Schumann's View of "Romantic"

Author(s): Leon B. Plantinga

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 4, Anniversary Issue: Highlights from the
First 75 Years (Winter, 1991), pp. 176-187
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/741844
Accessed: 30-12-2016 19:33 UTC

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Schumann's View of "Romantic"

Leon B. Plantinga

April 1966

This piece and the following one appeared in the same issue. Leon Plantin-
ga's piece is one of a number of attempts to reconsider the traditional labels
for the periods of music history-designations borrowed from art history and
somewhat awkwardly reapplied. Owen Jander's piece is a very simple dis-
covery in what was rapidly becoming a very complex field: musical theory.
In the heyday of the American disciples of Heinrich Schenker and the
advanced serialists, it was perhaps not surprising that numerology had
entered the musicological fray, as well.

In 1834 Ludwig Rellstab, the crotchety, quarrelsome editor of the

leading Berlin musical journal, Iris im Gebiete der Tonkunst, wrote a
review of some piano pieces by the young German composer J. C.
Kessler. He declared:

We have often lamented that the young composers of recent times have
no composition teachers, not to mention teachers of thoroughbass;
without guidance or study, wild and heedless, they just compose. We
considered this an unhealthy situation. But now things are quite differ-
ent. Now, not only do they fail to learn what is good-they even have
systematic instruction in what is bad; they make a study of perversity.
Obviously, for this young talent Chopin's most recent compositions
have served as a model, as a bad example. . . . Sad to say, we are wit-
nessing the formation of a whole school for error, which we could
detect first in Chopin, then in Schumann and others, and now in this
young composer.I

Allegations of this kind appeared frequently in German musical

journals of the 1830s, particularly in Rellstab's paper, and in the
house-organ of Breitkopf and Hartel, the Allgemeine musikalische Zei-
tung of Leipzig. The object of these verbal assaults was a group of
composers identified, both then and now, as "romantics." While the

176

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 Leon B. Plantinga 177

pronouncements of people like Rellstab probably did little to induce

the romantics to study thoroughbass, they had, from a historical van-
tage point at least, a certain salutary effect: they forced romantic com-
posers in Germany to engage in apologetics in the course of which
they clarified and articulated their position. The pressure exerted by
musical journalists hostile to the so-called romantic school was a
major factor in the founding of the Neue Zeitschrift fir Musik, the
journal Schumann helped establish in 1834 and edited from 1835 to
1844.
The literature dealing with romanticism is almost endless. In
addition to innumerable works treating the literary theory of various
romantic schools, there are detailed studies tracing the term "roman-
tic" through all the convolutions of meaning it underwent in the late
18th and early 19th centuries.2 While music historians freely use the
word "romantic," the theoretical and historical views of the romantic
composers have received very little critical attention (the most impor-
tant study in this field is Friedrich Blume's recent article Romantik in
Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart). Many questions about
"romantic" in music are not settled-for example, how was the term
interpreted in the early 19th century? What was the attitude of the
romantic composers towards the designation? Did the romantics advo-
cate a reaction against any musical qualities or practices they called
"classic" or we call "classic"? Were romantic composers as little con-
cemed with the traditions of musical craftsmanship as their detractors
in the 19th century (and the 20th) have suggested?
Schumann's journalistic writings, particularly in the 1830s, have
a bearing on these questions. His testimony is undoubtedly a responsi-
ble one, for in the later 1830s the Neue Zeitschrift was widely regarded
as the mouthpiece of the musical romantics in Germany, and Schu-
mann as their chief spokesman.3 Schumann's writings about music
sometimes call to mind only little essays describing the bizarre antics
of the Davidsbuindler Florestan, Eusebius, and Raro. In the ten years of
his association with the Neue Zeitschrift, Schumann in fact wrote hun-
dreds of articles, only a tiny fraction of which have anything to do
with the Davidsbiindler;4 in many of his writings Schumann speaks
with the sobriety, authority, and clarity of the professional critic.
The word "romantic" had commonly been applied to music in
Germany at least from the time of E. T. A. Hoffmann's famous
reviews of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the Trios, Op. 70, which
appeared in 1810 and 1813;5 "romanticism" was still a popular subject
for discussion in the musical journals of Schumann's time. In an arti-
cle entitled "Musikalischer Romantismus" in the first volume of the

