The development of the piano, together with changes in culture and society, led to the transformation of song into a major musical genre. This study of the great lieder of 19th-century composers Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf also includes lesser-known composers, such as Louis Spohr and Robert Franz, plus significant contributions from women composers and performers.

Forced by a hand injury to abandon a career as a pianist, Robert Schumann went on to become one of the world's great composers. Among many works, his Spring Symphony (1841), Piano Concerto in A Minor (1841/1845), and the Third, or Rhenish, Symphony (1850) exemplify his infusion of classical forms with intense, personal emotion. His musical influence continues today and has inspired many other famous composers in the century since his death. Indeed Brahms, in a letter of January 1873, wrote: "The remembrance of Schumann is sacred to me. I will always take this noble pure artist as my model." Now, in Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age," John Daverio presents the first comprehensive study of the composer's life and works to appear in nearly a century. Long regarded as a quintessentially romantic figure, Schumann also has been portrayed as a profoundly tragic one: a composer who began his career as a genius and ended it as a mere talent. Daverio takes issue with this Schumann myth, arguing instead that the composer's entire creative life was guided by the desire to imbue music with the intellectual substance of literature. A close analysis of the interdependence among Schumann's activities as reader, diarist, critic, and musician reveals the depth of his literary sensibility. Drawing on documents only recently brought to light, the author also provides a fresh outlook on the relationship between Schumann's mental illness--which brought on an extended sanitarium stay and eventual death in 1856--and his musical creativity. Schumann's character as man and artist thus emerges in all its complexity. The book concludes with an analysis of the late works and a postlude on Schumann's influence on successors from Brahms to Berg. This well-researched study of Schumann interprets the composer's creative legacy in the context of his life and times, combining nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual history with a fascinating analysis of the works themselves.

With the publication of his Gedichte in November of 1902, Hermann Hesse "arrived" as a literary figure in the German-speaking world. However, relatively little is known about the years immediately preceding this breakthrough. Through a great deal of "detective" work the author has succeeded in personally locating dozens of Hesse's previously unknown letters and manuscripts. These have been skillfully interwoven in this book along with a lively and most readable account of this crucial phase of Hesse's life from ca. 1899 to 1903. During this period Hesse worked as a bookseller in Basel, where he formed important friendships and creative alliances with writers, publishers, and journalists, described here for the first time. Moreover, during those years he devoted himself almost exclusively to the composition of "neo-Romantic" poetry, most notably his Notturni, handwritten sets of eight or more poems which he sold as unique collections. Two dozen of these poems are published here for the first time in the original.

Robert Schumann is one of the most intriguing-and enigmatic-composers of the nineteenth century. Extraordinarily gifted in both music and literature, many of his compositions were inspired by poetry and novels. For much of his life he was better known as a music critic than as a composer. But whether writing as critic or composer, what he produced was created by him as a reflection of his often turbulent life. Best known was the tempestuous courtship of his future wife, the pianist Clara Wieck. Though marriage and family life seemed to provide a sense of constancy, he increasingly experienced periods of depression and instability. Mounting criticism of his performance as music director at Dusseldorf led to his attempted suicide in 1854. Schumann was voluntarily committed to an insane asylum near Bonn where, despite indications of improvement and dissatisfaction with his treatment, he spent the final two years of his life. Drawing on original research and newly published letters and journals from the time, author Eric Frederick Jensen presents a balanced portrait of the composer with both scholarly authority and engaging clarity. Biographical chapters alternate with discussion of Schumann's piano, chamber, choral, symphonic, and operatic works, demonstrating how the circumstances of his life helped shape the music he wrote. Chronicling the romance of Robert and Clara, Jensen offers a nuanced look at the evolution of their relationship, one that changed dramatically after marriage. He also follows Schumann's creative musical criticism, which championed the burgeoning careers of Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms and challenged the musical tastes of Europe.

An Index to Music in Selected Historical Anthologies of Western Art Music is the essential reference for music history and music theory instructors for finding specific listings and details for all the pieces included in more than 140 anthologies published between 1931 and 2016. Containing over 5,000 individual listings, this concise book is an indispensable tool for teaching music history and theory. Since many anthologies exist in multiple editions, this Index provides instructors, students, and researches with the means to locate specific compositions in both print and online anthologies. This book includes listings by composer and title, as well as indexes of authors, titles, and first lines of text for music from antiquity through the early twenty-first century.