Selected by Shelley Davis, Associate Professor of Musicology, UMD School of Music
The Schumann Reader
Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman
Nancy B. Reich (Participating in the Schumann Festival)
Reich, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Research on Women at Stanford University, won the 1986 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for this first edition of this book. Lauded by readers for both its keen insights into Clara Schumann’s life and its lively, engaging style, the new edition includes an expanded catalogue of Clara Schumann’s works.
The Complete Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann: Critical Edition
Edited by Eva Weissweiler, translated by Hildegard Fritsch and Ronald L. Crawford
This ambitious and thoroughly researched series offers insights into the professional and personal lives of both Robert and Clara Schumann.
Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology
John Daverio
Daverio believes that musical thought underwent an essential shift in the early nineteenth century and his book explores the musical elements of change he believes served as the hallmarks of an emerging Romantic consciousness. In chapters on Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Weber and Strauss, he offers a series of studies in support of his thesis.
Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs
Jon Finson (Participating in the Schumann Festival)
Described as the “definitive work on Schumann's songs and the standard reference for any Schumann enthusiast,” Finson’s book challenges traditional interpretations of the composer’s lieder and argues against the commonly held belief that Schumann’s “Year of Song” simply reflects the composer’s personal life.
Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician
John Worthen
Worthen uses original sources to reveal Schumann as an astute, witty, articulate and immensely determined individual who painstakingly taught himself his craft as a musician, overcame problem after problem in his professional life and married the woman he loved after a tremendous battle with her father.
Schumann: A Chorus of Voices
Interviews and Conversations with John C. Tibbetts (Participating in the Schumann Festival)
Over the course of 30 years, Tibbetts interviewed dozens of distinguished musicians on a large variety of Schumann topics. Among those featured in this recent publication (released March 2010) are performers such as András Schiff, Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, Thomas Hampson and the Guarneri String Quartet as well as scholars such as Leon Plantinga, Nancy B. Reich, Charles Rosen and John Worthen.
Robert Schumann: On Music and Musicians
Edited by Konrad Wolff, translated by Paul Rosenfeld
For ten years Schumann used his journal Neue Zetschrift für Musik to champion talented composers, single-handedly establishing what posterity would accept as the canon of Romantic music. In On Music and Musicians, he adapts several critical personae to assess and explore both specific works and large musical concepts.
Robert Schumann and the Development of the Piano Concerto
Claudia Macdonald (Participating in the Schumann Festival)
Written in scholarly but non-technical language, this book explores how the generation that came after Beethoven was central in reshaping and refining the conception of the concerto style, and particularly the piano concerto. Macdonald relates Schumann’s own compositional development to his musical environment, recreating the exciting milieu in which Schumann and his contemporaries lived and worked.
The Romantic Generation
Charles Rosen (Participating in the Schumann Festival)
In readings uniquely informed by his performing experience, Rosen offers acute and engaging analyses of works by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Bellini, Liszt, and Berlioz, and he presents a new view of Chopin as a master of polyphony and large-scale form. He integrates his observations on the music with reflections on the art, literature, drama and philosophy of the time, and thus shows us the major figures of Romantic music within their intellectual and cultural context.
Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius
Peter Ostwald
Dr. Peter Ostwald, recognized internationally for his work on the interaction between music and psychiatry, wrote this pioneering biography on Robert Schumann in 1985. It was the first work to attempt an exact diagnosis of Schumann’s severe mental disorders as they related to his compositions and creative life.
Schumann as Critic
Leon Plantinga (Participating in the Schumann Festival)
In this influential book, Leon Plantinga describes Schumann’s critical work as a truly multi-faceted output that offered important aesthetical views and an original philosophy of music history.
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