Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs (review)

Jon Finson’s Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs is a much needed overview of Schumann’s lieder that replaces Eric Sams’s outdated The Songs of Robert Schumann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). In the middle of the twentieth century, Sams was perhaps the most prolific writer on the German lied, producing books on the lieder of Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf that strove to be comprehensive. Although some of these volumes have been reprinted a number of times, they were not updated to acknowledge the flourishing (and increasingly sophisticated) work of other scholars. Despite this state of affairs students and scholars alike still frequently consult Sams’s books. Finson’s new volume on Schumann is a significant improvement on the one by Sams. It not only provides introductions to all of Schumann’s songs, it also includes numerous references to the recent scholarship on these works and introduces the lay reader to some of the most influential new assessments and scholarly approaches in an engaging narrative.

The volume comprises two large parts, one on the early songs and the other on the later ones. Within each of these parts the published opus numbers (or cycles) are grouped by theme or genre. For example, there is a chapter devoted to songs on the Romantic theme of wandering, and another on the settings of Heine’s ironic poems. The songs on these topics, like Schumann’s love songs, are well known and widely discussed by scholars; by contrast Schumann’s ballads—the topic of chapter 4—are among his most overlooked works. Finson subdivides his chapters by opus number but unlike Sams he does not give the full text or translation of every song. Given the ease with which these can be accessed online, however, this omission is not a problem. Not surprisingly, Finson’s approach is more historically informed than Sams’s, and as a result the reader is given a far more comprehensive and accurate idea of Schumann’s career. Within less than a century the genre of the lied was transformed from the confines of domestic music making to the domain of the concert hall and professional singers. Schumann’s works were part of this change and at times this resulted in conflicts with publishers who were still interested in meeting the demands of amateurs. Finson describes Schumann’s relationships with the publishers of each group of songs, and includes information about the financial arrangements and formats of the editions. He shows that Schumann was quite capable of dealing with the practical and financial matters of publishing his works—a side of his personality that is not explored in other publications.

Finson also throws out tantalizing hints of the role Clara Schumann played in her husband’s career. Her advocacy of his works through her own concertizing and her dealings with publishers continued after Robert’s death, and she was responsible for the posthumous publication of the op. 142 songs. Finson astutely observes that she surely must also have influenced the actual composition of some of the vocal works. Moreover, while Sams attempts to locate symbols of Robert’s love for Clara in the songs, Finson describes the more practical aspects of their collaboration. Prior to their marriage, the couple worked together to bolster Robert’s reputation as a composer and his financial prospects, in the hope that he would be more acceptable to Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father. The two selected poems that could be used for songs and copied them into a manuscript that both subsequently drew on for their compositions.

Finson not only considers the prepublication history of the lieder (some of which were written years before they appeared in print), he also gives an indication of their reception by citing contemporary critics and tracking the reprints which often quickly followed a song collection’s initial publication. Some of the types of sentimental poems and narratives that were popular during the nineteenth century and that...