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Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs (review)

Jon Finson’s Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs is a much needed overview of Schu mann’s lieder that replaces Eric Sams’s outdated The Songs of Robert Schumann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969).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 Schu mann’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 gation of the fragments upon which the initials are preserved. Without bothering to offer such crucial information as the size and nature of the material upon which the initials were copied, the style of the calligraphy, the color and nature of the inks and pigments or any clues about the date, we are told that “the incipits on those calligraphic initials represent the strongest link between the fragments from the cantorales of San Pedro Mártir that were once at Ocaña and the rosary confraternity of Toledo” (p. 21). Unfortunately this “strongest link” is neither strong nor a link; yet even after acknowledging its fragility, the author goes on to erect an argument upon evidence that at best could only be described—as he does himself on at least one occasion (p. 124)—as circumstantial. If the most disheartening aspect of this book is its lack of scholarly rigor, certain elements of its design are also less than pleasing. While the front matter contains a listing of illustrations and their captions, the thirty figures that are placed on unnumbered pages between pp. 127 and 128 remain unlisted. This means that when the reader encounters a figure number in the text, she must first turn to the list of Illustrations (p. viii) to learn that the figures “follow page 127” and must then turn to p. 127 to begin counting through the figures. As for the illustrations, it is a pity that only those on the cover are printed in color. Fortunately some of the more important ones do appear in color in the author’s article “Tropes for the Ordinary in a 16thCentury Chantbook from Toldeo, Spain (Early Music 34, no. 4 [November 2006]: 587–611). As for the music examples, they appear in a variety of font sizes; there is little explanation of the editorial criteria by which they are informed.