The Life and Works of Robert Schumann (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886 Excerpt: ...offers us new workings-out, in which the theme also appears in contrary motion, but only a few times, as lies in the nature of this fugue. All the expedients of the modern tendency are expended upon its form as derived from the name of Bach, and again more particularly towards the close. The theme of the fifth fugue is also derived in the spirit of the new school, and then worked out in harmony with the old laws of form. Here, too, Schumann contrives to shape the form in the style of modern instrumental music, while he conceives the theme in its augmentation wholly in accordance with the canons of the old school, and then sets it in actual contrast to the first theme. In the last fugue, finally, where the theme is again more simply constructed and then worked out with all the materials of fugue work, it is the counter-subject particularly, planned wholly in the new spirit of the romantic school as it is, which displays the form in the light of that new tendency. The next great instrumental work, sketched during the same year, and finished in the following year (1846), the second1 symphony (in C major, printed as Op. 61, ) shows the extraordinary value which these contrapuntal studies had for the artistic and perfect composition of larger orchestral works. Their influence was especially beneficial upon the finale of this symphony, as is seen in the counter-subjects opposed to the principal subject, which grow out of the scholastic contrapuntal treatment of a motive in direct as well as in contrary motion: as also in the simple counterpoint, reminding us more of the old school, upon which the principal subject of the scherzo rests, and which is often apparent in the second trio in that movement, and in the adagio as well as in the closing movement, not only le..