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178 The Musical Quarterly

Neue Zeitschrift, the anonymous author characterized the romantics as

musicians who rose in rebellion against low standards and "material-
ism" in music.6 Carl Banck, a regular contributor to the early volumes
of the journal, in an 1836 review of Schubert lieder declared that this
composer, like Beethoven, was a "romantic," and in an article in the
Neue Zeitschrift of 1837, August Gathy speaks of the "new so-called
romantic school" of which Beethoven can be regarded as the founder.7
As had been true in the earliest applications of the term to liter-
ature, the word "romantic" was vastly more popular among the oppo-
nents of romanticism than among its adherents. G. W. Fink,
dedicated enemy of Schumann and the Neue Zeitschrift and editor of
the rival Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, never tired of referring con-
temptuously to the most recent developments in piano music repre-
sented by Chopin, Liszt, Hiller, "and a few others"8 as a "romantic"
movement.9 In a review of Hummel's Etudes, Op. 125, an essay that
cannot be understood except as an answer to Schumann's earlier
review of the same collection, 10 Fink in 1835 declared that it would
be impossible to form a "school" of the chaotic ideas, onesideness, and
blind enthusiasm characteristic of the romantics."
Schumann himself was always somewhat wary of the word
"romantic." In 1837 he exclaimed, "I am heartily sick of the term
'romantic,' though I have not spoken it ten times in my entire life."12
He had good reasons for being hesitant to use the term "romantic" to
describe the contemporary music of which he approved, or the com-
posers of that music. In the first place, the word as used in musical
circles in Germany at this time often carried with it a certain tinge of
opprobrium. This is most obvious in the music criticism of the Allge-
meine musikalische Zeitung. Schumann alluded to this in his remark of
1842, "The philistine, to be sure, mixes everything together, and calls
that which he doesn't understand 'romantic.' ,13
"Romantic," furthermore, was applied sometimes to music and
composers quite at odds, in Schumann's estimation, with the stan-
dards and tastes of the Neue Zeitschrift. The following note appears in
the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of 1835:

The so-called romantic or "fantastic" school, as it is also called by its

adherents, has acquired a sister. Italian papers now call the school of
Rossini "romantic" as opposed to the classic, or old-Italian. Will the
most recent romantics of Germany and France acknowledge their Ital-
ian namesake ?14

Schumann had a very low opinion of Rossini's music; identifica-

tion of musical romanticism with the "school of Rossini" would surely

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 Leon B. Plantinga 179

have been distasteful to him and must have contributed to Schu-

mann's caution about using the epithet.15
Despite his misgivings about this word, Schumann continued to
apply it on occasion to the composers who were the favorites of the
Neue Zeitschrift and to their music--but usually with a qualifying
adjective or phrase of some sort. In his New Year's editorial of 1839,
for example, he cited as an objective of the Neue Zeitschrift "the pro-
motion of those younger talents, the best of whom one also hears
referred to as 'romantics.' ,16 Several years earlier, Schumann had
proffered something of an explanation of his attitude towards the
word. In an unsigned article that appeared in 1834 under the rubric
Journalschau, Schumann alluded to Ludwig Rellstab's rejection of the
"so-called romantic school," and added, "we approve of this name

