In Part II of his essay on Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris, Baudelaire suggests that “it would extraordinary indeed if a critic should become a poet; but it is impossible for a poet not to be a critic.” Earlier, Étienne Méhul, in the preface to his 1799 opera Ariodant, had urged composers, as “repositories of the secrets of their art,” not to remain silent “in the midst of so many discussions in which they are seen now as idols, now as victims.” Already in eighteenth-century Germany, Telemann and Mattheson had taken to writing prose, and they were followed by Abbé Vogler and by his disciple Carl Maria von Weber. But it is surely E. T. A. Hoffmann, in his own mind more a composer than a writer, who best exercised the critic’s craft in the sense intended here: all of his essays, and especially those on Beethoven, reveal an understanding far beyond that of most of his contemporaries.

Berlioz was an extraordinarily prolific journalist. Reading through his ninehundred- odd feuilletons, a modern edition of which began to appear in 1996, requires far more time than listening to his complete musical works, so it is not surprising that most of his contemporaries saw him more as a journalist who composed music than as a composer who wrote about his art.

Robert Schumann was seen in the same light, although neither he nor Berlioz was the first artist to have taken up his pen to convey what was the central passion of his life, namely, musical composition. Despite the connotations of “music critic,” Berlioz, Schumann, and others were not primarily interested in pointing to others’ imperfections; they rather wished to demonstrate the creative act as a perpetual questioning nourished by admiring masterpieces, past and present, and by reflecting upon the reasons for one’s own failures and the failures of others.

The examples of Weber and Hoffmann were decisive for Schumann, who, for several years, devoted almost as much time to their works as to his own; and one might want to say the same thing about Berlioz, because he greatly valued the same two models. In fact the quantity and the literary quality of Schumann’s and Berlioz’s writings long hindered their acceptance as totally independent composers.