating that there was no ‘elevated intellect who would not perceive, at first glance, its superior value and rare beauties’.Footnote 6
An allusion to Beethoven in Schumann’s Toccata and Études symphoniques, which Stefaniak believes to be ‘heretofore unrecognized’, represents yet another way in which Schumann invoked the sublime (p. 147). The Toccata echoes Beethoven’s heroic entrances, metric and harmonic tension and prolonged apotheoses, channelling his sublimity. The Études symphoniques do not cite Beethoven specifically, but they their symphonic elements referred to him.
Beethoven represented the canon as its ‘iconic figurehead’ (p. 156). Composers and performers often appealed to the canon as they worked to establish themselves as serious artists. Along with the affect of the sublime and a variety of other ideologies, the virtuosity discourse drew upon the eminence of the canon. In turn, the canon was partly shaped by the work concept and virtuosos who embraced the ideal of Werktreue performance.Footnote 7
The work concept prompted an aesthetic shift in Schumann during the 1840s, a time in which he and Clara immersed themselves in Bach and in writing canons and fugues. Schumann described this shift: ‘Beginning in the year 1845 on, when I began to invent and work out everything in my head, an entirely new style of composing began to develop’.Footnote 8 He started to believe that he had to subordinate virtuosity to the musical work, and critics recognized this effort, finding his later works more classicizing and accessible.
To illustrate this argument, Stefaniak dedicates the lengthiest analysis in his book to Schumann’s Piano Concerto Op. 54. In 1841 Schumann began work on a Phantasie, just as critics were beginning to see him as a greater composer. He revised it in 1845 to become the first movement of a piano concerto, a work that critics found intellectual and idealised, placing him the canon; however, with its brilliant, post-classical finale, the piece also paid tribute to the aesthetic of pleasure and virtuosity.
In his final decade, Schumann collaborated extensively with Clara and Joseph Joachim, two virtuosos who upheld the Werktreue ideal. During this time, Clara changed her programming, dropping opera variations in favour of historicist repertoire and miniatures. A large canonic work (or recent work in dialogue with a large canonic work) in the Germanocentric tradition was typically the centrepiece of her mid-century programmes. She often showcased one of her husband’s later, more accessible works surrounded by Bach and Beethoven. Critics saw the Schumanns as the ideal serious virtuoso and genius composer partnership, in which Werktrue elevated both. The beautiful cover of Stefaniak’s book shows an 1850 daguerreotype of this partnership, with Clara seated at the piano and Robert, chin in hand, looking down at her over a stack of manuscripts.
As the canon was becoming an important figure in mid-century concert culture, Joachim was establishing himself in the Werktreue tradition. The pieces that Schumann composed for Joachim (the Violin Concerto and the Phantasie Op. 131) are more toned down and muted than his earlier works. Unlike Liszt, Joachim was not a wild performer, and he didn’t even seem to notice the presence of an audience. He was immersed in the music, which was his brand of personal authenticity. Schumann’s pieces and their retreats into quietude seemed to fit perfectly with Joachim’s personality.
The Phantasie, one of Schumann’s final commentaries on virtuosity, incorporates the virtuosic, if uncultivated, style hongrois. Schumann blended the style hongrois with serious German music, making a statement about virtuosity and cultivation, though Stefaniak hesitates ‘to interpret the Phantasie as an assimilation narrative that restrains and Germanizes Joachim’s “Hungarian” virtuosity’. Instead, he believes both showpieces highlighted Joachim’s ‘historicism, Germanness, and seriousness’ (p. 236).
While the late concertos earned Schumann a place in the canon, his earlier works are usually thought to be stronger. Ironically, they only entered the canon after his compositional style shifted in the 1840s, many of them only becoming standards in the years since his untimely death. Even though Schumann couldn’t offer definitive solutions to the problems presented by the virtuosity discourse, Stefaniak shows just how important his voice was in the conversation.
