Jean Paul's digressive style, his novel attitudes to form and genre, and his fluid notions of the artwork, beyond uniqueness and self-containment, represent important concepts for much nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. In this study, I hope to have demonstrated the extent to which these concepts permeate the piano music of Schumann, whose personal connections to Jean Paul's work are easily shown. Yet Jean Paul could prove to be an important model for further musical investigations. There is a strong continuity of style, particularly on a small-scale level, between Schumann's piano music and his other works. His songs, chamber music, symphonies, and large-scale vocal works all bear the hallmarks of his individuality. Schumann's peculiar approach to music was developed for the first time in his piano works, but there is no reason to doubt that Jean Paul's sensibilities could be traced in Schumann's later output. The reinvention of concerto form in the Piano Concerto, op. 54; the generic hybrid that is Das Paradies und die Peri; and the cyclic, self-referential symphonic model of the Symphony no. 4 all suggest themselves as structurally and spiritually akin to the radical early works, and thus, by analogy, to Jean Paul.

Another possibility is that the work of other writers with whom Schumann was familiar might provide useful models for the stylistic analysis of his music. Thus far, the most extended treatments of Schumann's relationship with individual writers have dealt with vocal music. Eichendorff and Heine have received serious consideration with respect to major works of Schumann.