merely as designative, not descriptive.'"17

Schumann was thus doubtful, apparently, about a literal meaning
of the adjective "romantic," but was willing to accept it as an arbitrary
designation or "conventional symbol" for some of the music and a few
of the musicians of his time. This is the music to which Schumann as
a critic gave his active support, and for whose advancement the Neue
Zeitschrift was founded. Schumann numbered among the romantic
composers in the 1830s and early '40s Chopin, Berlioz, Stephen
Heller, Mendelssohn, Ferdinand Hiller, William Stemdale Bennett,
Adolf Henselt,18 Schumann himself, as well as various less-known
composers such as the co-founder of the Neue Zeitschrift, Ludwig
Schunke, and Norbert Burgmiller. It will be noted that most of these
men were composers of piano music. It was largely within the area of
piano music that Schumann saw the unfolding of a romantic move-
ment; this was particularly true in the 1830s, when Schumann was
himself a composer almost exclusively of piano music.
The criteria by which Schumann evaluated music, and on the
basis of which he regarded certain composers as contributors to a
romantic movement, are more diverse than is usually supposed. His
foremost demands of the music of his time, to be sure, are the familiar
requirements of the 19th-century esthetic: originality, a personal mode
of expression, or to use Schumann's own language, "fantasy," the
"characteristic," and the "poetic"--all qualities that for Schumann
eluded precise definition, but that he believed were the most impor-
tant attributes of music. It was the presence of these qualities, first of
all, that entitled a musical composition to be called "romantic."
From the beginning of his career as a critic, nevertheless, Schu-
mann was intensely concerned with rational, analyzable elements of
musical style. His interest in clarity of form and correctness of har-

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180 The Musical Quarterly

mony is revealed in the almost painful degree of detail in which he

analyzed Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and Hiller's Etudes, Op. 15;19
both of these reviews date from 1835, i.e. from the earliest days of
Schumann's editorship of the Neue Zeitschrift. Schumann expected of
the romantic composer rich and original musical expression, but also
genuine musical craftsmanship. In an otherwise ecstatic review of
several chamber compositions of Herrmann Hirschbach, for example,
Schumann noted that the music was marred by offenses against "the
natural laws of harmonic progression." You must obey such laws as
these, he said, no matter how geistreich you are.20
The romantic composers of the 1830s were regarded in Germany
as a dissenting minority, and the Neue Zeitschrift was looked upon as a
rallying point for revolutionaries. What Schumann and his colleagues
proposed to rebel against, it is clear, was not anything described in his
time or our own as "classic." Schumann virtually never used the antip-
odal terms "classic-romantic," just at this time becoming fashionable,
to characterize what was happening in music in the generation imme-
diately preceding his own. He did not, in the first place, normally
recognize a "classic" period in music. The only instance in which he
so designated the late 18th century, so far as I know, is in his state-
ment, "If one accepts the attribution of romantic and classic charac-
teristics to music, then Louis Ferdinand was a romantic in a classic
period .. ."21 The "classic period" in which Louis Ferdinand lived,
however, doesn't coincide very well with that of Mozart and Haydn;
he was born later than Beethoven, the founder, by common consent
in Schumann's day, of the romantic era.
Schumann, like many in his time, saw in Mozart's music those
qualities popularized in Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alter-
tums as the hallmarks of ancient art: "tranquility, grace, ideality,
objectivity."22 These qualities were for Schumann, however, more the
achievements of a single individual than the standards of an era;
Schumann did not ascribe the same characteristics, for example, to
the music of Haydn. Even if he held Mozart to be a proponent of a
"classic" art, Schumann and his fellow romantics never proposed a
revolt against this. On the contrary, Schumann was always full of
admiration of Mozart's music.
The antipodal terms "classic-romantic" were occasionally used in
German musical criticism in the 1830s and 1840s, but with little con-
sistency. In an extended article entitled "Classisch und romantisch,"
which appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift of 1841, F. A. Gelbcke provides
an example of the kind of interpretations to which these terms were
subjected. Classicism, he maintains, is to be identified by its concern

