SOURCE: Botstein, Leon. “History, Rhetoric, and the Self: Robert Schumann and Music-Making in German-Speaking Europe, 1800-1860.” In Schumann and His World, edited by R. Larry Todd, pp. 3-46. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Botstein places Schumann's literary and musical work in the context of nineteenth-century German culture and thought.

Introduction: Rescuing the Historical Schumann

“I often wonder whether my cultural ideal is a new one, i.e. contemporary, or whether it derives from Schumann's time.” This thought, jotted down by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1929, identifies how the work of Robert Schumann has come to be thought of as emblematic of a past discontinuous with our own.¹ Schumann's music is understood to represent a critique of the twentieth-century present. An idealized and vanished culture whose qualities we wish we retained reappears to us in the music.

Wittgenstein's observation was a species of early twentieth-century nostalgia for a...