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Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs.

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Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs. By Jon W. Finson. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. [xvi, 381 p. ISBN: 9780674026292. $49.95.] Bibliographic references, indexes, illustrations.

Jon Finson's Robert Schumann: The Book of Songs is a much needed overview of Schumann's lieder that replaces Eric Sams's outdated The Songs of Robert Schumann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). In the middle of the twentieth century, Sams was perhaps the most prolific writer on the German lied, producing books on the lieder of Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf that strove to be comprehensive. Although some of these volumes have been reprinted a number of times, they were not updated to acknowledge the flourishing (and increasingly sophisticated) work of other scholars. Despite this state of affairs students and scholars alike still frequently consult Sams's books. Finson's new volume on Schumann is a significant improvement on the one by Sams. It not only provides introductions to all of Schumann's songs, it also includes numerous references to the recent scholarship on these works and introduces the lay reader to some of the most influential new assessments and scholarly approaches in an engaging narrative.

The volume comprises two large pans, one on the early songs and the other on the later ones. Within each of these parts the published opus numbers (or cycles) are grouped by theme or genre. For example, there is a chapter devoted to songs on the Romantic theme of wandering, and another on the settings of Heine's...

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