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 Leon B. Plantinga 181

for depicting objects; classic art is typically representational. The

essential effect of romantic art, on the other hand, is the communica-
tion of pure feeling. Music is in its essence a romantic art, and when
it steps outside the boundaries of expressing pure feeling, it becomes
"defective and insupportable."23 This is often the case, he continues,
with the so-called romantic school; their programmatic titles and
attempts at musical representation deny the essence of both romanti-
cism and music. The true function of music-and by extension,
romanticism in music-was lost with the passing of Mozart and
Haydn; the contemporary "romantic school" has no claim to that title,
having violated the romantic nature of music by introducing into it
principles indigenous to classicism.24
Schumann did not let this unique construction of musical his-
tory, which in effect reverses what has become the normal view of a
progression from "classic" to "romantic," pass without comment. He
observed in a footnote that Gelbcke's article, circulated in manuscript,
had already elicited several conflicting opinions.25 This article, though
it may represent a somewhat eccentric personal position,26 neverthe-
less indicates that in Schumann's time the proper application of the
antithetical terms "classic-romantic" to music was very much an open
question.
The founders of the Neue Zeitschrift viewed the romantic move-
ment in Germany not as a rebellion directed against "classicism" of
any sort, but as one designed to unseat a tradition of very recent
vintage-that of fashionable, commercially oriented music imported
particularly from Paris. It was in the area of piano music, Schumann
says,27 that the first battles of this rebellion were waged. Piano music
strongly dominated the German concert stage in the 1830s. Touring
virtuosos such as Kalkbrenner, Herz, Htinten, Thalberg, and Bertini
won enormous popular acclaim with their repertories of glittering
arrangements and variations on current operatic tunes. The music
market of all Europe was similarly controlled by the repertory of the
piano virtuosos. The leading music-publishing houses of Paris, Vienna,
Leipzig, and London all did a brisk business in selling the products--
often simplified-of the leading pianists, and of local talents imitating
their style. It was particularly against the ascendancy of this style,
Schumann informs us, that the musical romantics in Germany waged
war.

It was not the intention of the romantics, according to

mann, to replace prevailing standards and tastes in music w
thing entirely new. Schumann's music criticism from the fir
the romantics as carrying on a firmly established historical

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182 The Musical Quarterly

music. For him, the recent history of music represented a series of

heroic personal accomplishments which together comprised the locus
of necessary points in an inevitable line of progress leading to his own
time. This historical progression extended from Bach through
Beethoven and Schubert to the romantic composers of Schumann's
generation, with an important spur, just off the principal line, occu-
pied by Mozart (Haydn hardly figured in Schumann's scheme).28
Schumann's estimation of the importance of Bach's music (and
the relative unimportance of Mozart's) as a historical model for the
romantic composers is revealed in a letter he wrote in 1840 to his
friend Gustav A. Kefferstein:

The profound power of combination and the poetic and whimsical

qualities of recent music have their origin largely in Bach. Men-
delssohn, Bennett, Chopin, Hiller, all the so-called romantics (I refer,
of course, only to the Germans) are in their music much closer to that
of Bach than Mozart was; all of them have a most thorough knowledge
of Bach .. .29

Schumann admired Bach as a consummate craftsman, and

detected as well in his music a certain admixture of the subjective
qualities he valued in the music of his own time.30 These qualities
represented for him the unique achievements of a single individual
quite at variance with the musical standards of his era. In a review in
1837 of a collection of 17th- and 18th-century keyboard music edited
by C. F. Becker he wrote, "In respect to composition for organ and
clavier, no one of his century, to be sure, can compare with him
[Bach]."31 In 1839, reviewing a set of Scarlatti sonatas in an edition
by Czemy, he wrote,

There is much that is excellent in Scarlatti, which distinguishes him

from his contemporaries. . . . But we must confess that much of this
can no longer satisfy us, nor should satisfy us. How could such a com-
position be compared with the music of one of our better composers
. . Think of comparing this to Bach!32

