Schumann's Virtuosity: Criticism, Composition, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Germany, by Alexander Stefaniak

Recent years have seen virtuosity thrive as a topical focus in nineteenth-century music studies. Reflecting music scholars' increasing attention to issues of performance and performers—perhaps influenced by the historically informed performance practice movement, which has of late been training its lens on the Romantic era—discussions of virtuosity have emerged in monographs, journal articles, dissertations and theses, and conference programs over the past decade and a half. Alexander Stefaniak's monograph participates in this development.¹ In focusing on the concept of virtuosity in Robert Schumann's music, Stefaniak tackles an issue that has long lain cloaked in near silence among scholars who specialize in this composer's works. Such reticence may stem from the perception that virtuosity, “in its most basic definition … an extraordinary display of physical skill from the performer—velocity, power, facility, even the ability to invent and execute radically new sounds” (p. 2), has not been widely acknowledged as a...