Paul Driver writes:

Tunbridge is interesting on Schumann’s mania for collecting and cataloguing. From re-editing his early piano music, collecting his stray pieces into albums, gathering up his writings on music as well as those by others, Schumann ended up in the asylum trying to list every concert he’d ever been to. Such passions need not be seen as pathological. As Tunbridge says, they resulted in the 19th century in ‘the proliferation of antiquarian societies, the development of the historical novel, and the rise of national libraries and museums’. And overhauling his earlier works also preoccupied the eminently sane Wordsworth. The cases are indeed comparable. Just as Wordsworth covered the daring effects of his early versions of The Prelude with a glaze of syntactic propriety in the 1850 edition, so Schumann regularised the inspired eccentricity of early piano works such as Davidsbündlertänze, adding repeat marks to phrases that seemed dangerously evanescent, solidifying harmony, stabilising tempo, removing the apparatus ascribing the 18 pieces variously to his fictional alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius, and even dropping the word ‘dances’ from the title.

(LRB 21 February 2008)

Cambridge | hardback 246 pp. |ISBN: 9780521871686