Schumann saw in the Baroque a glorification of rationalistic,

mechanical principles of musical composition. In his review of the
Becker collection first mentioned he declared,

The recent champions of old music err especially in this: they always
seek out that in which our forefathers were strong, to be sure, but
which should be called by almost any name other than "music," that is,
all the categories of composition associated with the fugue and canon.33

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 Leon B. Plantinga 183

Schumann believed it was in opposition to the prevailing standards

and tastes of this age that there first arose the reaction that culmi-
nated in the romantic music of his own day.
The expressive qualities Schumann sometimes detected in the
music of Bach first achieved a complete victory, he felt, in the works
of Beethoven-particularly the little-appreciated late ones; it was from
the time of Beethoven that he reckoned the beginning of the genera-
tion of romantic composers. In his review of Hirschbach's quartets in
1842, for example, Schumann praised the composer for recognizing in
Beethoven's late quartets "the beginning of a new poetic era," and
adopting them as his models.33 In a letter to the same composer,
Schumann had declared in 1838 that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
was "the most important work in instrumental music of recent
times."34
The German musical romantics, of whom Schumann was recog-
nized as leader by the later 1830s, were often identified by a special
name--one that emphasizes their acute consciousness that they were
the carriers-on of a historical tradition: "neo-romantic." While this
term appears as early as 1833,35 it did not come into common use as a
designation for Schumann and the composers championed by the
Neue Zeitschrift until the publication in 1839 of Der Neuromantiker, a
"musical novel" by Konstantin Julius Becker. The significance of the
title is revealed in Becker's introduction: "Beethoven became the
founder of a new epoch in music; it is called by our colleagues the
'neo-romantic school.' ,36 The foremost representative of that school,
Becker holds, is Schumann.37
Schumann, then, regarded the romantics as the continuers of a
musical tradition having its roots in Bach and its most powerful repre-
sentative in Beethoven. He saw this tradition buried in the years
1820-c. 1835 under a deluge of "artificial" music, especially virtuoso
piano music, so that its effects were temporarily lost. In its support of
the romantic composers, Schumann believed, the Neue Zeitschrift
contributed to the reinstatement in contemporary music of the stan-
dards and goals, as he saw them, of Bach and especially Beethoven.
Upon assuming the official editorship of the Neue Zeitschrift in 1835,
he wrote:

Our intention has been clear from the beginning. It is quite simple. We
mean to recognize former times and their contributions, and to point
them out as the only pure source at which present artistic endeavor can
find renewed strength. Further, we propose to attack the inartistic
nature of the immediate past, which has nothing to offer by way of
compensation except a great development of mechanical technique.

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184 The Musical Quarterly

Finally, we wish to prepare the way for a youthful, poetic future, and to
speed its realization.38

