ABSTRACT
Robert Schumann has been described as the 'quintessential Romantic composer'. Interactions between the opposing demands are the foundations of Schumann's musical codes of desire, redemption, transcendence, loss and melancholy. In Schumann's mental life, Clara was 'the ever-present image'. The omnipresent mental representations of the physically distant Clara operate as an 'organizing principle' and 'integrating function' in Schumann's creative mind. In Schumann's allusions to Clara's theme, her augmented triad is 'composed out', so that 'quotation becomes transformation', suggestive of 'a kind of exertion of Robert's self over Clara's, an "authorizing" of the feminine work'. In Schumann's imagination the composition of the Novelletten would have seemed impossible without the erotic fantasy of kissing Clara's lips. Schumann, the 'quintessential' Romantic composer, already calls the expressive modes of the Romantic imagination under critical scrutiny.
