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Schumann

Eric Frederick Jensen
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE

Researched Bibliographic Dossier

Verified edition data and a musicological research note prepared specifically for this work.

Oxford University Press
Eric Frederick Jensen. Schumann. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 9780195135664.
Title
Schumann
Author
Eric Frederick Jensen
Series
The Master Musicians
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Place
Oxford and New York
Year
2001
ISBN
9780195135664
Language
English
Type
Scholarly biography / works study

SCOPE & CONTENT

Jensen’s Schumann combines a chronological life with focused discussion of the music, drawing on journals, correspondence and modern research to reassess familiar biographical narratives. Literary culture, the relationship with Clara, Schumann’s work as critic and editor, and his changing professional ambitions are treated as essential to the composer’s artistic identity. The book moves beyond the piano and song cycles to give serious attention to orchestral, choral, dramatic and late works.

RESEARCH VALUE

The study is particularly useful for challenging the older habit of interpreting Schumann’s final years only through illness and decline. Jensen examines the late repertory on its own terms and treats the Endenich period with greater documentary caution. For researchers, this makes the book a bridge between traditional narrative biography and the revisionist Schumann scholarship that has questioned assumptions about chronology, mental illness and compositional value.

BIOGRAPHY AND GENRES

Biographical chapters are interwoven with consideration of Schumann’s principal fields of composition. This helps show that the celebrated “years” of piano music and song were part of a larger sequence of changing ambitions that later included symphony, chamber music, choral writing and opera.

THE LATE-WORK QUESTION

Jensen participates in the broader reassessment of late Schumann. Rather than treating stylistic differences as automatic symptoms of pathology, the book asks what can actually be established from documents and from the works themselves, an approach that remains central to current Schumann studies.

DIGITAL ARCHIVE DATA
Catalogue completeness
7 / 10 core bibliographic fields
RECORD SOURCES Oxford University PressOxford University Press
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE ONLY — This researched record is kept independent from automatic PDF association; no archive file has been deleted or modified.