In 1844, Carl Kossmaly wrote of Schumann's piano works that he found many of them “too pithy, dense, and laden with meaning … as if one were lost in a thick, overgrown forest, the path barred from moment to moment by mighty treetrunks or knotty roots, powerful vines and sharp thorns, and could escape only with difficulty” and that they shared with other bizarre expressions of Romanticism “a tendency toward everything arbitrary, eccentric, and formless.” Since Kossmaly, we have seen varying degrees of sympathy toward Schumann's piano music in the literature, beginning with J. A. Fuller-Maitland's short overview of 1927 and Kathleen Dale's article in the Schumann symposium edited by Gerald Abraham in the 1950s. It was not until the 1980s, however, that truly concentrated analytical attention was paid to these works, particularly those without the immediate accessibility of a sonata structure. Bernhard Appel's dissertation on the Humoreske was at the vanguard of a welcome cornucopia of scholarly examination of this repertoire.