Book Description

"Robert Schumann (1810-1856) saw himself and his contemporaries as heirs of a venerable, largely Austro-German tradition whose value lay not just in the artworks of that past, but also in its ability to nurture present and future accomplishments. This outlook held true even for modern composers whose indebtedness to the past seemed less clear. As Schumann noted in 1838, "By no means did the new, so-called romantic school grow out of thin air; everything has its good foundation." More than a decade later Schumann put it more baldly to Franz Liszt: "No one is wholly original," a telling response to a representative of the then budding "New" German School. This perspective explains the importance that Schumann continually put on studying one's inherited musical traditions and the significant "individualities" who cultivated them. Nevertheless, mere imitation of past models, while helpful for training and study, risked one becoming "a mannerist and a Philistine." Thus Schumann always insisted that an artist "lead me a step further in the spiritual realm of art and provide poetic depth and novelty everywhere. Schumann's historical consciousness was in keeping with a larger cultural transformation in the nineteenth century, one that drew the past into various niches of the musical world. This period saw the development of various musical canons, with certain bodies of works and their composers assuming heightened cultural prestige for both contemporary musicians and audiences. Older esteemed works increasingly came to offer guideposts for younger composers, provide sources of programming for conductors and performers, and serve as touchstones of musical taste for people of various classes"--