Schumann's understanding of musical history was strongly condi-

tioned, no doubt, by his own artistic interests and goals; his view of
Bach, particularly, may seem to us peculiar. His knowledge of the
music of the early decades of his own century, however, was consider-
able, and especially during his editorship of the Neue Zeitschrift, he
was always immediately involved in the broader issues of the day. His
views about the nature of the romantic movement in music thus surely
deserve a hearing. While there is no reason to suppose that we must
accept without question the romantics' notion of "romantic," reliable
contemporary testimony such as Schumann's surely ought to be taken
into account in the attempts we make to improve our understanding
of this period in musical history.
Several important suggestions emerge from Schumann's state-
ments on the "romantic" in music. In the first place, Schumann's
writings lend added support to Blume's contention, in his essay Klas-
sik,39 that we must discard the popular view of a classic period in
German music followed by a romantic revolt against it. Romantics
such as Schumann saw in Beethoven a champion of subjective musical
expression, but never thought of him as "the man who set music free"
from the shackles of Mozartean classicism. He was instead, in the
romantic's view, the most important continuer of a musical tradition
that in its origins was a rebellion against the thoroughly rationalistic
ways of the Baroque. The romantics, or "neo-romantics," of Schu-
mann's generation sought to cultivate this tradition, and to rid Ger-
many of the flood of fashionable Parisian music that in the 1820s and
'30s threatened to inundate all Europe.
Schumann's music criticism, secondly, clearly points to a healthy
regard among the romantics for the rules and conventions of music
they inherited from the preceding century. His writings tend to mini-
mize the element of caprice in composition, and dispel the image of
the romantic artist hopefully waiting for an attack of furor poeticus.
While he maintained faith in inspiration, from the beginning of his
journalistic career Schumann shared a belief prevalent in his time that
there was a good deal in music that was dependent upon traditional
procedures and competent craftsmanship. The harmonic orthodoxy
and formal clarity of Mendelssohn's symphonies and the rigorous theo-
retical precepts of Adolph Bernhard Marx were in no way quaint
anachronisms in the 19th century.
It is important for us to recognize, finally, that the romantics
were in the 1830s a dissenting minority. When Schumann referred, as

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 Leon B. Plantinga 185

he did on a few occasions, to his own time as a "romantic era," he did

not imply that he would call all or most contemporaneous music
"romantic," he meant instead to single out the romantic movement as
the most significant development in music in his time. When we call
Schumann's period "romantic," perhaps we should be aware of this
distinction. When we extract a single term from the cross currents of
variegated styles and ideas of a period, and then proceed to apply that
term to everything in the period, we necessarily do violence to both.
Arnold Schering followed such a procedure in an article written in
1917, Aus den Jugendjahren der musikalischen Neuromantik,40 and the
errors begotten as a result have found their way into the most recent
literature. In his admirable article Romantik, Blume follows Schering's
example in singling out Neuromantik as a kind of "sub-period" in 19th-
century German music, and includes as one of the elements of neo-
romanticism the cult of the glittering piano virtuoso--precisely that
element in German music against which the neo-romantics rebelled.41
Too easy a confidence in the uniformity of a Zeitgeist can lead to a
blurring of important distinctions.
Schumann's writings will hardly dispel all our doubts about the
proper application of the term "romantic" to music, or explain for us
all the workings of the musical style of romantic composers. But they
provide a useful glimpse of the ideas and attitudes underlying the
music of the earlier 19th century-music whose value as the object of
serious study ought tobe reassessed.

Notes

1. Iris im Gebiete der Tonkunst, V (1834), 91.

2. Cf. especially R. Ullman and H. Gotthard, Geschichte des Begriffes "Romantisch"

in Deutschland, Berlin, 1927, and Femand Baldensperger, Romantique et ses analogues et

ses .quivalents:
lology tableauXIX
and Literature, synoptique de 1650 a 1810, in Harvard Studies and Notes in Phi-
(1937), 13-105.

3. In 1838, for example, there appeared in a Viennese paper, Der Humorist, an

article by J. P. Lyser entitled "Robert Schumann und die romantische Schule in
Leipzig."

4. The Davidsbiindler names appeared in Schumann's music criticism only very

infrequently after 1835.

5. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (hereafter cited as AmZ), XII (1810), 630-42 and
652-59; XV (1813), 141-54.

6. Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift fur Musik (subsequent volumes issued as Neue Zeitschrift
fir Musik, both cited hereafter as NZfM), I (1834), 187.

7. NZfM, IV (1836), 2-3; VII (1837), 54-55.

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186 The Musical Quarterly

7. Fink apparently adopted a policy late in 1833 of forbidding any mention of

Schumann's name in the AmZ. Only once did he relax this policy. On March 30,
1840, Liszt played parts of Schumann's Carnaval in a concert at Leipzig. Fink reported
in his journal: "The Carnaval-scenes of R. Schumann, despite the excellent playing of
Herr Liszt, did not achieve the effect expected of them." AmZ, XLII (1840), 298.

