Ostensibly, Schumann’s Piano Concerto has its origins in the single-movement Phantasie in A minor for piano and orchestra composed in 1841, which later became the Concerto’s first movement. Broadly understood, however, the work’s genesis spans some fifteen years, encompassing both Schumann’s fledgling attempts to compose in the genre and his developing critical engagement with the concerto idea, expressed in a series of articles for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which documented his views on concerti of his time and set out his own generic agenda. Beginning with the unfinished F major Concerto of 1831, Op. 54’s prehistory takes in the aborted Konzertsatz in D minor of 1839 and also runs parallel with the genesis of Clara Wieck’s Concerto in A minor, Op. 7 of 1833–5, a work with which Schumann was closely involved. Chapter 2 narrates this prehistory, paying attention not only to the compositional genesis of Op. 54 and the process by which it absorbed the Phantasie of 1841 but also to Schumann’s critical relationship with his predecessors and evolution of an alternative concept of the genre, which emphasised the integration of soloist and orchestra and the features of the three-movement cycle into a single-movement sonata form.

The final chapter has two objectives. It first of all traces the performance history of Schumann’s Concerto in the decades after the composer’s death, focusing on London, Vienna, Leipzig, New York and Manchester, and the advocacy of particular pianists, primarily but not exclusively Clara Schumann. It examines critical responses to the work and the ways in which opinion changes over time, evolving from outright hostility and complaints about audacious modernity in the 1850s and 1860s to canonical acceptance and hagiography by the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter’s second objective is to evaluate the work’s compositional reception by exploring the uses of Schumann’s formal and expressive techniques in subsequent concerti, including both canonical music by Brahms, Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov and lesser-known examples by Scharwenka, Beach, Stanford and MacDowell.

The Introduction appraises recent trends in Schumann scholarship and reception, evaluating perceptions about Schumann’s instrumental music and the Piano Concerto’s place within them. It locates the Concerto within the critical tendency, prevalent since the early twentieth century, to style Schumann’s large-scale instrumental compositions as deficient in comparison with the piano cycles of the 1830s and the songs of 1840, evidencing the inadaptability of Schumann’s style to classical forms. Noting that the Piano Concerto has consistently evaded this criticism, I argue that the work should be understood as a landmark in the development of what John Daverio called Schumann’s ‘system of genres’: it marks the point at which Schumann’s evolving engagement with the genre comes to fruition, and makes possible his subsequent experiments with concerto form.

Chapter 1 sketches the generic contexts for Schumann’s Piano Concerto. It evaluates important theories of concerto form from Donald Francis Tovey to James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, and identifies a disconnect between these theories, which typically take Mozart as their point of orientation and trace a subsequent history through Beethoven and Mendelssohn to Brahms, and the milieu with which Schumann engaged, which was saturated with the practices of the virtuoso concerto and the models advocated by Hummel, Field, Kalkbrenner, Moscheles, Herz and others. Taking these influences as its starting point, this chapter builds an approach to the analysis of the Romantic piano concerto, which is put into action in Chapters 4 and 5.

In its final form, Op. 54’s first movement engenders an analytical paradox. In its original incarnation, it realised Schumann’s ambition, first voiced in 1836, to combine ‘the Allegro-Adagio-Rondo sequence in a single movement’, thereby instantiating the compression of the genre’s movement cycle into its first-movement form. To an extent, the full Concerto of 1845 undoes this ambition: those aspects of the Phantasie, which invoke the features of a slow movement and finale, recede into the first movement once the second movement is underway. The first movement is nevertheless distinctive for its rejection of both the classical and virtuoso sonata-ritornello form in favour of a unitary, symphonic sonata form. This chapter examines the Phantasie’s form and the processes from which it is constructed, exploring the implications of its inclusion within Op. 54 for the work’s three-movement design and clarifying its multiple but largely neglected debts to the virtuoso repertoire. Schumann retains the virtuoso concerto’s stylistic hallmarks, but rehouses them in a new formal context and makes them responsible to processes of thematic transformation and development.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Intermezzo and Finale respond to the challenge of balancing the first movement’s slow-movement and finale-like episodes with the movements of the overarching concerto cycle. The Intermezzo is a ternary-form lyric character piece, which invokes the epigrammatic style of Schumann’s early piano cycles, and which is elided with the Finale via an enigmatic reference to the first movement’s main theme. The Finale, in contrast, is an expansive sonata rondo, which, in a nod to the Beethovenian symphonic struggle–victory narrative, supplants A minor with the parallel major. Together, the two movements convey a productive dialectic of lyric concentration and symphonic expansion, which in combination radically rethink the bel canto and brillante stylistic hallmarks of Schumann’s virtuoso precedents.

The analogy between music and language is both problematic and essential for any rich understanding of musical Romanticism. Few commentators today would accept that music functions as a language; but the idea that music has poetic, literary, or dramatic substance is foundational to Romantic aesthetics and find expression in music as stylistically disparate as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Schumann’s Papillons. This chapter explores the musical languages of Romanticism, focusing both on the melodic, harmonic, and formal dimensions of musical practice and on the literary and linguistic labour they perform. It explores music from Beethoven and Field at the turn of the nineteenth century to Brahms and Mussorgsky at the century’s end, paying attention to the contrasted thematic cultures that Beethoven and Field instantiate, the harmonic innovations of Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, and Mussorgsky, and the intersections of form and narrative in Schumann’s Second Symphony.