ABSTRACT
Schumann associates the new, romantic style of his concerto with what he calls a changing cast of characters and array of ideas in his work. Schumann's ecstatic review of the F Minor Concerto when it was published in 1836 suggests that he recognized in this work a full realization of romantic style toward which he believed he inclined in his own earlier, abandoned concerto. From a twenty-first-century perspective, saying that Schumann's first work in a romantic style drew heavily on a virtuoso concerto by Herz is tantamount to accusing him of sleeping with the enemy. A final aspect of Schumann's Concerto that he may have considered romantic has to do both with its new style and its modern form, namely, a certain whimsicality. If Schumann heard in the virtuoso concerto he left unfinished the first in his style that “inclines toward the romantic,” in seductive surface detail of Chopin's virtuoso concerto he surely heard a romantic style in full bloom.