8. AmZ, XXXVII (1835), 33.

10. NZfM, I (1834), 73-75. This review is reprinted in Schumann's Gesammelte

Schriften, ed. Martin Kreisig, Leipzig, 1914, I, 9-12. This edition will be cited hereaf-
ter as GSK.

11. AmZ, XXXVII (1835), 164-65.

12. NZfM, VII (1837), 70; GSK, I, 249. By this time, however, he had written the
word more than ten times.

13. NZfM, XVI (1842), 143; GSK, II, 72.

14. AmZ, XXXVII (1835), 100.

15. In the famous preface to his Gesammelte Schriften of 1854 (reprinted in GSK, I,
1-2) Schumann cited the ascendancy of Rossini as one of the foremost evils in Ger-
man musical life of the 1830s.

16. NZfM, X (1839), 1. This statement was substantially altered in the Gesammelte
Schriften; cf. GSK, I, 384.

17. NZfM, I (1834), 199. This article can confidently be attributed to Schumann,
but has not been included in any edition of the Gesammelte Schriften.

18. Fink in 1838 protested that Henselt "by no means belongs to the so-called
romantic school." AmZ, XL (1838), 201.

19. NZfM, 11(1835), 53, 55-58, and III (1835), 33-35, 37-38, 41-48; GSK, I,
46-52, 71-90. The Berlioz review appears in the Gesammelte Schriften in shortened
form.

20. NZfM, IX (1838), 51-52; GSK, I, 343-45.

21. NZfM, VII (1837), 70; GSK, I, 248.
22. NZfM, I (1834), 73; GSK, I, 9.
23. NZfM, XIV (1841), 188.

24. Ibid., p. 189.

25. Ibid., p. 187.
26. Gelbcke's notion that music is by nature a romantic art was of course a very
popular one; Schumann himself subscribed to it, for example, in his well-known aph-
orism, "It is difficult to conceive that there could be a special romantic school in
music, which is already romantic." GSK, I, 26.

27. Cf. e.g. NZfM, XIX (1843), 34-35; GSK, II, 147.
28. This view of history is set forth especially in the "historical sketches" with which
Schumann prefaced a number of his reviews. Cf. NZfM, I (1834), 73-74; II (1835),

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 Leon B. Plantinga 187

5, 29-30, 153-54; X (1839), 137; XIX (1843), 34-35; and GSK, I, 9, 42-43, 107,
397; II, 147, 305-06.

29. Robert Schumann's Briefe, neue Folge, ed. F. Gustav Jansen, Leipzig, 1904, pp.
177-78.

30. Cf. Georg von Dadelsen, Robert Schumann und die Musik Bachs, in Archiv fiir
Musikwissenschaft, XIV (1957), 46-59.

31. NZfM, VI (1837), 40; GSK, I, 305.

32. NZfM, X (1839), 153; GSK, I, 400-01.
33. NZfM, VI (1837), 40; GSK, I, 306.
34. NZfM, XVI (1842), 159; GSK, II, 74.

35. Briefe, p. 121.

36. AmZ, XXXV (1833), 357.

37. I have not yet been able to see this book. The statement above is quoted from
the review of the book by Franz Brendel in the NZfM, XI (1839), 190. This state-
ment of Becker's, as it stands, does not explain what the "neo" means. In other con-
temporary sources, such as Fink's acid editorial Die neuromantische Schule, AmZ, XL
(1838), 665-67, it is made clear that the neo-romantics were so called because of
their avowed intention of reviving the "romanticism" of Beethoven.

38. Cf. NZfM, XI (1839), 191. Schumann was not wholly enthusiastic about Beck-
er's book. Cf. Briefe, p. 187.

39. NZfM, 11(1835), 3; GSK, I, 37-38.

40. Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, VII, 1030 ff.

41. Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, XXIV (1917), 45-63.

42. Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, XI, 801.

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