The Cambridge Companion to Schumann

Beate Perrey is currently Senior Lecturer in Critical Musicology and Analysis at the University of Liverpool, and was previously Visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and Research Fellow at Trinity and Christ's College, Cambridge. Together with Gillian Beer and Malcolm Bowie, she co-directs the long-term research project New Languages for Criticism: Cross-currents and Resistances at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Schumann's 'Dichterliebe' and Early Romantic Poetics: Fragmentation of Desire (Cambridge, 2002), and writes about nineteenth and twentieth century music and its interfaces with different forms of cultural expression, and the verbal and visual arts.

• Part I. Contexts: 1. Introduction to Schumann: life stories Beate Perrey; 2. Life and literature, poetry and philosophy: Robert Schumann's aesthetics of music Ulrich Tadday; 3. Schumann's heroes: Schubert, Beethoven, Bach Nicholas Marston; Part II. Works: 4. The piano music I: a world of images John Daverio; 5. The piano music II: afterimages Laura Tunbridge; 6. Why sing? Lieder and song cycles Jonathan Dunsby; 7. The chamber music Linda Roesner; 8. Novel symphonies and dramatic overtures Scott Burnham; 9. The concertos Joseph Kerman; 10. Dramatic stage and choral works Liz Paley; Part III. Reception: 11. Schumann in his time and since Reinhard Kapp; 12. The compositional reception of Schumann's music since 1950 Jörn Peter Hiekel; 13. Songs of dawn and dusk: coming to terms with the late music John Daverio.

'Her own chapter, Schumann's Lives and Afterlives: An Introduction', is … a good overview'. London Review of Books