Paket: Maskenspiel und Seelensprache

This two-volume monograph entitled “Maskenspiel und Seelensprache” (Masquerade and the Language of the Soul) addresses the tension between Robert Schumann’s aesthetics of music and Heinrich Heine’s post-Romantic aesthetics of poetry. In volume 1, Ingo Müller examines both the relationship between Schumann’s views on literary Romanticism in terms of musical aesthetics and the specific poetic aesthetic tendencies of Heine’s early poetry. Müller’s subsequent poetry and music analyses of Schumann’s musical compositions for all of Heine’s solo songs highlight the aforementioned tension in detail from both a literary and music studies perspective and allow examples of poetry and music converging and diverging to emerge clearly (volume 2). In this way, this study makes an interdisciplinary contribution to research into Heine’s early poetry and how Schumann set it to music. At the same time, it represents a compendium on Heine’s “Buch der Lieder” (Book of Songs) and Schumann’s music to it, which, in addition to its detailed examinations of the individual works of both men, provides an up-to-date overview of the far-reaching and broad international research literature on this subject.