Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz, and their Publishers

Robert Schumann's and Hector Berlioz's careers took
place during a period in western Europe when royal
patronage had given way to the middle-class music
consumer and when composers and performers had
begun to earn their livelihoods by serving this new
audience. Prior to this time, music publishing was
concerned with the needs of a smaller, more select
and mostly aristocratic audience. Both composers
needed the income and recognition that publication
could bring yet there is little academic literature
that provides an in-depth examination of these
crucial relationships. In this study artistic
achievement and commercialism are viewed through
these composers' business practices and
interactions with music publishers at the dawn of
the consumer-centered music business. This book
provides a unique and revealing glimpse into the
composers' personalities and the way they conducted
themselves in the prosaic but necessary activity of
earning a living in composition. General readers
interested in the lives of Schumann and Berlioz as
well as musicologists will find a perspective on
each man s nature and character here that has been
generally lacking in other accounts.