Robert Schumann--Musikalische Haus- und Lebensregeln: Faksimile mit ubertragung und Textabdruck (review)

The past two decades have seen a sea change in the quantity and quality of Schumann scholarship, particularly with regard to source materials. Gerd Nauhaus completed Eismann's edition of the Tagebücher in the 1980s, and gave us the Haushaltbücher too. The new Gesamtausgabe is exemplary and—just as important—is proceeding at a steady and relatively quick pace. The most significant of recent publications, though, and part of the Gesamtausgabe, is Margit McCorkle's thematic catalogue (Robert Schumann: Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis (Munich, 2003)), with which Schumann scholarship comes of age, even if we still have only a fraction of the voluminous correspondence in a reliable scholarly edition. The chief credit for all this must go to the two major German institutions, the Robert-Schumann-Forschungsstelle in Düsseldorf, and the (older) Robert-Schumann-Gesellschaft in Zwickau. Indeed, one senses a welcome spirit of collaboration between them, rather than what could have been a less productive competitive tension.

This attractive new Zwickau publication, again informed by Nauhaus's painstaking editorship, is of lesser stature than the works mentioned above, but it is not without interest and significance, particularly in relation to Bernhard R. Appel's substantial study of the Album für die Jugend (see p. 8 n. 10). At its core is a facsimile of a twelve-page manuscript of the well-known collection of aphorisms, or maxims, which Schumann published under the title 'Musikalische Haus- und Lebensregeln' (Schumann's original term was 'Lehrsätze': see p. 9). Formerly in the extensive Wiede Collection, the manuscript was sold at Sotheby's in 1996 and acquired by the Zwickau Gesellschaft. The facsimile is presented on the right-hand page of each opening, while the lefthand page presents Nauhaus's line-for-line, word-for-word transcription. Few scholars can match Nauhaus's familiarity with Schumann's notoriously difficult hand, and this presentation will be a useful aid to those trying to come to grips with it. The quality of the facsimile is generally high, though it is unfortunate that more could not have been done to make Schumann's pencilled annotations more easily legible (the great majority of the manuscript text is in ink). Following the facsimile and transcription (pp. 24–47) there come (pp. 49 ff.) the German text as published by Schuberth in 1850, and then nineteenth-century translations into English (Henry Hugo Pierson, c.1859?), French (Liszt, 1854), Russian (Peter Tchaikovsky, 1869–70), and more recent Italian, Spanish, and Japanese versions.

A remark dated 30 November 1849 (see pp. 42 and 43) allows Nauhaus to place the manuscript in relation to the complex publication history of the Regeln, which is the main subject of his Foreword. Schumann's original intention had been to incorporate them, as well as various pictorial matter, into the first edition of his Album für die Jugend, Op. 68. (The earliest ideas for the Regeln are to be found on leaves of the Jugendalbum sketchbook, still in private hands, except for a single leaf in Boston University Library.) Initial negotiations with Breitkopf & Härtel during the second half of September 1848 (composition of the Album was finished on the 15th) foundered, but a contract was then agreed in mid-October with the Hamburg firm of Schuberth; publication was planned prior to Christmas, albeit with the pictorial element greatly reduced and the Regeln omitted. In April 1850 Schumann approached Franz Brendel, by then editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, to explore possibilities there. Brendel agreed, and the first published edition of the Regeln appeared as a supplement to the 3 May 1850 issue of the NZfM, though hardly to Schumann's complete approval. At the end of that year a second edition of the Jugendalbum was published, incorporating the Regeln as an appendix; but prior to that Schumann had received a separate Abdruck of the text.

The Zwickau manuscript represents, according to Nauhaus, a...